Fish Sauce

Well as I grew up in a Vietnamese-Chinese household, fish sauce was like having salt & pepper on the table. It smells awful but in a good way, very salt, very umami. Most people are familiar with soy sauce and I tend to use it in a similar fashion, a teaspoon here and there will amp up a marinade or sauce, I also like to use it anywhere Worcestershire sauce is used, it has similar qualities.

It's most familiar form for most western eaters is the base for the dipping sauce that fresh garden rolls come with. Mix it up with a bit of sambal olek (garlic chili paste), sugar, and lime juice and you have yourself a tasty condiment for just about anything.

Also check this out here: http://vietworldkitchen.typepad.com/blog/2008/11/fish-sauce-buying-guide.html

She has a great vietnamese cookbook that is my go to for recreating my childhood.

borgech

Yes, it adds a huge amount of umami. Think parmeggiano flavor, but better. My favorite brand is Squid Brand, and I use it quite often. Some of my favorite uses:

Add to blue cheese dressing

Add to Sriracha + mayonnaise dressing

Makes a great addition to pickling brines

Add to ground meat before making hamburgers

Add to ragus

Add to broth for cooking risotto or red lentils

I am sure I will think of more uses as this discussion progresses!

I've been conditioned to buy 3 crabs brand but I would taste your way through the different varieties. Some are a bit more salty than umami and others are less aggressive. I think squid brand is probably the most widely available brand that i've seen in the regular grocery stores though.

Jack_Mayer_85396

I'll throw in a recommendation for Red Boat brand fish sauce. Its sort of like anchovies, if you leave it out you sense that something is missing ... I just recently tried adding it to ground beef for burgers, really nice! And I'm going to try the tip for "dry-aging" steaks with it and some blue cheese and some umami paste.

Tim_Sutherland_52834

If you are not use to it, start in small batches. Many years ago I followed an Asian recipe and I was heavy handed with the fish sauce - the smell of fish in a chicken dish scarred me for a few years. I don't know what the LD50 for fish sauce is but I must have been close to it.

Fish sauce addict here.

I use at least a touch of fish sauce anywhere it's compatible......in almost anything savory.

I also make "fish salt" and use that a lot....sea salt, mashed anchovies packed in salt and fish sauce...combine and let dry.

~Martin

"I just recently tried adding it to ground beef for burgers, really nice!"

Yeah, it's great in burgers. I also use it in my sausages and the like.

~Martin

In Roman times, garum (fish sauce) was the condiment of choice because of the myriad taste-enhancing amino acids and umami compounds you'll find in this savory liquid. Indeed, the oldest bioreactors I know of are old Roman stone pits used for making garum.

But garum, like fish sauce today, came in a variety of forms, some more expensive than others. Garum, made by fermenting salted mackerel and filtering the resulting liquid that was exuded, was favored by the rich. Tuna yielded muria, a similar concoction for the slightly less wealthy. Liquamen was the poor man’s sauce, made from the blood and guts of whatever fish people happened to be throwing away. The pungent aromas and savory tastes of bagoong from the Philippines and nam pla from Thailand make them the closest modern kin to garum. The Red Boat fish sauce, which I like a lot, is probably the closest that I know of to true garum.

It would be interesting—and very pungent—to try making a variety of fish sauces.

Some of the colaturas are pretty good, but expensive and sometimes hard to find.

~Martin

borgech

@Chris thanks for sharing, that's an awesome history!

I was wondering if the addition of pure glutamate (without the sodium) would yield the same savory flavor, or is the sodium molecule necessary??

Glutamate is the ionic species that you want, but glutamate is not the only savory tasting component in something as complex as fish sauce. Their are myriad of peptide fragments and amino acids that all interact to create the unique flavor. And, of course, there are also the pungent aroma molecules that you smell rather than taste. So, no, the sodium is not necessary, but glutamate on its own won't give you glorious fish sauce either.

borgech

@Chris. Thanks! My idea is that purified glutamate for cell culture is clear, and if one hypothetically wanted to add some savory notes to cocktails (probably mezcal and bourbon based drinks), a few drops of pure glutamate could do the trick...

Jack_Mayer_85396

@Chris, thanks for the history lesson, fascinating! Wasn't the garum used to mask off flavors in many of the dishes of the time?

I'm not an expert in Roman culinary history—if anyone here is, please speak up—but I suspect that if you were wealthy, you ate fresh food. If you weren't than pungent liquamen might have been able to make food more pleasant to eat than it otherwise would have been.

"Wasn't the garum used to mask off flavors in many of the dishes of the time?"

I've read that, but there's a lot of comflicting information when it comes to garum.

I do think it's safe to say that there were many types with much different flavors.

Here's a bit of interesting info I ran across while doing some research some time ago.

Source: Around the Roman Table: Food and Feasting in Ancient Rome by Patrick Faas

~Martin

Jack_Mayer_85396

Fascinating ... Thanks @DDF!

@Martin — Thanks for sharing that excerpt. Even better info than what I had. So, should we have a prepare a garum competition? Centrifuges optional?

Step 1: dig a hole

Tim_Sutherland_52834

We will need more than two weeks for the competition though.

Fish guts three months in the Texas sun should have a nice aroma.

ParkerCook_66639

Just orderd a bottle of Red Boat. I can't wait to experiment with it!

Dean_41768

Hey ParkerCook

A good easy and delicious recipe that'd go well with Fish sauce is a Filipino beef dish called 'Bulalo'(Beef Bone Marrow stew). A sample recipe can be found here: http://norecipes.com/blog/bulalo-recipe/

I love putting tonnes of black pepper in the stew and plantain bananas. Savoy Cabbage gives a beautiful earthy tone to the dish and pairs very well with the corn cob and plantains. The dipping sauce issue here is fish sauce and cumquat juice. You'd eat this dish with plain jasmine rice.

robert.c.brown15

Hey Guys,

I have Red Boat fish sauce and was planning on making burgers tonight and using some of it. Any idea of how much to use? I don't know exact weight of the burgers as my girlfriend bought the fresh pre-made ones from Whole Foods with Blue Cheese in them (and bacon and cheddar ones too, not sure which one I'm going to make yet). I'm just going to "un-make" the patties and add the sauce and then re-form the patties. Each patty is around 3 to 4 inches across and 3/4 to 1 inch thick right now.

Thank you and look forward to hearing from you!