Kennett Square local launches a line of soy-free soy sauces, made from mushrooms

In her mid-20s, Nicole Gordon, now 37, was very ill. “No doctors could figure out what was going on, so I did a multi-year elimination diet and that’s when we figured out I was allergic to all legumes.” Suddenly unable to eat most of the foods she had grown up, Gordon went down a path to developing Nikigo, a line of mushroom-based sauces that launched in April.

Nikigo has the salinity of a lighter soy sauce and the body of a darker one, but it’s exceptionally umami-rich, with an almost smoky depth. For those with soy allergies but an appetite for the condiment, it’s a great dupe.

Gordon’s pre-allergy palate was wide. She was born in Seattle, lived in India, and spent stretches of time in the UK, and she loved foods from all around the world. Her mother is from Hawaii so she also grew up eating all different types of Asian foods from those islands.

“I spent all my summers in Hawaii and when you land, you either go for Korean barbecue or a Chinese banquet-style meal,” said Gordon. Both cuisines are heavily reliant on soy sauce.

Living in Arizona during the pandemic, Gordon decided to start a company that made a soy sauce alternative. Nikigo’s original soy-free sauce is a “like for like for soy sauce. You don’t need to change any recipes that use soy sauce [to use Nikigo],” said Gordon. The ingredients are simply mushrooms, salt, and water.

She quickly discovered, “if you want to be in the mushroom business, you’ve got to go where the mushrooms are.”

She and her then-fiancé sold his house, got married, and moved out to Kennett Square, where she sources all of the white button, cremini, and portobellos that go into Nikigo sauces. Originally, she had been shipping the mushrooms out from Kennett Square to Arizona.

Her first customer was herself. “The very first thing I made with Nikigo was kalbi [Korean marinated short ribs],” said Gordon. “When I made it, I actually cried since it had been so long since I had it. And to me, that’s the whole reason to start Nikigo, the idea that people should be able to eat delicious food and eat it safely. It should be an alternative that shouldn’t taste like an alternative.”

Gordon’s most interested customers have been fellow food allergy sufferers, but to her surprise, many of them come from the gluten free community. “Although tamari exists and is gluten free, it has an extremely sharp flavor. There’s a reason there’s wheat in soy sauce. Wheat tempers that sharpness. But Nikigo has umami depth without that sharpness.”

And how did she get the flavor of Nikigo right without being able to taste soy sauce? “A lot of it comes down to smell, but also I used my parents and husband. They really learned how to become extreme flavor testers.”

The company also makes a Hawaiian-style teriyaki sauce, adding ginger and cane sugar to a Nikigo mushroom base, and noodle sauce seasoned with seaweed and rice vinegar, modeled after Japanese metsuyu. “It’s the one I use the fastest. You either mix it with water or broth (one part noodle sauce to four parts water or broth) and have ramen broth or you can cook soba noodles, drain them, and stir in one to two tablespoons of noodle sauce,” said Gordon.

Nikigo’s sauces are now available on their website, on Amazon, and they will soon be sold on TikTok shop.