a sauceSoy garlic sauce
also: ganjang chicken sauce · ganjang-chikin sauce · soy garlic
Ganjang (간장) is soy sauce. A Korean counter offers soy garlic or spicy, and banban gets you both.
A brown glaze of soy sauce, sugar and garlic, brushed onto fried chicken after the fryer. Sweet and savoury rather than hot; often heavily garlicky. Ganjang-chikin — soy sauce chicken — is the Korean name for the dish it makes. A honey version, sweeter and stickier, is sold alongside it.
The story Cited · wp-bonchon-chicken
Bonchon standardised two flagship sauces, soy garlic and spicy, made with regional Korean ingredients and manufactured centrally in South Korean facilities so every franchise tastes the same. Jinduk Seo founded the chain in Busan in 2002; its name means "my hometown". Its first US location was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and it is credited as the first Korean fried chicken brand to expand internationally.
The sauce sits in an old lineage. Pogye (포계), a fried chicken dish of the early Joseon dynasty, was sautéed in oil while soy sauce, sesame oil, flour-and-water and vinegar were poured on in turn.
Bonchon stopped retailing in South Korea by the end of 2016 to concentrate on export. VIG Partners took a majority stake in December 2018; the headquarters moved to Dallas, Texas in 2021. Around 500 restaurants operate in over ten countries.
Inference — soy garlic is the sauce that carried Korean fried chicken to people who do not want heat, which is most of a mall food court.
How it is done Tradition
Double-fry, then paint. The sugar in the glaze catches on a still-hot crust and sets glossy; too much of it and the crust goes soft, which is why it is brushed thin rather than tossed. Serve with pickled radish. Scallion-topped padak is the same bird under shredded scallion instead.
Today Harvested · fdc-we-love-you-soy-garlic
Sold at Korean fried chicken chains across the United States and bottled by small importers. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for We Love You Soy Garlic Korean Chicken Wing Sauce & Glaze reads 430 mg sodium and 6 g sugar in a 1-tablespoon serving, with soy sauce first, sugar second and granulated garlic fourth. Black pepper is the only pepper on it, and no Scoville number is published — for a sauce that claims no heat, none is expected.
The particulars
| base | soy-sweet |
|---|---|
| heat | none |
| region | Korean America, The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · Korean Delights LLC (We Love You) |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | — |
| vinegar | #6 on the label |
| butter or oil | — |
| tomato | — |
| sugar | #2 on the label |
| soy sauce | #1 on the label |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 430 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 6 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | soy sauce (water, soybeans, wheat, salt), sugar, water, granulated garlic, apple juice concentrate, white distilled vinegar, corn starch, granulated onion, black pepper, ground ginger |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. We Love You Soy Garlic Korean Chicken Wing Sauce & Glaze, 15 oz. Label serving is 1 tbsp (18 g), so the per-tablespoon figures are the label's own. pepper_rank is 0: black pepper at rank 9 is not a chile. Bonchon's own soy garlic is made in company plants in South Korea and is not sold in a labelled retail bottle, so it returns no USDA record and its panel is not on this disk. Every bottle we have read is on the sauce page.
Recipes you can use
Old cookbooks are printed whole, spelling and all. Where a recipe is still somebody's copyright, you get the ingredient list and a link to the rest.
We Love You Soy Garlic Korean Chicken Wing Sauce & Glaze, as labelled
- soy sauce (water, soybeans, wheat, salt)
- sugar
- water
- granulated garlic
- apple juice concentrate
- white distilled vinegar
- corn starch
- granulated onion
- black pepper
- ground ginger
Ingredients only, in label order, from the USDA branded-food panel. Bonchon's own soy garlic is made in company plants and is not sold in a labelled retail bottle, so nothing of it can be read here.
Not to be confused with
- Teriyaki sauce — Garlic. Soy garlic leads on it; a Japanese teriyaki tare is soy, mirin and sugar, and garlic is uncommon in the traditional version.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Bonchon Chicken · link
- Korean fried chicken · link
- We Love You Soy Garlic Korean Chicken Wing Sauce & Glaze — branded food label (FDC ID 2511275) · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.