Premium Japanese Soy Sauce Ice Cream by Kamada Shoyu

I had tried miso ice cream before and thought it was marvellous. I think there is something special when the rich complex flavours of fermented sauces such as miso mix with salt and creamy milk. It's probably why salted caramel is also such a winning combination - although the complexity comes from the heat/burning of the caramel.

So when I saw shoyu ice cream at Meidi-ya, I pounced on the chance to try it.

Kamada Shoyu Ice Cream

And I was right The umami and salt of the shoyu went perfectly with the milky cream and egg yolk! If you have tried rich Japanese shoyu, you'll notice that the flavor is very complex, almost winey, which could be why a lot of dashis pair shoyu with some form of Japanese wine.

This particular ice cream was made not by an ice cream specialist, but by a shoyu specialist. Kamada Soy Sauce was apparently established in 1789. More than 200 years of brewing. Nonetheless, it was manufactured in Hokkaido with 100% Hokkaido milk.

There was also honey in the ingredients list (click to enlarge photo below), so quite a lot of gastronomic pairing skill probably went into it, which explains the excellent execution of the flavour. It tasted very premium indeed. It has just 6 ingredients, none of them preservatives. That makes it as pure as Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream, which has 5. The 6th ingredient in this case was honey, so that is still pure to me.

Japanese Soy Sauce Ice Cream by Kamada Shoyu - ingredients list

I got this at the Millennia Walk Meidi-ya in January 2023, which has many other interesting gourmet ice cream flavours from niche Japanese manufacturers, so the stocks come and go. I recently dropped by again (April 2026) and saw that they still had it, but the price had undergone inflation of course, so it is almost S$6 now. The freezer store display is in the photo below. If you visit, you might not always see the same products, but there'll probably be something else interesting.

Japanese Soy Sauce Ice Cream by Kamada Shoyu at Meidi-ya, Millenia Walk - store display
Discover other interesting ice creams

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