For many people of the Asian diaspora, food provides a tangible link to heritage that can sometimes feel distant. Soy sauce is one of the best examples.

While familiar red-capped, mass-produced bottles of soy sauce dominate supermarket shelves, a small community of artisans is choosing to make the condiment in different, slower ways.

Ramona Lee – also known as “The Soy Sauce Lady” – and Mike Fung of Cinwaan Soy Sauce are hand-crafting the liquid gold in rainy Sweden and sun-drenched Australia, respectively.

Lee is a Chinese-American who grew up in New York’s Chinatown after her parents moved there from Hong Kong and mainland China in the 1960s.

“I grew up with dinners at my grandparents’ in Chinatown. [We’d have] big banquet dinners at Chinese restaurants … huge dinners with lobster and shrimp, and these big whole steamed fish would come out onto the table. But my sister and I, all we would do is order bowls of rice and eat it with soy sauce,” she says with a laugh.

Sixteen years ago, Lee moved to Malmo, a coastal city in southern Sweden. It was there that she became interested in fermenting foods, while working as a preschool teacher about five years ago.