Most people reach for the soy bottles first, and fair enough, they do the heavy lifting in a Cantonese kitchen. But the cooking has a wider range of sauces than those two jars suggest, and leaning on them for everything flattens the food into the same brown note. The Ip Shing Kee series grew out of that gap. Since 1946 we have kept the fermentation side sharp, then built out pastes, marinades, and clay-pot bases so a home cook in Manchester can reach for the right bottle without hunting through a specialist shop or guessing at a ratio.

Take the chicken pot base. It started as something our own families cooked with, then we bottled it once customers kept asking how the restaurant down the road got that depth of flavour. Our pastes follow the same idea: long-aged soy, a bit of sugar, real aromatics, no filler. Use them the way you would use a stock cube, except the result actually tastes like the dish you meant to make. A spoonful in a clay pot of chicken and mushroom does more than an hour of fiddling with separate seasonings ever will.

We still age everything the slow way in Yuen Long, the same as we did in the beginning. That is the part mass-produced brands skip, and it is why our series does not taste flat after a week in the fridge. The soy keeps its edge, the pastes keep their roundness, and the bases hold up to a long simmer without turning bitter.

If you have only ever cooked with straight soy, start with the chicken pot base on a rainy Sunday and see where it takes you. Most people come back for the paste next, then the marinade. The series was built so you can move through it one bottle at a time, learning the kitchen the way our own cooks did.