I'm pretty close taste-wise to deconstructing the ingredient ratio for Annie Chun's udon soup (sold at Trader Joe's). Ok, so what's in the soup is printed on the container which reads: naturally brewed soy sauce, shitake mushroom, sea vegetable, evaporated cane juice, rice wine, and yeast extract. When you pour it out of its packet, it's a dark liquid with no dangly bits and isn't murky. So, the sea vegetable is probably a standard grade seaweed like kelp or kombu; both of which are common to asian soups.
I suppose I really don't have a reason for doing this other than it's a personal quest this year to make homemade udon noodles and a good soup base to go with it. Sea vegetable and shitake mushroom exists in the Annie Chun recipe as a dashi. The yeast extract won't make it into my soup base recipe since it's pretty much MSG.
A basic dashi recipe is that you take a dried ingredient and rehydrate it with water, usually by boiling it until the ingredient softens. The reserve liquid is the dashi and is used in soups and sauces.
A lot of meat/vegetable/potsticker dipping sauces will call for a 2:1:1 ratio of soy sauce, vinegar/wine, water.
This might be as easy as:
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp rice wine
1 tbsp dashi.
Adding sugar to a sauce is generally to taste by its maker, so this recipe would probably include no more than 1 tsp of unbleached cane sugar.
