I remember the first time I saw “superior Dark” (also called lao chou 老抽 and “superior light” (also called sheng chou 生抽) soy sauce that I felt very confused. So, I asked my mother: “What’s different between Dark and light soy sauce?? How to use it?”
My mother basically said: superior dark soy sauce is for enhance the colour of food. It will make the colour of our dishes have more caramel kind of colour. We often add some dark soy sauce when we cook stew type of dishes in Chinese cooking.
Normally, just use couple drops of dark soy sauce to enhance your dishes if you put too much dark soy sauce will cause your dishes looks too dark and damage the presentation.
“How about light soy sauce? How we use it for our dishes?” Well, normally we use light sauce for season our dishes, especially stir-fry, making chinese style salad, marinating and dipping. So, you must be careful when you use light soy sauce for your dishes because light soy sauce taste very salty.
Do you feel more confident to choose soy sauce yourself in Chinese supermarket now? I hope this article can help you in somehow.
Can I buy the dark sauce
in Dubbo NSW?
Hi Helen,
Have you try your local Chinese supermarket? I will go there first to try it. Usually they have different kind of soy sauce to choose and dark soy sauce will have a line of text say “Dark soy sauce” on the label.
Good luck for finding the dark soy sauce!