
I pulled it down and read the ingredients, it was like the bottles I looked at before except one ingredient was missing. Wheat flour. This might be it. I couldn't just look it up, so I bought it, along with a few gluten free gains that I plan on testing out for my beer.
A moment of explanation for people who are not familiar with this asian food staple. Oyster sauce is a product of Lee Kum Kee, a company known for sauces. My family has used oyster sauce for ages and we always got a bottle that had a boat and a child on it. This was known as the premium brand. The other brand, which we thought wasn't quite as good, was their panda brand. To my family, it lacked the depth of flavor that the main bottle had. The sauce is like a demiglace, the product of oyster stew that cooked for too long and reduced itself to a salty, slightly sweet, slightly tangy glaze that had a full, savory flavor that worked well as a finishing sauce for noodles, vegetables and would lend a special flavor to ribs and chicken. Oyster sauce fits one of the asian tastes known Umami.
Once I got home, I looked up the sauce on their website. I had checked several times this year but found the new entry, it was of this very same bottle. I even looked up their section on gluten free sauces and it was in the list! I was excited so I popped it open and poured it onto my plate and ate it with plain rice and chicken finally getting to taste a sauce I had missed for years. It was everything I remembered. It brought back years of having Sapporo Ichiban noodles with an egg dropped in, drizzled with sauce. Gai lon, or common broccoli, lightly stir fried with ginger and garlic, finished with this very sauce. Green beans with ginger and garlic and this sauce. Oh, so many recipies I had to cut away from because I could not eat this.
For a while, I've been using a storebought stock reduction that didn't contain wheat flour, it wasn't quite enough. I was attempting to make my own, using a combination of chickenstock, vegetable stock, or mushroom stock reduced to a glaze. I had just started with a reduced chickenstock that even now sits in my freezer, waiting for me to figure out what steps to do next, but it's no longer needed for it's original purpose.
Gluten free fans of asian foods rejoice, there's another sauce that's made the list and we're a step closer to authentic asian food free of gluten. This is surprisingly difficult when some people don't know about gluten allergies. I've found a few who do, but even they couldn't guarantee anything. I'm crossing my fingers for Hoisin sauce next and perhaps a good version of Pearl River Bridge mushroom soy sauce. I know that San-J does a geat gluten free tamari soy sauce, and I use it quite often, but to me, it's thinner than the syrupy dark mushroom soy sauce that I love. Gluten-free, we're getting there.