If you think you know soy sauce from using what you find in the grocery aisle, that’s like claiming to be a wine expert after tasting grape juice. Soy sauce, it turns out, can have the nuance and complexity of a fine wine.
Yuichiro “Junior” Takebata makes custom soy sauce for his restaurant, Hachiya Ramen, that took about 100 tries over six years to perfect. “I liked seeing my customers’ reactions to the food. I wanted to see that kind of reaction to the soy sauce, too,” he said. “I kept trying. It wasn’t right and it wasn’t right, and then it was. I let my palate tell me when it was done. But even today, I still try to refine and improve it.”
Takebata, who said he finally got the recipe right in 2018 when working at Hachiya Kyoto Steakhouse and Sushi Bar in West Ashley, recently gave the Charleston City Paper a behind-the-scenes invitation to witness the beginning of his top-secret soy sauce recipe.
Steps in the process
The process starts with hand-wiping extra salt from stalks of dried seaweed that look like a basket full of knee-high flat reeds.
A 10-gallon pot of regular soy sauce — the kind you get in the grocery store — simmers on a two-burner stove next to pieces of pork slow-boiling into what will later become broth. The regular soy sauce is the starter for what Takebata gussies into his own sauce.
“I wish I could make my sauce from soy beans, but I could never find the industrial-sized mashers, so I start with this,” he said.
The stalks of seaweed are added, and Takebata swishes a white paddle almost as tall as he is through the pot. Next, he blends a bed-pillow-sized bag of bonito — a fish related to tuna and mackerel — into the brew. The bonito is dried into what looks like light pink pencil shavings and it floats atop the sauce until Takebata pushes it down with the paddle. A light, inoffensive fishy smell floats from the pot.
The bonito will soak for anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour, until the dry flakes turn glutenous and brownish from the soy. Takebata spoons out a soaked piece for this reporter to try. It’s delicate, almost shrimp-like in flavor.
“Sometimes I would just eat this on rice,” he said with a smile. “It’s good, right?”
He turns up the fire. Takebata then carefully takes the temperature of the dark brown liquid. Too hot and it turns bitter. The sauce will cook for four to five hours and then go into the cooler for about 20 hours. There will be several more rounds of the cooking and cooling process. It will take three days until the sauce is finished, and Takebata said he believes he is the only person making his own soy sauce in the entire state, if not the Southeast.
The journey
As the soy sauce cooks, Takebata relates his journey to making his own sauce. He came to the United States from Japan when he was 19 in 2008.
“I had only my passport when I got a job with my mom’s best friend’s brother in Myrtle Beach,” Takebata said. “I had no English, no cooking skills, nothing. I worked from 7 a.m. to midnight to prove to him that I should stay, but after two months he told me to go back to Japan and get experience at a sushi bar. He said I would need that experience for a visa so I could work at his sushi place.”
Takebata spent two years learning sushi in Japan before returning to the States in 2011 armed with the skills he’d need for that visa. He worked for the same friend’s Miyabi Japanese Steak & Seafood Restaurant in Savannah until 2012 before moving to the West Ashley sushi restaurant, where he worked until 2024 when he opened Hachiya Ramen.
Back to that sauce
When the soy sauce is done, it is used for three dishes: Karaage, a Japanese-style fried chicken; alongside pork buns; and to marinate the soft-boiled eggs that are served atop the cold or hot ramen bowls for which the restaurant is becoming known. The eggs — purchased locally from Storey Farms — are soaked in the sauce three times and the final product produces eggs whose whites are the color of strong tea. Takebata says he goes through 1,000 to 1,500 eggs a week, each dunked in his special soy sauce.
Takebata urged guests to taste the difference, setting out a bowl of soy sauce from the grocery store and one from an earlier batch he made.
The grocery sauce tastes predictable, salty but flat. The homemade sauce? Bursting with an almost smoky umami, leaving a slight fishy aftertaste. It was salty, but not in the obliterate-your-tastebuds way of the soy sauce that comes in packets with sushi.
It’s not something Takebata sells in bottles. The only way to get this sauce is to have it alongside one of the dishes on the ramen restaurant menu.
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