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quoted Eight Flavors by Sarah Lohman

Sarah Lohman: Eight Flavors (2016, Simon & Schuster)

“Very cool…a breezy American culinary history that you didn’t know you wanted” (Bon Appetit …

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, recipes for making soy sauce at home appeared in English and American cookbooks. Since soybeans were not widely available, these recipes used local ingredients such as mushrooms, walnuts, and fish...

Tomato was another popular ingredient for making American "soy" sauce... The names for these varying sauces were "ketchups," or "catch-ups," or "catsups," derived from the Indonesian word for soy sauce: ketjap.

— Eight Flavors by  (Page 124)

ketchup is soy sauce????????????????

replied to mouse's status

@mouse most people from the US only know of Japanese/Chinese soy sauce, which is always salty. but in Indonesia their sweet soy sauce (kecap manis) is equally if not more common than salty soy sauce (kecap asin). it's closer to Thai oyster sauce in taste and consistency.

@technomancy @mouse Lots of fermentations are controlled (well, *selected*, really) by salt, so it would make sense that many of these savory sauces would be salty.

I wonder if the heavy use of sugar in kecap manis plays a similar role as salt by lowering the water activity (in the same way that jams are moderately shelf stable).

Does it have much sourness to it? I'm wondering if there's much in the way of lactic acid production.

replied to varx - social alt's status

@technomancy @mouse OK, yeah, from Wikipedia: « Aspergillus wentii is moderately xerophile, able to tolerate very dry conditions with low water activity (with an a_W of 0.73–0.79 for growth and germination). »

And recipes I find for a "quick" version of it show about half and half water to sugar, so that probably answers that.