Not many people give a lot of thought to soy sauce. After all, if you’ve seen on sauce, you’ve seen them all, right? Actually, the sauce that you find at a Japanese restaurant is a distinctly Japanese variety, which may very well be different than the sauce you might find in China.
The primary difference between Chinese soy sauce and Japanese soy sauce comes from the concentration of soybeans. Japanese soy sauce manufacturers tend to mix their soy with grains, usually wheat, during the fermenting process to give it a sweeter taste. Chinese soy sauce, by contrast, usually has little or no wheat in it. Most people in the West appreciate the sweet flavor of the Japanese variety, which explains why most soy sauce found in the United States is of Japanese origin.