The Secret Benefit To Adding Soy Sauce To Your Meals

Soy sauce has tons of flavor, bringing sweet and salty notes along with a wonderful savoriness to food. But there's another benefit to adding it to dishes, one that may sound a little odd at first but which makes sense if you know how flavor works: It makes us salivate, and saliva helps create the experience we have with our food. Besides initiating step one in the digestive process, saliva assists in breaking down flavor compounds and delivering them straight to our taste buds. Meanwhile, it releases the food's scent molecules up into our noses, enhancing flavor. It even helps our mouths register high-fat foods, coating our palate to give it that rich, luxe feel. 

Soy sauce, a fermented condiment made from soy beans, wheat, and salt, accomplishes this saliva-making trick by being one of the best umami-boosting ingredients in the pantry. Umami, the "fifth taste," is the essence of deliciousness. In addition to soy sauce, you'll taste it in seared meats, cheeses, and mushrooms, among many other foods. The key is that umami produces a longer-lasting salivary response than most other tastes. Sourness yields a sharp, sudden spike in saliva (remember eating Warhead candies?), but it dries up relatively fast. In contrast, umami keeps it coming, prolonging and carrying the flavor as we eat.

This centuries-old condiment's flavor-facilitating powers don't only belong in Southeast Asian cuisines. Overlooking its broader potential is like having a microwave and only using it to make popcorn. Here are some ways to use it that will — literally — keep your mouth watering.

Soy sauce's flavor profile includes some sweetness, bitterness, and sourness, along with floral, caramel, smoky, roasty, and nutty aromatic notes, among many others. This complexity makes it a versatile ingredient with many uses. In scrambled eggs, for example, a splash of soy sauce can replace added salt, but it does more than season the dish. The saliva production from the umami keeps every bite tender while magnifying the eggs' own natural richness. In this same way, soy sauce can boost the savoriness of meat dishes like pot roast, or work together with cumin and cloves in a carne asada marinade. Soy sauce can even make pasta sauce 10x more flavorful. The deep umami flavors bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes, creating a more robust sauce that lingers longer on the palate thanks to that extra salivation.

Soy sauce can even be incorporated into your dessert repertoire, too. Swap it for the salt in brownies, creating rich caramel undertones that build on the chocolate base. You don't even have to cook it into a dessert to reap the benefits — a light drizzle over ice cream will give you a surprising (and tasty) twist on a classic treat. In both cases, that surge of saliva spreads and prolongs those sweet, rich flavors with every bite.