🌿 Folk Prescriptions

Fermented soybeans are a traditional Chinese food, similar to bean paste, indispensable in daily life. They can be used to cook vegetables, braise fish and meat, stir-fry alone, steam, or soaked in hot water to extract juice as a substitute for soy sauce.
Fermented soybeans are made from black or yellow beans through washing, steaming, cooling, fermenting in jars, salting, and sun-drying. Classified by salt content into salty and unsalty types. Historically, fermented soybeans were first called "You Ji," because ancient people referred to soybeans as "Shu," and "You Ji" meant boiling soybeans and sealing them for fermentation. By the Qin Dynasty, the name was changed to "Dou Chi," a term still in use today.
The reason fermented soybeans are beloved is not only for their delicious taste but also their rich nutrition—containing abundant protein, fat, calcium, phosphorus, iron, cobalt, selenium, molybdenum, thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and other trace elements. Tests prove that the nutritional value of fermented soybeans is nearly equivalent to beef: protein content is 39.3% (beef: 22.7%), fat content is 8.2% (beef: 4.9%).
Research confirms that fermented soybeans contain 40 times more cobalt than wheat, beneficial for preventing coronary heart disease; 50 times more molybdenum than wheat; and selenium levels exceeding even high-selenium foods like garlic and onions. Both molybdenum and selenium possess powerful anticancer properties. Fermented soybeans also contain large amounts of urokinase, which dissolves blood clots, effectively preventing cerebral thrombosis, improving cerebral blood flow, and helping prevent senile dementia.
In traditional Chinese medicine, fermented soybeans are commonly used to treat excessive phlegm, chest tightness, vomiting, indigestion, memory decline, and drunkenness.
Li Shizhen, the great Ming Dynasty pharmacist, analyzed: "Black beans are neutral in nature; when processed into fermented soybeans, they become warm. After steaming and heating, they can rise and disperse. With green onion, they induce sweating; with salt, they cause vomiting; with alcohol, they treat wind; with garlic, they stop bleeding; when fried, they stop sweating—similar to the mechanism of Ephedra root." Modern medicine believes fermented soybeans have the effects of releasing exterior, clearing heat, promoting eruption, and detoxifying, suitable for wind-heat headache, chest tightness, vomiting, excessive phlegm, and restlessness.