Soy Sauce Is The Secret Ingredient Your Bakes Need

We're blessed to live in an era in which it is widely agreed that desserts need a little salt. Or quite a bit, even. Dropping into a fancy bakery the other day, I picked up a croissant filled with sweet muscadine jam, lemon verbena, sunflower seeds — and feta cheese. It's common to find miso banana bread, halva with miso, or chili crisp spooned over ice cream. Americans of an earlier generation may have subsisted on desserts stuffed with cloying marshmallow fluff or syrupy canned orange slices, but today, we live in more balanced times: The best bakers realize how salt can enhance a dessert and are reaching for all sorts of ingredients to provide that savory touch.

The next frontier? Soy sauce. Like miso, soy sauce is another fermented product with an astonishing depth of umami flavor, potent enough that just a few drops can add an irresistible note to many sweet dishes. It can be drizzled over ice cream, added to caramel, or in your favorite baked goods, where it can replace the salt in a recipe (a good rule of thumb is to use about 2 teaspoons of soy sauce for every 1 teaspoon of salt called for). Soy sauce plays especially well with chocolate; when added to a batter, it'll give your cakes and brownies a rich, beguiling flavor, although your dessert guests probably won't be able to identify the source.

Standard grocery-store soy sauce is a mix of fermented soybeans, wheat, salt, and water. The best way to bake with it is just to give it a try. The soy sauce company Kikkoman recommends adding a couple of tablespoons to chocolate chip cookie dough at the same time you add the vanilla. In fact, you can think of soy sauce as you would regard extract, liquors like bourbon or rum, or other little-goes-a-long-way liquids that give pastries a potent flavor boost. 

It's not just chocolate cake batter where soy sauce excels. A dribble in your chocolate frosting will enhance the earthy notes of the cocoa, or include it in your homemade caramel. As with vanilla, you want to wait until the sugar finishes caramelizing before carefully stirring in a tablespoon or two of soy. That'll be perfect for drizzling over ice cream, which, as it happens, can also be doctored up with soy sauce. If you're not making a whole batch from scratch, let a bit of vanilla ice cream soften at room temperature before stirring in a splash of soy sauce, which will add a butterscotch note.

And it's not just sweet baked goods, either. Brush soy sauce onto bread or pizza dough, and you'll wind up with a briskly salty, faintly funky-tasting crust that bakes up into a lovely, burnished color in the heat of the oven.