Making soy sauce is hard — and it’s only done in a few places around the United States. One of them is North Stonington, Connecticut.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “A chemist, a chef and an author craft soy sauce on the CT coast,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Laura’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Laura, you were intrigued when you found out that Moromi soy sauce is manufactured in North Stonington, Connecticut. How did you find that out?
LT: I think I was just doing some reading. I wrote a story last year about chef Jacques Pepin. And I'm always really interested in what's going on in food. I had spent a number of years before this working on a book about a chef, so that's just a topic that I'm interested in. I think I was kind of on the hunt for another interesting, quirky kind of food story based in Connecticut.
WSHU: And so you come across this sauce, and then how do you go about telling the story? Because Bob Florence seems like a fantastic character.
LT: Yeah, he's done a number of interviews. So I read up on, you know, what he had discussed about this journey. And then I got to go to the Moromi brewery. The factories making soy sauce are referred to as breweries. I came to learn and interviewed him there, and got to sample some of the different Moromi products. And yeah, he has had an amazingly interesting journey up to this point. I think in a lot of ways, when you hear what his story is, it makes total sense that he's making soy sauce now. But he, you know, started out in industrial plastics, selling these plastics, having lived in Detroit and working for the car manufacturing industry at a time when manufacturers were replacing a lot of these kinds of clunky, heavy metal parts in cars with plastics to improve mileage. And so he ended up doing a lot of business in Japan and his career, and because of that,he went to Japan, ate a lot of great food in Japan, learned about soy sauce, which in Japan is shoyu. And then, you know, many years later, after he had moved to Mystic, he started thinking about another business idea and also a hobby of making his own soy sauce at home.
WSHU: But before he got to the soy sauce, he had another project that he had worked on; trying to make fuel, right?
LT: Yeah, fuel from algae through a fermentation process, and that project was scientifically successful, but it didn't end up being a profitable business at the time. So that kind of linked his experience with manufacturing, his experience with chemistry, and his experience with fermentation altogether, which are kind of like these key elements to having a successful time making soy sauce and manufacturing it.
WSHU: Now, tell us a little bit about soy sauce. What is it?
LT: So there's a process by which this mold called koji is added to soy beans and to wheat, or it could also be rye berries, and the mold kind of eats at these ingredients and then ferments. And so that mash of ingredients, once the koji has had time to inoculate the soybeans and the wheat are put into barrels in a mash, and that mash starts to ferment, and it's kind of producing this kind of slow motion Maillard reaction, which is the same process when you're cooking and heating something, and basically, proteins and sugars are being heated. So over time, you know. It creates this substance that really kind of lights up your mouth when you're eating it. Through this other partner in the business, James Wayman, who's a chef based on the Connecticut coast, I learned a little about his experience with koji and with soy sauce and kind of how he views it as a really critical component to taking his food to the next level.
WSHU: Now, James Wayman is another person involved in this, and he happens to be a chef.
LT: Yes, so James was when he met Bob Florence, he was the head chef at Oyster Club, the acclaimed restaurant, and then he ended up separating off and founding Nana's, which has locations in Mystic and Westerly, Rhode Island. And Nana's is kind of an all-day cafe. They call it a bakery. They also have pizza, rotisserie chicken, and specials. So there's a lot going on in their menu. And when Bob Florence and James Wayman met, Bob Florence asked James Wayman to just try the soy sauce that he was making. I think for him, it was kind of like, you know, he was making this thing as a pet project, but it would mean a lot to him to have a chef like James taste it and just give him his thoughts. And immediately, James Wayman put it on the menu at the Oyster Club and called it Bob Florence soy sauce. And at the time, you know, it takes about a year to brew one of these barrels of soy sauce.
WSHU: Wow, that's long.
LT: Yeah. So for Bob Florence, he wasn't kind of ready to scale up that quickly. He was like, Do I really have enough of this stuff to be putting it on a menu of a restaurant? But over time, they decided to go into business together to make this together.
WSHU: Now, tell us about the third person in this story, Debbi Florence.
LT: So Debbie is Bob Florence's wife. She is a Japanese American children's book author, and so she has also written some great children's books about Japanese food, specifically a picture book biography of a Michelin-starred chef named Nikki Nakayama. But yeah, so the three of them went into this business together.
WSHU: Now the Moromi brand can be found in restaurants across the country.
LT: Yeah, and you can also buy it on their website. You can also go to Nana’s and buy it, and a number of other places carry it in the Mystic area, restaurants, and other gourmet shops.
WSHU: This is really a specialty item.
LT: Yeah, I will say, since I visited, I bought a bottle of it, and I have started using it. My kids have very expensive tastes, as their favorite food is sushi. Once in a while, we get sushi, and we'll use the Moromi soy sauce. And I really do think that it adds complexity and, really, it adds to the experience of eating something like that.
WSHU: Well, it's fascinating how these things happen. And one of the few manufacturers of soy sauce in the U.S. is located right here in Connecticut.
