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Sauces and condiments from Hongyang town, Puning, Jieyang, Guangdong

Puning bean paste (Puning soybean sauce, Chaoshan yellow bean paste)普宁豆酱

A golden Teochew soybean paste in which the split beans stay whole. Dehulled soybean halves are soaked, steamed, mixed with flour and Aspergillus oryzae and grown into koji on bamboo trays, then sun-fermented in open jars of brine for 3–5 months and boiled before bottling.

A short entry: the sources we found record only what is said here about Puning bean paste itself.

Short entrySauces and condiments3 months – 5 months

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedWorkshop make; no source gives amounts or the salt level. The label of one commercial Puning paste in a 2024 study lists soybean, salt, wheat flour and water, with sodium benzoate, acesulfame and MSG.
Yellow soybeans, dehulled and splitMakers prefer small round northeast-China beans[Sina2018][PuningGov2022]
Wheat flour[Sina2018][PuningGov2022]
Mould culture, mainly Aspergillus oryzae[Sina2018]
Salt and waterAdded by measure; no source gives the amounts[Sina2018][PuningGov2022]
Startera mould culture, mainly Aspergillus oryzae, rubbed into the bean halves and flour

Total time across the recorded steps: 3 months – 5 months

Start
Drag the bar or press Play

What changes: Soybeans are sun-dried, then milled and split into halves

Step 1 of 5
Sun-dry the beans and split them (曝豆, 碾豆)
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Aspergillus oryzae

Done only on a dry, sunny day; in damp weather the hulls do not come off cleanly. Output: dehulled split beans.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
split cotyledons (豆瓣)
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

A golden Teochew soybean paste in which the split beans stay whole. Dehulled soybean halves are soaked, steamed, mixed with flour and Aspergillus oryzae and grown into koji on bamboo trays, then sun-fermented in open jars of brine for 3–5 months and boiled before bottling. Made in 5 steps over 3 months – 5 months. The longest step, brine and sun-ferment in open jars (推水醭), takes 3–5 months (记忆中的潮汕味道!普宁豆酱凭什么成为潮汕酱料的王牌? (reprinted from 悦食…). Aspergillus oryzae does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step3–5 monthsReported[Sina2018][PuningGov2022]Brine and sun-ferment in open jars (推水醭)

What makes this one different

Sina's 2018 feature likens it to miso, but the bean halves stay whole and plump, and the brine stage is a sun ferment of about three to five months.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Teochew home bean pasteSteamed beans are covered with a quilt for 3–5 days instead of a koji room, then brined in a covered pottery urn in the sun for 1–2 months.

Safety

A 2022 TV report credits one Puning maker's heat treatment after the sun ferment with the long shelf life; commercial pastes also carry sodium benzoate. WHO says botulinum spores can survive boiling for several hours, so a boiled paste in a sealed jar still depends on its salt and acidity. A 2024 study of shop pastes appears to put a Puning brand (its third doujiang row) at 10.9 g salt per 100 g and pH 6.3; no source we read gives figures for a home paste. In China, homemade fermented bean products, bean paste among them, are a leading cause of foodborne botulism.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

A 2018 feature says Puning county was set up in 1563, and that bean-paste yards began to appear in the late Ming and early Qing, most famously several in the old county town of Hongyang. A Puning culture bureau report, citing records, says large-scale making was under way in the Daoguang era and that more than ten yards existed by the Republican era. The method was listed as Guangdong provincial intangible cultural heritage in 2009 (Chinese Wikipedia).

  1. [who-botulism] World Health Organization, Botulism, fact sheetgov
  2. [danai2026] Danai A., Huang J., Su J., Meng W., Lin Y., Yuan Y., Ma X. 2026, Analysis of the epidemiological characteristics of foodborne botulism in Xinjiang, China from 2016 to 2024, BMC Infectious Diseasespaper
  3. [PuningGov2022] Puning Municipal Bureau of Culture, Radio, Television, Tourism and Sports, 普宁豆酱:古法技艺 芳香弥远乡情浓 (reprint of a Guangdong TV report), 2022-04-11gov
  4. [Sina2018] 记忆中的潮汕味道!普宁豆酱凭什么成为潮汕酱料的王牌? (reprinted from 悦食记), Sina, 2018-02-14web
  5. [PMC10855112] A systematic comparative study on the physicochemical properties, volatile compounds, and biological activity of typical fermented soy foods, Foods 2024 13(3):415 (label list of a Puning soybean paste, and salinity and pH by sample)paper
  6. [WP-zh] Wikipedia (zh), 普宁豆酱wiki