Actually, there aren’t many cons.

Soy sauce is a condiment dating back millennia, and the process of making it has been refined in just about every way imaginable at this point. Multiple varieties with subtle flavors to match certain dishes have been developed and the process of brewing can range from state-of-the-art mass production technology to traditional wooden barrels.

But despite all this surprises still emerge, such as the Fluffy Foam Soy Sauce (Mokomoko Awa Shoyu) that our writer Maro stumbled upon by chance at a highway rest stop. She would have almost been convinced the two types of bottles were hand soap had they not been stocked prominently among an entire shelf of soy sauces.

There were two types of foaming soy sauce: tamari soy sauce which has a deeper flavor and lends itself well to sashimi; and tamago kake soy sauce which is tailored for the classic Japanese dish of raw egg on rice known as tamago kake gohan.

In dispensing soy sauce in a foam there are said to be numerous benefits. One is that it reduces salt consumption without altering that sauce itself. Since this dose of soy sauce is largely composed of air, you get a heightened sense of its natural taste while actually eating less of it.

Not only that, but as a foam the soy sauce doesn’t run all over the place. You can pick it up and fine-tune the amount used with utensils.

This also means that rather than pouring the sauce in a separate dish, you can just add a dab of tamari right next to your sashimi. This not only adds to convenience but can be used in decorative serving ideas.

Maro sampled the tamari first and found that the foam melted quickly in her mouth but the taste was very firm, maybe even stronger than usual. The tamago kake sauce was noticeably lighter in color and has sugars to complement tamago kake gohan.

Once again, because the foam stays in place, Maro could easily get a nice photo of it in action. Normally, soy sauce would simply seep into the rice and become hard to see. Also once again, the taste was not weakened at all by being in a foam state.

With a nice flavor, health benefits, and introducing a new way to serve and eat soy sauce, Fluffy Foam Soy Sauce seems perfect in every way. However, Maro did run into a problem related to the store’s display.

▼ “Mysterious product! A soy sauce that doesn’t stain your clothes! The cutting-edge of soy sauce! Please try it!”

Keeping your clothes free of unsightly soy sauce stains is a very bold claim, but as Maro already saw. Fluffy Foam Soy Sauce does sit on top of food instead of soaking in. Maybe it does work…

It’s important to note that the manufacturer itself, Yamakawa Brewing, in no way recommends getting their soy sauce foam in contact with clothing ever. Still, in the spirit of accurate reporting, Maro got a white shirt from her closet and put the ad’s theory to the test.

However, as we can plainly see, the shirt ended up quite stained.

So it would seem that the fatal flaw in Fluffy Foam Soy Sauce is that it’s so great it makes people overconfident in what it can do. If you do purchase one of these cans for about 500 yen (US$4.38) each remember to just enjoy it as a topping and not get carried away.

Related: Tamariya Fluffy Foam Soy Sauce
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