HIS SECRET SAUCE
At Ayam Piru Sauce Factory, a third-generation soya sauce scion tweaks the family recipe and produces an astonishing gem.
Cheah Cheow Beng is the somewhat maverick heir to a three-generation soya sauce business. As a teen, he learnt the traditional tau yew ropes: soya beans are soaked, cooked, mould-fermented for three days, then mixed with brine and left to brew alfresco for many months before being filtered. After inheriting the business from his father in 1999, who in turn got it from his father who migrated from Guangdong to Penang in the 1930s, he retuned the process, opting for non-genetically modified Canadian beans, and switching to pure cultured koji mould instead of the capricious and unpredictable natural airborne spores on which his grandpa relied.
In 2010, Cheah made an experimental batch of soya sauce with mineral-rich salt from Australia’s Lake Deborah, a fivemillion-year-old primeval ocean deposit. It turned out surprisingly delicious – and expensive. “Per kilo, sea salt was 40 sen, lake salt was 7 ringgit,” he says, shaking his head. “My first intention was not to sell the sauce… until I shared it with my friends, who said, ‘You must produce this!’”
What finally convinced him was the sauce’s effect on his family’s health. After his daughter started consuming it daily, she stopped succumbing to frequent bouts of flu and getting mouth ulcers. He found that his own stamina – he is an avid cyclist – had increased. “My mood changed, my blood pressure went down,” he shares, attributing all of this to the sauce’s probiotic effect.
He dips some sauce for me to sample, straight from under an opened vat’s gnarly-looking bacterial frosting. Its flavour is sweetly rounded, with all the umami but not the wheaty sharpness of a Japanese shoyu. He also pan-sears me a chicken breast: marinated in the sauce for just 20 minutes, it tastes like it had steeped for days. Perhaps most radically different from commercial sauces, Cheah’s brew is aged for several months after filtration but is not pasteurised, yet keeps well and indefinitely at room temperature.
Today, this light soya sauce is Cheah’s signature premium product, along with double- and triple-brewed versions.
He has learnt how to imbue the sauce with mushroom and seafood nuances. Shio koji and shoyu koji (starter spiked with soya sauce) are his latest test subjects, and new ideas are continually brewing in his head and his vats – thanks to a trillion infinitesimal, invisible sources of inspiration.