Sweet soy sauce

Lore & Background

Sweet soy sauce is made from a fermented paste of boiled black soybeans, roasted grain, brine, and Aspergillus wentii mold, to which palm sugar is added. The sauce may contain up to 50 percent gula merah or gula jawa (palm sugar jaggery), and is often enriched with spices including star anise, cinnamon, black pepper, coriander, and clove. It is similar to, though finer in flavor than, Chinese Tianmian sauce.

Reader's Guide

Sweet soy sauce is an essential sauce in the Indonesian pantry, used to add a pleasantly mild sweet and umami flavor to common dishes such as nasi goreng, mie goreng, ayam kecap, babi kecap, semur beef stew, and ketoprak. It is also a popular marinade for grilled dishes like satay, ayam bakar, and ikan bakar. When mixed with chopped shallot and bird's eye chili, it serves as a dipping sauce for tahu goreng. Steamed rice topped with fried egg and drizzled with sweet soy sauce was a common meal among Indonesians in the 1990s and 2000s, especially children.

In Eastern Indonesia, it is used in colo-colo dipping sauce. The sauce is traditionally a small-scale home industry, with numerous regional brands alongside widely distributed national brands such as kecap manis ABC, Kecap Bango, Indofood, and Sedaap. It is widely available in Indonesian marketplaces and Asian grocery stores worldwide, though difficult to find in most parts of Europe except the Netherlands, UK, France, and Germany, and also scarce in the Americas.