The handy soy sauce trick has been wowing fans on social media (Image: Getty)
There aren’t many that aren’t made taster with a dash of soy sauce.
From sushi and stir fries to marinades and chilli, the umami-packed condiment is a great way to deepen the flavour of your favourite and add a delicious salty kick.
Light soy is what’s going to give you the best of that flavour, whilst the dark variety is excellent for adding a bit of colour to your noodles or rice dishes.
But did you know that there’s an even easier way to pour it out – and it’s been hiding under your nose this whole time?
The nifty was shared by chef to the disbelief of fans on , so if you’ve got a bottle in your kitchen cupboards, you’ll want to try this out.
Soy sauce is always a handy condiment to have, as it pairs well with so much (Image: Getty)
She showed off a bottle of soy sauce from the popular brand Kikkoman – something that many of us will have picked up from the supermarket before.
But its distinctive red lid is more than just a way to keep the sauce fresh.
Each side of the lid has a hole drilled into it for easy pouring, but if you struggle with getting the perfect portion out then this nifty hack could save you a lot of hassle.
By holding your finger against one of the holes as you pour, this will effectively act as a stopper to ensure you don’t let too much soy sauce escape.
Posting in the caption, Elly said: “A design classic, the Kikkoman bottle has a very cleverly designed lid, but did you realise that’s how you use it?
“Hold your finger firmly against one side, and the soy sauce will stop flowing from the other, meaning no spills or splashes and complete control.”
The reason the bottle is designed this way is because soy sauce was typically sold in large two litre bottles in Japan until the late 1960s – which was awkward to pour.
So Kikkoman hired a young man named Kenji Ekuan—who would eventually become one of Japan’s most famous industrial designers— to work on a solution.
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Ekuan and his team developed nearly 100 prototypes over three years until they finally found the solution: a perfectly balanced bell-shaped bottle with a flared opening that was easy to refill and a signature red cap with two spouts – one for soy sauce to pour out of, the other for air intake.
This created a smooth, steady pour and put an end to the problem of dripping.
In the video’s comments, people were blown away by this trick with many admitting they had no idea why the lid was shaped like that.
One person said: “I just thought one side came out faster than the other.”
Another wrote: “Genius! Why aren’t all pouring bottles made like this!”
A third commented: “I did not know that, and I’ve just used my soy sauce in my stir fry!”
Meanwhile a fourth said: “Amazing! Every day is a school day.”