Both grits and polenta fall under the heading of cornmeal, which is essentially a coarse flour, or “meal,” made from dried corn. Cornmeal can be yellow or white, fine, medium, or coarsely ground, each with its own distinct purposes; fine cornmeal, for example, is best used for baking, as its texture won’t interfere with the rest of the dish. Conventional cornmeal—most of the stuff you’ll find on the grocery-store shelf—is “degerminated,” which means the hull and the germ have been removed from the kernels; this creates a shelf-stable product with a somewhat uniform texture. Stone-ground cornmeal, on the other hand, is whole grain; it still has the hull and the oil-rich germ attached, making it more perishable (and artisanal) than the standard stuff.

Grits are made from coarse-ground or coarser-than-coarse-ground cornmeal, and the term can refer to both the ingredient and the finished dish, most popular in the South. Like most of the cornmeal you’ll find in the United States, grits are typically made from dent corn: a variety with a low sugar content, a soft, starchy center, and a particularly pronounced “corn” flavor. Grits can be white or yellow, both of which are traditional; historically, white grits were popular in the urban ports of the South, while yellow were more popular in the rural, inland areas.

The word “polenta,” like “grits,” can refer to both an ingredient and a finished dish—though polenta, in Italy, can be made with any type of ground grains or starches, not just corn. The corn the Italians do use, however, is historically different than the corn used for most cornmeal and grits in the United States; instead of dent corn, true polenta is made from a varietal called flint corn, or otto file. This type of heirloom corn holds its texture a bit better than dent corn, giving it a slightly different texture than grits. Purists and nerds: this one’s for you.

Although we delight in these nitpicky, hair-splitting differences, let’s be honest: you can use coarse-ground cornmeal for any of these dishes, and they will taste just great. Just stay away from anything labeled “instant” or “quick-cooking,” whether it’s grits, polenta, or anything else in the category; that stuff is dried, par-cooked, and then dried out again, and it tastes like sawdust. Stick with the real stuff—whatever it is—and you’ll be good as gold.

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There are two major categories of tomatoes: heirlooms, which we’ll cover below, and hybrids. The tomatoes you’ll find year-round in the grocery store are hybrids, which means that humans have cultivated and bred them for specific characteristics. Not all hybrids are bad, but the grocery-store ones are; they’re bred for resistance to diseases, firm flesh, thick skin, and storage potential, rather than, say, juiciness or flavor. They’re also yanked from the vine while they’re still green—and therefore hard as rocks—so that they don’t get crushed while they circumvent to globe to their final destination. Once there, they are sprayed with ethylene gas that induces reddening and softening—but off the vine, they can’t develop the sugars and acids and other flavor/aroma chemicals that make tomatoes actually taste good. So you get watery, cottony pucks, instead of the mind-bending globes of wonder that you’ll find at the greenmarket in the summer.

Heirloom tomatoes live on the other side of the spectrum: they’re “open-pollinated,” which means their varietal came about through natural pollination (birds, insects, wind, etc.). These types of tomatoes “breed true,” which means that if you plant one of its seeds, it will grow into a plant that bears tomatoes that look just like the parent. (Hybrids, on the other hand, will give birth to plants that exhibit different characteristics from each of the parents; it takes around seven generations for cultivars to stabilize.) Heirlooms have been grown without cross-breeding for at least fifty or so years. They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes: perfectly oval ones; craggy, bulbous ones; heart-shaped ones; yellow, green, black, pink, striped, tie-dye ones. Their names are just as diverse-sounding: Black Krim, Mr. Stripey, Green Zebra, Brandywine, Purple Cherokees. These are the guys you’ll find at the greenmarket at the peak of the season, the ones that just beg to be sliced and salted and eaten pretty much as-is.

Beefsteak tomatoes are notable for their size—they can weigh in at over a pound each, with a diameter of 6 or more inches—and their texture: they have smaller seed cavities than other types of tomatoes, giving them a greater ratio of flesh to juice and seeds. There are around 350 types of beefsteaks out there, and they can be either heirloom or hybrid. And although you’ll mainly see the red ones labeled as “beefsteaks” at the greenmarket, they can come in all colors: pink, yellow, green, white, technicolor. The Brandywine, Purple Cherokee, and Black Krim heirlooms, for example, are all beefsteak tomatoes, too.

Plum tomatoes, also known as Roma or paste tomatoes, are oval-shaped and smaller than beefsteaks. They also have a lower water content compared to other types of tomatoes, with an almost chewy flesh—which makes them particularly suited to sauces. These are the tomatoes you’ll see everywhere in Italy, the most famous type being the San Marzano. (Pro tip: According to food scientist Harold McGee, when you’re shopping for canned tomatoes, check the ingredients; many brands include calcium, which prevents the cell walls from breaking down during cooking and will mess with the texture of a sauce.)

Let’s now move onto the world of baby tomatoes: the cherries, grapes, and cocktails. Cherry tomatoes are the small, round guys with thin skins that squirt juice everywhere when you bite into them. They’re super sweet and have a high water content, and they come in many colors; my personal favorites are the Sungolds, an heirloom type that ripens to a golden orange.

Grape tomatoes are the oblong, grape-shaped ones that you’ll often find in the grocery store; they have a lower water content and thicker skins than cherry tomatoes, making them easier to store and transport. (They also last longer.)

And cocktail tomatoes are larger than grape and cherry tomatoes, but still of the small, sweet ilk. They’re grown hydroponically, and can be found in many grocery stores, too—and as tomato expert Barry Estabrook told Food52, are probably the best ones to buy in the winter.

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But before we start stocking our pantries, we need to talk about salt and acid. Salt and acid are the two major mediums in which food can be preserved; they’re the things that keep it from spoiling, and in many cases, the things that transform the food into something wholly new. When we talk about preserving (and/or flavoring) with salt, we’re talking about brining; when we talk about preserving (and/or flavoring) with acid, we’re talking about marinating.

A classic brine is a mixture made of salt and water, and it can be used to preserve and/or flavor pretty much anything: vegetables, fruits, meats, fish. (You may also see foods “dry-brined,” which means they’re covered in salt, not immersed in salt water.) Brining meat for a few hours or days before cooking it makes for a juicier and more tender final product; the salt disrupts the structure of the muscle filaments, allowing the meat to absorb more liquid (and therefore lose less moisture while cooking) and keeping the proteins from coagulating as densely as they would naturally (and therefore preventing the meat from getting too tough). Brining fish for a short period of time has a similar effect, but you’ll also see fish brined for much longer; stuff like lox, anchovies, and salt cod are brined for weeks or months. In those cases, the salt transforms the fish into entirely new ingredients; the salt inhibits the bad bacteria from proliferating and aids in the proliferation of new savory compounds, creating more complex flavors and aromatics where there were none before.

A marinade, on the other hand, relies on acid to do its job. Acids—such as vinegar, wine, fruit juices, and buttermilk—are great at killing microbes, making marination another great form of preservation. Marinades, like brines, also provide flavor, and like their salty cousins, they weaken a piece of fish or meat’s muscle tissue and allow it to retain more moisture when cooked.

So where does pickling come into this? According to food scientist Harold McGee, a pickle is a food preserved through immersion in a brine (as in brining) or a strong acid (as in marinating). So: pickles can be brined, or marinated, or both! In order to be considered a pickle, however, the food must be preserved through either method, not just flavored; a steak that’s marinated just before grilling isn’t really a pickle, for example. Though you’ll see it in other contexts, the term “pickling” is most often used to refer to preserved vegetables and fruits: think bread ‘n butter pickles, olives, preserved lemons, kimchi, and sauerkraut, just to name a few.

But when it comes to pickling, salt and acid (usually vinegar) have very different uses. Pickles that are brined, such as the aforementioned sauerkraut, kimchi, and preserved lemons, are also fermented; the salt encourages certain good microbes to flourish, while preventing the growth of other microbes that cause the food to go bad. The characteristics of the pickle depend on the salt concentration, fermentation length, and temperature—as well as the actual thing being pickled, of course.

Pickles that are dunked in acid, on the other hand, are unfermented; the vinegar stops the growth of the spoilage-causing microbes and helps to flavor whatever is being pickled, without stimulating the microbe growth that causes food to ferment. Pickling in acid is a lot faster and gives you more control over the texture of the final product, but the flavor that develops is a lot less complex.

And what about curing? Curing refers to any way of preserving food and preventing spoilage: it can mean brining, pickling, or marinating (as well as smoking, which isn’t on today’s lesson plan). If you’re doing something to food in order to make it last longer—short of, like, hiding a package of Oreos in the back of your pantry so that they’re out of your line of sight—you’re curing it.

SO, to debrief:

Brining = preserving and/or flavoring with salt

Marinating = preserving and/or flavoring with acid

Pickling = preserving with salt (fermented pickles) or preserving with acid (unfermented pickles)

Curing = all of the above

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Cage-free, a term regulated by the USDA, means that the eggs come from hens that, put simply, aren’t caged: they can “freely roam a building, room, or enclosed area with unlimited access to food and fresh water during their production cycle, but [do] not have access to the outdoors.” Considering the conventional cage is 8 ½ by 11 inches, or the size of a piece of paper, this seems like a better lifestyle—but there are down sides, too; according to All About Eggs by Rachel Khong, cage-free facilities have more hen-on-hen violence and lower air quality than facilities that use cages.

Free-range, another USDA term, means that the eggs come from hens that have some sort of access to the outdoors. However, it doesn’t mean the hens actually go outdoors, or that the outdoor space is more than a small, fenced-in area with a netted cover.

Pasture-raised is not a term regulated by the USDA; however, if the carton says “pasture-raised” and also includes stamps with “Certified Humane” and/or “Animal Welfare Approved,” it means that each hen was given 108 square feet of outdoor space, as well as barn space indoors. This is pretty much as close to the bucolic, E-I-E-O farm vibe you’ll get when dealing with large-scale egg producers, so if you’re looking to support those practices, keep a look out for those labels.

For eggs to be Local, they must come from a flock located less than four hundred miles from the processing facility or within the same state. And for eggs to be Organic, the only stipulation is that they must come from hens who are fed an organic diet. Amount of space per hen, access to the outdoors—neither of those are specified or required, though many organic eggs are also at least free-range.

When it comes to eggs labeled Vegetarian-Fed, it’s worth noting that chickens are actually omnivorous; they love worms and bugs and larvae and other crawly things. However, in the mass-scale production sense, they’re not necessarily doing Whole30—they’re getting fed animal byproducts, like feather meal or chicken litter. So depending on the context, vegetarian-fed can actually be the lesser of two evils.

Hormone-free means that the hen wasn’t administered hormones, which isn’t particularly commendable—considering that hormones and steroids are already banned by the FDA. No Added Antibiotics is another funny term, because very few hens are administered antibiotics—and those that do end up being “diverted from human consumption” anyways.

So, given all of this information…what should you buy? Cartons stamped with the Certified Humane or Animal Welfare Approved seal are good bets—both of which are administered by third-party groups. When it comes to brands, Vital Farms, Family Homestead, Oliver’s Organic, Happy Egg Co., and Pete and Gerry’s all have particularly good reputations, as well as Safeway’s cage-free eggs and Kirkland organic eggs at Costco.

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Sounds awesome, but are you really barbecuing? Or are you grilling?

Turns out that like many things with a rich history, the difference is… complex. At the root of the issue is the very definition of barbecue, a practice that—within certain definitions—is as old as humankind (if you subscribe to the belief that cooking made us human). Barbecue expert and cookbook author Meathead Goldwyn argues that the defining characteristic of barbecue is smoke: if there’s smoke involved, it’s barbecue. “There are many forms of barbecue around the world and it is the presence of smoke that unifies them all,” Goldwyn says. He accompanies this with a handy graphic:

With Goldwyn’s definition, grilling is a subset of barbecue. So what defines grilling, then? Grilling involves high, direct heat, from charcoal or a fire, coming from one direction; when the food is placed on the grate, the heat is transferred through convection. This all means that grilling is hot and fast: the surface of a grill is usually 500°F to 800°F, which means that whatever you’re grilling gets cooked quickly—and probably gets some char on it, too. Grilling therefore lends itself well to small, relatively tender cuts of meat—think steaks, chicken parts, hamburgers, and chops—as well as seafood, vegetables, and fruit.

So if grilling is the hot-dogs-and-hamburgers kinds of stuff, where do the briskets and the ribs and the pork butts and the stuff we in the U.S. of A. think as “barbecue” fit in? That’s Southern barbecue, and in fact, it’s quite different from grilling. Rather than ripping-hot heat, Southern barbecue is all about taking things low and slow. The coals and flames are set off to the side or far below the food, and the lid of the grill or smoker is kept closed; the heat is then transferred through convection, in which the heat and smoke circulates and commingles around whatever’s being cooked. The temperatures for Southern barbecue are usually in the 200°F to 300°F range, making the cooking process a much slower ride—especially considering the fact that the technique is used for larger, tougher cuts of meat, such as brisket, ribs, pork shoulders, and even whole animals. The process allows for the connective tissue to properly break down, resulting in that transcendent fall-apart texture that people stay up all night fire-tending for (or just waiting in really long lines for).

And how about the spelling? Is it barbecue, barbeque, BBQ, B-B-Que, Bar-B-Q, Bar-B-Que, Bar-B-Cue, or some other permutation? Because the word originally comes from barbacoa, linguists and historians generally agree that the correct term is “barbecue”—and the others are just colloquial. So maybe you’re actually barbecuing this weekend, after all!

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I ask you this: Do you know the difference between penne and ziti? I didn’t.

Let’s start with what makes them confusing. Penne, ziti, and rigatoni are all hollow, cylindrical pastas made using the extrusion process, where the dough is forced through a die into the desired shape. Their large surface areas are wonderful transportation vehicles for meaty sauces as well as simpler ones. And, like all pastas, they are very good to eat.

For the differences, I turned to The Geometry of Pasta for help. It’s time to get out some graph paper.

PENNE

Length: 2.12 inches
Width: 0.4 inches
Wall thickness: 1 mm

“Penne” comes from the Italian word for “quill,” and if you take a thoughtful look at it, it’s not hard to see why: the pasta, like its namesake, has its ends cut at an angle, gifting it with a particularly large surface area for a sauce to be drawn into the tubes. Penne can be smooth (lisce) or ridged (rigate), with the ridged ones being a bit sturdier and more soak-up-the-sauce-able than its smoother siblings.

ZITI

Length: 2 inches
Width: 0.4 inches
Wall thickness: 1.25 mm

A whopping 0.12 inch shorter and 0.25 mm thicker than penne, ziti is a smooth-exteriored pasta that hails from Naples, Italy. Notably, its ends are cut straight rather than at a diagonal, making it possible to distinguish it from penne without pulling out a ruler. The word “ziti” comes from the world for “bridegroom” or “the betrothed,” and it’s traditionally served as the first course of a wedding lunch. It’s closely related to ziti candele (or just candele), another type of pasta that’s twice the width and three times the length and needs to be broken up into pieces before cooking so it can fit into a pot.

RIGATONI

Length: 1.8 inches
Width: 0.6 inches
Wall thickness: 1 mm

Slightly shorter and wider than ziti and penne, rigatoni can be straight or slightly curved, depending on the extrusion process. It’s always ridged, with square-cut ends similar to ziti. “Rigatoni” comes from the Italian word “rigare,” which means “to furrow” or “to rule”—and its ridges give a sauce plenty of area to furrow into. Also: rigatoni rules!!

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Let’s start with the most general term: crudo. “Crudo” is the Italian and Spanish word for “raw,” and it refers to a dish of uncooked stuff—usually fish, shellfish, or meat—dressed with some sort of seasoning, such as olive oil, citrus juice, and/or a vinaigrette-type situation. “Crudo” implies no specific size, shape, or technique involved with how said uncooked stuff is sliced, so it can serve as a blanket term for anything that’s raw and dressed.

Carpaccio is a type of crudo, but one in which the uncooked stuff is sliced or pounded super thin. It’s oftentimes made with fish, but you’ll also see meat or even vegetable carpaccios as well (though calling a salad a “crudo” would be a particularly eye-rolly thing to do). Like the others in the crudo category, carpaccios are dressed/drizzled, usually with an olive oil/lemon combo, and usually have some sort of garnish as well.

Another type of crudo is tartare, which is made of raw meat or seafood that’s chopped up and bound with some sort of sauce, dressing, and/or other seasonings. Like carpaccios, tartares are defined by the shape in which the raw stuff is sliced—in this case, usually minced or diced rather than sliced thinly.

Moving on: a raw preparation not in the crudo category is sashimi. Sashimi is made with carefully sliced raw fish that’s rarely marinated, sauced, or garnished; it’s more about the quality of the fish and the technique of the chef preparing it rather than any vinaigrettes or seasonings. For classic sashimi, the fish is killed in the manner of ike jime, in which a spike is inserted into its brain. This method, which kills the fish instantly, preserves its flavor and texture and keeps it fresher for longer.

While it’s not technically raw, it’s worth noting a crudo-family cousin: the ceviche. Ceviche is made up of raw seafood that’s marinated in citrus juice, which cures (or, in this case, “cooks”) it. Ceviche recipes call for around eight times the amount of acid found in dishes like crudo or tartare, and the fish sits in it for longer, allowing it to penetrate the raw stuff and transform its texture. Ceviche can be found all over Latin America, and its ingredients and garnishes totally vary on its locale; a ceviche in Peru, for example, is going to be different from a ceviche in Colombia or Mexico.

Tiradito is essentially a mash-up of all the stuff we’ve talked about; it’s made of raw fish, sliced thinly (like carpaccio or sashimi) and then marinated in an acidic mixture (like ceviche). It only cures for twenty or so minutes, however, rather than the longer baths that a ceviche typically gets. Tiradito is a part of Nikkei cuisine, a form of Japanese-Peruvian cooking that evolved after a nineteenth-century influx of Japanese immigrants to Peru. Turns out a lot of cultures have ways of making raw food delicious—and that great stuff happens when those traditions intertwine.

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A chef is technically a professional cook, someone who runs the kitchen of a restaurant or hotel. He/she has some sort of codified training, whether it’s through culinary school or just working his/her way up through a restaurant kitchen, and there’s a management component to the role; it means you’re in charge of a kitchen, not just making great food. As cookbook author, TV personality, and Domestic Goddess Nigella Lawson told Eater, “Chef means a degree of professionalism either because you’ve got the qualification or because you’ve worked in a restaurant kitchen. I have done neither. My only qualification is in Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. A chef means in some sense that you are a professional and I feel like I am a passionate amateur.”

Nigella, then, would consider herself a cook. In a general, non-restaurant setting, a cook is anyone who prepares food; it has more of an amateur association than the word “chef,” simply because it implies the person doesn’t cook professionally. (The delineation doesn’t come from the actual quality of the food being prepared—you can be a badass home cook that makes better food than someone considered a “chef.”) In a restaurant setting, a cook is anyone below the sous chef in the chain of command; they’re the people who are literally cooking the food each night rather than creating recipes and/or managing the kitchen.

While we’re here, let’s dig a bit into the hierarchy of a restaurant kitchen, shall we? Most kitchens operate under some version of the brigade system, a model that was devised by Auguste Escoffier over one hundred years ago and is still used today. Here’s a very top-level look at the brigade de cuisine and the types of cooks and chefs you’ll find in a restaurant kitchen.

CHEFS

Executive Chef
The top of the food chain. This is the chef who supervises the staff, creates the menu, and manages the business. Depending on the restaurant, this could be more of a figurehead role or someone who is more hands-on.

Chef de Cuisine
The chef who is actively in charge of kitchen. In smaller restaurants, this can be the same as the executive chef; in larger operations, especially ones with many locations, the chef de cuisine reports to the executive chef, who may not be present every day.

Sous Chefs
The managers of the kitchen. They’re the people taking inventory, dealing with invoices, making sure the stations are set up on time, and overseeing the food before it gets sent out into the dining room.

 COOKS

Line Cooks/Chefs de Partie

The people who run each station, or a specific realm of the kitchen. These are your sauciers (sauce chefs), rôtisseurs(meat cooks), poissoniers (fish cooks), entremétiers (vegetable/soup cooks), and garde mangers (the cooks in charge of cold-food preprations, like salads). The pâtisseur, or pastry chef, is classically a part of this group as well.

Junior Cooks/Commis
The people who work at specific stations under a line cook. They are typically still in training and/or just out of culinary school.

Stagiaires
Usually a student and considered the “intern” of the kitchen. They’re usually assigned basic prep tasks, like peeling potatoes or slicing onions.

Also in the brigade system can be the aboyeur, who communicates between the front and the back of the house; thecommunard, who prepares staff meal; and the plongeurs, or dishwashers.

This edition is in honor of the Restaurant Workers’ Community Foundation, an organization working to improve the lives of restaurant workers. You can visit their website and sign up for their newsletter here. 

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Let’s start with table salt. Table salt is made of small, regular, cubic crystals and is usually mined from underground rock-salt deposits (rather than gathered from sea water). As much of 2% of its weight is made up of additives that keep the salt crystals from sticking together—including silicon dioxide, which is used in glass and ceramics—and then more additives to keep those additives from sticking together. It’s also the densest of the salts, which makes it the slowest to dissolve—and when it does dissolve, those additives can make something like a brine look and taste murky.

On the other side of the purity spectrum is kosher salt, which is relatively more pure than the other salts on the market. Kosher salt can come from either salt mines or the sea, and it was originally used in the koshering process of meats; the salt would remove impurities and draw the blood out of whatever animal was meant to be koshered. Lots of cooks now use kosher salt in all kinds of cooking; its coarse, uniform texture makes it easy to grab, and at around $1 per pound, it’s inexpensive.

A note about kosher salt: the two top brands on the market, Diamond Crystal and Morton, behave very differently. Morton is much denser than Diamond Crystal, and therefore a volume measurement (like, say, a tablespoon) will be “saltier” than DC. Morton also takes longer to dissolve, which makes it easier to over-salt a dish with it; if you taste a dish right after salting it, it won’t taste as salty as it will be when all the salt dissolves. When given the choice, then, many cooks typically prefer Diamond Crystal over Morton.

Moving on: sea salts, as their name implies, come from the sea; they’re produced through the evaporation of sea water or water from saltwater lakes. They often contain natural minerals, like magnesium and calcium, as well as teensy bits of natural sediments that can affect their color: think Hawaiian pink salt or French sel gris. Sea salt can come in various coarseness levels—and on the coarser end, the crystals can be irregular, making them better for garnish or texture rather than for workhorse-cooking.

If you’re looking for even fancier crystals, there’s also flake salt and fleur de sel. Flake salt, like Maldon, comes in flat, extended flakes rather than granules; those flakes are made either through evaporation or by rolling out granulated salts by machine. And fleur de sel is specifically made from the crystals that form on the sea-salt beds in central or Western France, when the humidity and breeze are just right; they’re scooped off of the surface just before they have the chance to dunk beneath the water. Sounds like fancy salt production, yes, and like a dream vacation, too.

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Soy sauce was first invented approximately 2,000 years ago, using a process that is quite similar to the one we use today. To make it, soybeans and roasted wheat are mixed together and inoculated with Aspergillus mold, or koji. (Koji is also the mold used to make miso paste and sake.) After three to four days, the soybean-wheat-koji mixture is combined with water and salt to form a thick mash. The mash is then put into large vats and fermented, traditionally for eighteen months or longer, and then strained and bottled.

Soy sauces can be Chinese-style or Japanese-style. Chinese-style soy sauces traditionally are made with 100% soy, while Japanese-style soy sauces are made with a mix of soy and wheat (usually 50/50). This gives the Japanese sauces a sweeter, more nuanced flavor than their Chinese counterparts, which are usually saltier and more aggressive. Shoyuis simply the name for the Japanese-style soy sauce, which can be light (usukuchi) or dark (koikuchi).

Tamari is soy-sauce-like product that originated as a by-product of making miso. Classically, it’s made with only soybeans (and no wheat), making it more similar in flavor to Chinese-style soy sauce—and a great option for those who are gluten-free. (Many tamaris these days, however, do contain a bit of wheat—so if you’re concerned about gluten, make sure to check the bottle.)

Other soy sauce variants include Chinese light soy sauce, or “fresh” or “thin” soy sauce, which is the most common soy sauce in Chinese cuisine; Chinese dark soy sauce, which is thicker and darker in color but less salty than the light sauces and sometimes contains sugar or molasses; and sweet soy sauce, or kecap manis, an Indonesian style of soy sauce that’s popular across Southeast Asia. Sweet soy sauce is flavored with palm sugar, star anise, galangal, and other aromatics, giving it what Max Falkowitz at Snuk Foods calls a “barbecue-sauce consistency.” It’s popular in stir-fries and rice and noodle dishes, and it’s also great used in a marinade.

One more thing: before you buy any soy sauce or soy-sauce-like product, make sure to check the ingredients first. These days, there are bottles of stuff that are sold as soy sauce but contain tons of gross chemicals, aimed at replicating the soy sauce taste while bypassing the traditional fermentation process. According to Max, “If you see anything besides soy beans, wheat, salt, and mold cultures on the label, such as caramel coloring and ‘natural flavors,’ steer clear.” With so many options of what you can buy, it should be easy to do so.

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