The search for our Madame Jeanette pepper continues
Looking back… Some of you might remember the 3 different sweet spicy soy sauces we’ve launched last year. For those who’ve missed it… at the bottom of the page you will find the link to this story. In short… that story represents the first step in our search for unique varieties of peppers. It took us three years to make the first batches of soy sauce with these peppers. The response was quite overwhelming to say the least. So we needed little convincing to continue with growing our own peppers. So we did….
Mistakes happen…
Even before launching the products in 2022 we continued and planted 5 selected varieties of Madame Jeanette Peppers. Little did we know… as it turned out that these plants are cross-pollinators. Apparently, we were lucky the years before. But this year it resulted in all kinds of different peppers on the same plant. It’s cool to see nature does her thing, but it took us 3 steps back in our selection for flavor process... So back to the drawing board…
New pepper!
With the help of the Centre for Genetic Resources, The Netherlands (CGN) we’ve carefully selected one variety. It’s the most original Madame Jeanette Pepper we could find. This variety finds her origin in Surinam. With the help from the people of ZorgBoerderij Beversoord we’ve planted these seeds. Even though we’ve been growing these crops for over 4 years… it’s still requires quite the effort and personal attention. And the results are promising.
The result?!
This variety has proven to be a strong and resistant plant, with a lot of fruit. And most importantly… the peppers looked and smelled good! We can’t emphasize enough what it means to work with crops that you’ve witnessed growing over the last months. It totally changes our perspective on the rest of the process. A feeling that is difficult to put into words. So, you’ll have to trust us when we say so ;-).
We’ve used Tomasu’s signature soy sauce as a basis, the heat is softened, allowing the taste of the pepper to be better recorded and hopefully appreciated. The final step was to ask our favorite illustrator to come up with a new illustration. The color of this new label represents the color of the pepper and her plant.
So, there you have it! A new sweet and spicy soy sauce. We hope you like it as much as we do!
