If fussing over peeling and chopping has you frustrated, this saucy solution can add plenty of flavour — chop, chop!
Bradford entrepreneur and owner of Yehs Innovations, David Yeh, is combining produce from the Holland Marsh with ingenuity to offer a flavourful new way to eat healthy while saving time on meal prep with SoSecret sauce.
Both vegan and gluten free, SoSecret is a garlic chili oil sauce made with onions from Bradford’s ATV Farms along with ginger and shallots, combined with spices imported from China and India, providing plenty of flavour without all the prep work of washing, peeling and chopping.
“I love to cook very much. However, I found lots of time when making a meal, the preparation time is much longer than the actual cooking time,” Yeh said via email. “A quick meal can also be healthy and delicious. At the same time, I want the sauce to be versatile so people can use it as a dipping sauce, cooking with it, making soup base, marinate with it and much more.”
Depending on the dish being prepared, Yeh estimates, the sauce can save anywhere from 10 minutes for making something like a dipping sauce to 45 minutes making something like a soup base from scratch.
He enjoys adding the sauce to pizza, steak and burgers, but also uses it for soups and all kinds of noodle dishes.
While the concept may sound simple enough, Yeh spent years experimenting with different ways to get the flavour just right, taking the first recipe from December 2020 and slowly tweaking the ingredients and cooking methods.
“Sometimes, when I change one simple ingredient the whole profile changes. When I changed the cooking temperature in one stage of the process, the tastes became different. Maybe it’s the challenge that made me enjoy doing it so much,” he said.
During that period of experimentation, Yeh was also sharing the sauce with his friends and family who helped provide feedback, but also frequently asked about the ever-changing recipe.
“Since nothing was final at the time I didn’t want to tell too much, so my answer usually was, ‘I can’t say it right now. Just take a guess,’” Yeh recalled.
That prompted responses such as “Yeah, secret sauce,” or “Wow, so secret, huh?” and with that, the name was born.
While the recipe is still secret, there’s no need to bite your tongue, because SoSecret can be purchased at 19 Sobeys and 10 Foodland locations in Ontario, and is also available on Amazon.
This isn’t the first time Yeh has had a successful product launch either, with his folding compact camping grill, the Bitty Big Q going on sale in 2019.
Made with Grade 316 stainless steel and weighing just less than 900 grams, the grill was the answer Yeh had been searching for when it came to cooking on camping trips.
Currently, the grill is available in North America, Europe, Australia, Japan and online.
For more information about SoSecret, visit sosecret.ca.
For more information about the Bitty Big Q, visit bittybigq.com.
