Worcestershire sauce (Torii sauce)

Worcestershire sauce (Torii sauce)

The classic Torii Sauce is this Worcestershire sauce. It is a light, Japanese-style Worcestershire sauce made with plenty of raw vegetables, homemade vinegar, and dashi stock made from kelp and bonito flakes, which are unique to Japan. It is also characterized by being aged carefully in a wooden barrel.

Capacity: 200ml

Ingredients: sugar (domestically produced), vegetables (onion, tomato, carrot, garlic, celery), brewed vinegar, salt, spices, lemon juice, kelp, bonito flakes

Shokunin Shoyu No. 3094

Sauce aged in wooden barrels

Torii's Worcestershire sauce is aged in wooden barrels. The finished sauce is put into these barrels once, and only the amount to be bottled is drawn out again. It's like a sauce that is topped off, and it apparently spends an average of about two months in these barrels between the time it is poured in and the time it is taken out.

The sauce is then aged to ensure the flavor is uniform and the umami flavors of the generations are concentrated. This process is rare in the sauce industry, and I think Torii Sauce is the only company that ages sauce in wooden barrels.

The sauce is made from vinegar and vegetables.

The ingredients of the sauce are surprisingly unknown. President Torii Daisuke explains, "Soy sauce adds saltiness and umami, and sauce adds sourness and umami." The source of sourness is vinegar, and the source of umami is vegetables. The sauce is made by adding spices to these ingredients.

Therefore, Torii's Worcestershire sauce is made with 100% domestic vegetables and carefully-selected vinegar produced in-house. The vegetables are sourced from familiar producers or neighboring areas as much as possible. They are delivered in the freshly harvested form, and the staff chops them up and blends them into a paste.

The vinegar is also homemade

We have been brewing our own vinegar for over 30 years. We extract alcohol from sake lees from ginjo sake produced at a local brewery, then use the static fermentation method to grow acetic acid bacteria and turn it into vinegar over a period of two months.

Vinegar and spices have different optimum temperatures

Another feature is the use of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves that bring out the sweetness. Instead of powdering the spices and mixing them, they are placed in a straining bag in their original or coarsely ground form and then soaked in the sauce, allowing only the aroma to be dissolved into the sauce.

Depending on the type of spice, some can withstand heat, while others cannot, so the temperature and timing of adding them are important. By dividing the temperature range into two stages and allowing the heat-sensitive spices to cool before adding them, only the desired aroma is transferred to the sauce.

The idea is to put spices in a bag and let them steep, but Torii explained, "It might be easier to understand if you imagine tea brewed in a teapot and powdered tea. Tea brewed in a teapot doesn't have much impact, but it goes down smoothly. Powdered tea has a straightforward taste, but it still has a bitter aftertaste."