The Soy Sauces of Thai Food
When most of us think of soy sauce, we picture the red-lidded bottle of Kikkoman that sits on the table at any number of Asian restaurants. But this bottle wouldn’t get much use in a Thai restaurant’s kitchen.
According to SheSimmers blogger Leela Punyaratabandhu, modern Thai cooking relies on five variations of soy sauce, none of which come close to resembling that ubiquitous kitchen staple.
To help demystify Thai cooking, Leela wrote Simple Thai Food: Classic Recipes from the Thai Home Kitchen, a cookbook with an unusual format. Much of the book comprises a shopping and ingredient guide to help readers navigate their local Asian markets. But the guide also does double duty as a primer for anyone who wants to delve deeper into their favorite dishes from their local Thai restaurant, especially in the section on soy sauces.
Below, we break down these sauces, and we explore a dish with a recipe that requires three of them.
The Soy Sauces
Thin soy sauce (or light soy sauce), when compared to “mainstream” soy sauce (think Kikkoman), is “lighter in terms of saltiness and color,” Leela said. It’s also got a mild yet sweet aftertaste, in the same way fish sauce does. In a pinch, you could sub Kikkoman for thin soy sauce, but Leela cautioned that the final dish won’t taste quite as expected.
Dark sweet soy sauce (or sweet soy sauce, but not dark soy sauce, which is another variation) falls on the other side of the Kikkoman spectrum. This is the sauce that’s essential to a good pad see ew. “It’s syrupy sweet,” Leela said, and it’s usually made so with a blend of molasses. The consistency is also much thicker, like the consistency of a good barbecue sauce. The sauce is one of Leela’s favorites and she didn’t suggest any substitutions: “Nothing can replace or mimic its salty yet sweet, caramel-y yet smoky flavor.”
Oyster sauce is not technically a soy sauce but is often similarly used to build a cooking sauce. The good stuff is made from real oysters, soy sauce, and other seasonings. Oyster sauce is much richer, thicker, and more complex than the others. It’s one of my personal favorites. “A little bit goes a long way,” Leela said. Add a spoonful or two to a stir-fry sauce for a hit of umami or blend it with some water straight from the bottle for a delicious condiment for steak or poultry.
Maggi liquid seasoning sauce is “the ubiquitous table sauce,” Leela said. It’s super-concentrated—as the bottle says, “a few dashes are sufficient.” Southeast Asians, however, don’t cook with it, instead using it as a condiment to enrich bowls of congee, for example.
Dark soy sauce is thick and somewhat sweet, like dark sweet soy sauce, but not as cloying. Great for marinating, it lends a rich brown color to meats and noodle dishes and is Leela’s staple in recipe making and testing.
A Dish with Three Soy Sauces
A Thai dish that perfectly illustrates the complexity of these soy sauces is lard nar or rat na (both are Americanized spellings of the same Thai words). The dish is packed with Chinese broccoli and chewy rice noodles, but it’s the gravy—so thick and so umami-rich—that makes it the ultimate comfort food.
According to Leela, lard nar uses three different soy sauces: thin soy sauce, dark sweet soy sauce, and oyster sauce. Could specialty soy sauces be the secret? I order lard nar from Thai restaurants about three times a month, but I was skeptical about my ability to recreate its flavors at home. But with Leela’s encouragement, I set out to try her recipe from Simple Thai Food.
The recipe is long and therefore intimidating, with separate instructions for each of the dish’s three parts: the meat, the gravy, and the noodles. I also had to hike to Chicago’s Golden Pacific Market to pick up the three sauces (on her advice, I bought the Healthy Boy and Golden Mountain brands).
I was hesitant about adding more sauces to my already overstuffed pantry. But when I finally tucked into my noodles, that hesitation began to slip away.
The sauces were what made the dish.
The oyster sauce, I realized, is what gives lard nar its complexity and comforting earthiness. And though you could just pan-fry the noodles if you didn’t have the thin and dark sweet soy sauces, they wouldn’t have that caramelized crunch and sweet-salty tang.
The verdict?
Clear out your shelves—fancy soy sauces are totally worth it.
Photo of Leela Punyaratabandhu by Chris Cham; other photos by Andrew Nawrocki, Groupon
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