Slow Sauce: The Scottish brand making miso & shoyu with British ingredients

What happens when you mix ancient Japanese methods with UK grown ingredients to make some of the most nourishing foods you can eat?

Slow Sauce co-founder Robin Sherriff

Most of us know miso as that bowl of warm soup that comes with a Japanese meal. But you probably don’t know what’s in it, what it’s doing for your body or that some people believe it reduces the risk of certain cancers. Robin, one of the founders of Slow Sauce, is on a mission to change that.

Slow Sauce’s range of misos

Miso is a fermented paste, usually made from soybeans but whatever the base ingredient is, it can’t be made without koji.

Koji’s a mould culture, which helps break down proteins & is what gives miso its deep, rich umami flavour. It’s the same process used for soy sauce, sake, gochujang & even Worcestershire sauce. Breaking down protein takes our digestive system a lot of work & we’re evolutionarily driven to seek out food that’s easy for us to digest. So it should come as no surprise that soy sauce is the most popular condiment in the world. A product based on mould that we eat every day without even realising it.

The reason fermented foods taste so good to us is because our bodies recognise them as nutritionally rich. Microbes do the hard work of breaking down proteins & starches, which makes the nutrients easier to absorb. We figured this out thousands of years ago & have been eating like that ever since. Cheese, coffee, chocolate, even chilli sauce all benefit from fermentation.

Slow Sauce’s shoyus

We really benefit from eating fermented foods, which is what people like Tim Spector have been telling us for a while. It’s also not only why Robin believes fermented foods have a place in our regular diet but why he’s done something about it. 

Robin got into miso making pretty much by accident. He was in Kyoto on a whisky research project when a nearby koji maker gave him a tour inside his factory. Luckily Robin’s background in chemistry & biology meant he could actually understand the process. More importantly, he was able to understand why the mould on rice in a koji factory is good for you but the mould on rice at home can kill you.

He went on to found The Fermenters Guild, a trade body supporting makers of fermented foods. He’s also written The Science of Fermentation. Robin has a deep understanding of fermentation. Even though the science behind making koji & miso can be on the heavy side, one of Robin’s super powers is that he’s great at explaining it in a way anyone can understand.

Slow Sauce Oat Miso packaging

What makes Slow Sauce different from the miso you find on a supermarket shelf is in the ingredients. Slow Sauce uses Scottish heritage oats & regeneratively grown peas, which come from UK farms. The aim is to create products that are made using far east techniques but have a unique local flavour unlike anything produced at an industrial scale that you’d find in a supermarket.

The product range currently includes misos & shoyu. Robin’s favourite product is the Oat Miso, which is so good he can’t go a day without having some…usually served up as a simple miso soup with a little seaweed but that little Oat Miso is capable of much more.

Watch the full episode to understand:

Watch the full episode to discover:

•  Why fermented foods taste so good to us

•  How koji creates that umami taste

•  Why mould is key to the World’s most popular condiment

•  The difference between soil & dirt & why it’s important for your food

•  What Robin learned inside a sake brewery in Kyoto

•  Why MSG is a distraction used by the ultra processed food industry

•  How Slow Sauce sources from the UK & what terroir means in a jar of miso

•  How a fermenting expert like Robin eats his miso every day

If you care about what you eat, where it comes from & what it actually does for you, check out the conversation.

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