1, oyster sauce "past life"
Oyster sauce was initially born in 1888 in Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, a small family workshop in Nanshui Township, there was a man named Li Jinshang left his hometown from the wells of the new will come to Nanshui to live. At that time, a man named Li Jinshang left his hometown and came to Nanshui from Xinhui to make a living. Since oysters were abundant in the local area, he opened a small teahouse and cooked oysters for sale to supplement his family's income.
The birth of oyster sauce is similar to that of stinky tofu, soy sauce, and fine wine, but it is also an "accidental product" that came about by chance. One day Li Jinshang forgot to take care of the oysters while cooking them as usual, and when she remembered, they had been overcooked and turned into a layer of thick brown juice that settled at the bottom of the pot, smelling rich and tasting delicious.
So oyster sauce was born, the original oyster sauce is to use the shucked oysters by boiling, concentrated into a paste-like juice . And the man named Lee Kam Sheung is the founder of Lee Kam Kee Oyster Sauce Chuang, which until now has been a familiar brand of oyster sauce and soy sauce.
2, oyster sauce "this life"
While the original oyster sauce is boiled with oysters, but now on the market oyster sauce, most of the relationship with the oysters is not so direct.
Of course, it's not all about the merchants "playing around", but mainly about the cost which is really hard to afford. If you purely use oysters to boil, 100 kilograms of oysters to remove the shells, boiled a few hours after the pure oyster sauce can only get less than 3 pounds, even if you ignore the labor, water and electricity, only purely calculated the cost of oysters, this oyster sauce is not able to widely mass-produced, large-scale consumption of the things.
So now we see on the market is that most of the oyster sauce is only part of the raw materials added "oyster juice", and then thickened with wheat starch, xanthan gum, and then caramel color to color made. Some of them are also the use of flavored nucleotides, monosodium glutamate, etc. to provide fresh flavor, the real part of the oyster is very little.
3, simple selection of high-quality oyster sauce
Now most of the oyster sauce is made with part of the oyster juice plus salt, sugar, starch, and other substances, after all, if purely simmered oysters then the price is genuinely not many people can accept. Then in the many oyster sauce products, we can follow the following points to select, you can choose the better oyster sauce.
Oyster juice ratio: oyster sauce this product can be said to be oyster juice proportion the higher the better, after all, its original face should be boiled with oysters, so try to choose the ingredients list oyster juice clearly labeled and accounted for a high proportion. The less ingredients the better: all soy sauce, vinegar, oyster sauce, these non-solid seasonings, whether brewed or refined, the ingredients list tends to be the shorter the better, the more simple the content of the ingredients the better, the name of those who look at it is a pure chemical things naturally less better. Pick the brand with a good reputation: oyster sauce this kind of thing is usually not too much, so pick the time to try to choose the brand with a good reputation, do not recommend picking a particularly cheap.