It began with a bottle. Or rather, hundreds of them.

During the MCO period, Chef Andy Ong turned to bottled food as a way to stay afloat, packaging his signature dishes and condiments in jars for easy for delivery. In the process, one ingredient stood out as essential to the flavour of everything: soy sauce.

Andy decided to craft his own.

“I know a soy sauce maker in Ipoh, a small-time artisan who’s been at it for years,” Andy shares, adding that the maker only produces small batches at a time and therefore, could not compete with the big brands. “I advised him to forget about quality but concentrate on quality — compete through flavour.”

Most soy sauces are fermented for 3–4 months but for Andy, the flavours are under developed. Inspired by a friend in Terengganu who fermented his own soy sauce for two years, Andy insisted on a longer fermentation period: minimum of one year, and up to 500 days. 

The outcome? A deeply savoury soy sauce with a complexity that no commercial brand could match — so good that even one guest, upon trying, asked Andy if he would consider setting up a factory to boost production!

Now on its fifth batch, Andy uses the soy sauce across many of his signature dishes. Soy sauce chicken marinated for 24 hours, then grilled over charcoal; claypot rice; pan-fried fish maw; and tau see yue (fried dace with salted black beans), where the dace is soaked in the soy sauce for months to deepen the taste profile. Even the prized rib cuts from above the five-layer pork belly are seasoned simply — just salt, some preserved tau see (salted black beans), and a good rub of his soy sauce before being pan-fried dry, Guangzhao-style. Andy’s soy sauce is also great as a dip.

He’s made the soy sauce available for sale to customers at his restaurant, Xip Wah Lau, but and you’d have to be pretty lucky to get your hands on it as only one urn is made at a time. Each yields around 200-300 bottles. 

Currently, Andy is working on developing a traditional caramel soy sauce using sun-dried sugar, a process that takes one to two months. So you won’t see it on the shelves anytime soon and that’s not a bad thing. “No shortcuts,” says Andy. “Just like with cooking, it doesn’t matter how simple the dish is — the chef’s job is to get it right.”