Chu hou sauce (Cantonese fermented soybean braising paste)

A sweet bean paste for braising

Chu hou (Mandarin zhùhóu jiàng, 柱侯醬, also written chee hou) is a thick Cantonese paste built on fermented soybeans. The Woks of Life describes it as similar to hoisin sauce but seasoned differently, with ingredients such as salted garlic, salted plums, salted lemon and fermented bean curd that change from brand to brand. It is quite sweet, and it is used mainly in braised dishes, where it seasons and thickens the liquid. Hoisin is the usual stand-in. One retail paste lists fermented soybean paste, fermented bean curd, sesame, ginger, garlic and spices, which is a good picture of its character: salty-sweet, savoury, and aromatic rather than hot.

A typical household use is a rib stew. The Woks of Life makes one with pork ribs, dried tofu skin (foo jook) and bought chee hou sauce. That recipe documents how the sauce is used, not how it is made.

How the sauce is made

A Lee Kum Kee account from Xinhui describes the factory method in outline: a fermented paste of soybeans and wheat is combined with seasonings and cooked. Nothing more is given, so the factory proportions, times and temperatures are not known.

The home formula above is a different thing: a blog's adaptation that starts from ready-made salted bean paste and red bean curd, fries minced garlic, ginger and shallots in oil, and stirs the rest in with sugar until the paste is thick and fragrant. It borrows hoisin and chicken powder to supply sweetness and savour, so it is a shortcut to the flavour rather than the traditional product. The page it comes from also mentions sesame paste, oyster sauce and chicken essence in its method without listing them, which is why those are left out here. In both routes the fermentation has already happened in the bean paste and the bean curd. Cooking only blends and concentrates them.

Who made it first

The origin story belongs to one cook, Liang Zhuhou, and the accounts disagree about him. The Lee Kum Kee Xinhui account places him at the Three Pin Lou restaurant in the Qing Jiaqing period. A Chancheng local biography instead says his birth and death dates are unknown and puts him in Foshan during the Daoguang and Tongzhi periods. A 2020 Macao Daily article by chef Huang Chihua tells a third version: the dish linked to a busy Beidi temple fair, with the chicken dish coming before the sauce.

These are later retellings, from a manufacturer, a local biographical site whose authority is not established, and a newspaper reminiscence. None is an archival record, so the page treats Foshan and the Qing period as the shared setting and leaves the date and the inventor open.

Open questions

No independently verified earliest record, controlled endpoint for the factory process, or tested storage period for a homemade batch was found. Bought chu hou is kept refrigerated once opened; the home formula has no storage advice at all.