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kindkitThis is the first in what I plan to be an occasional series about my experiences as I learn about Asian cuisines (particularly Indian, Thai, and Vietnamese) and their ingredients.
Before I get down to it, a little background about me, cooking, and eating. I'm a white US-ian from a working class (and often unemployed-class) background who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Minnesota, a state in the north central part of the US. Minnesota is somewhat unfairly notorious as the home of Bland. The Europeans who settled there were largely Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, and Eastern European, with a lot of Irish in some parts of the state. There's still a considerable population of Native Americans, too, who live mostly on geographically isolated reservations or in the larger cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul (technically two cities that blur into one another) and Duluth. Until about the late 1970s there was very little immigration of people from anywhere else, but there's been a lot since then: a group of Hmong refugees who resettled in Minnesota after the Vietnam war were among the first, followed by other southeast Asians, then groups of Somali refugees, and starting around 2000 a big wave of people from Mexico and Latin America. These people still mostly live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but they're moving out into small towns too, and the whole state is becoming more culturally diverse. In my childhood, however, and especially in rural northern Minnesota where I grew up, this wasn't happening yet.
My own background is maybe a little different than most. My ancestry is Swedish on my father's side and mostly Scottish on my mother's, but my parents divorced when I was a baby, and I grew up with a stepfather who was Native American. We lived on the reservation, and my stepfather hunted and fished (as well as working a poorly paid job in a lumber mill, until he became disabled in a workplace accident) to help us survive. And northern Minnesota is wild rice country: each fall my parents gathered wild rice from the lakes, which by the way is very hard work, sold some for cash and kept some for our own use. (Incidentally, if you eat "wild rice," be aware that it's now mostly paddy grown by commercial producers, and if it is wild grown and hand harvested, the harvesters only receive a fraction of what you pay. Try to buy fair trade wild rice or rice that's produced by a Native-controlled cooperative.)
This means that my childhood foods included, besides wild rice, game such as venison (we called it "deer meat," and "venison" still seems like a slightly foreign term to me), rabbit, and partridge, and freshly caught fish. It also included lots of canned foods (we received government food assistance, mostly the kind called "commodities" which is food that's given directly to you rather than vouchers you use to buy the food of your choice, because you get a lot more commodities than food stamps will stretch to) such as canned chicken and beef, canned soups, canned vegetables and fruits, powdered and canned milk, and things like peanut butter, shortening, and flour. Once a month or so we might have TV dinners, frozen fried chicken, frozen pizzas, and that kind of thing as a treat. Also about once a month or so, when we went into town (the nearest substantial town with a halfway decent grocery store was 50 miles away) to do our shopping, we'd eat out. Mostly it was fast food, but occasionally, if it was just my mom and me (my stepfather and brother didn't like it), we'd go to the Chinese Dragon restaurant.
I can see now that it was absolutely the most depressing kind of Amercanized faux-Chinese food: egg drop soup, sweet and sour pork, fried rice, the works. But it was different from what we usually ate, and I loved it.
My mom didn't really like cooking and, probably as a consequence, wasn't a great cook. Admittedly there's not much you can do with what she had to work with, but my memory is that we ate a lot of simple, repetitive meals: meat with boiled potatoes, fried fish with boiled potatoes or, if we were lucky, French fries, wild rice hot dish with meat, bean soup with ham, and a dreadful "goulash" of hamburger, canned tomatoes, and macaroni. We seldom had fresh vegetables, because we couldn't afford them, they wouldn't keep given that we could only shop once a month, and it was difficult to garden in the clay-ey soil and cold climate where we lived.
When I was fourteen, I decided to become a semi-vegetarian (I ate fish but no other meat), and my mom quite reasonably refused to cook separate meals for me. That was when I began to really learn how to cook. I'd cooked a bit before then, helping out, but as I did more cooking I started to be more interested in it. My cooking wasn't adventurous--honestly I can't really remember what I made in most cases apart from tuna casserole--but it gave me a few skills. I also learned to bake simple bread and cakes, though I never did learn the secret of my mother's much-admired fry bread (the only dish she was really good at), and now she's gone so I never will.
I went to college, leaving Minnesota for the east coast and discovering things like bagels and knishes and drinking wine for the first time; I went to France for a year studying abroad, where I was alas too poor to eat in restaurants and too shy and too young to go to farmers' markets to try the wonderful cheeses etc., but where I dated an Algerian man and ate coucous and brik á l'oeuf; I went back to Minnesota for graduate school and was too busy to do more than the most basic cooking; I got a job in Washington DC and spent six years too depressed, I think, to do much cooking.
Then I moved back to Minnesota and was unemployed for two and a half years, and that was the start of my coming back seriously to cooking. I didn't have great facilities--I only had one small pot and one skillet, the sink was usually filled with my housemate's unwashed dishes, and there was hardly any room to work. On the plus side, Minneapolis/St. Paul had by this time an established community of people originally from Southeast Asia, and a number of grocery stores that catered to them. I began, tentatively, trying to reproduce the flavors I'd liked in restaurants. I had small encouraging successes, and so I kept on and branched out and I'm still exploring and learning.
I'm not an expert at cooking, and I'm especially not an expert at any of the Asian cuisines that I (try to) cook in. I read cookbooks and cooking blogs and I play along at home, but that's all. And even a single cuisine is so immensely complicated that it would be a lifetime's task (and for somewhere like India or China, much more than a lifetime's) to be an expert in it. I welcome correction from anyone more knowledgeable than me. These posts, I hope, are more about opening up conversations than about me pontificating, and they're geared towards other people like me, who may not have a background with these cuisines but are starting to explore them, or thinking about it, or are just curious.
So, at last we come to fish sauce.
This was one of the first Southeast Asian ingredients I learned to use, because it's difficult to cook Thai and Vietnamese food without it. But it took me a long time to get around to trying, because cookbooks for westerners make it sound scary. It's made from fish that are salted, packed in barrels, and fermented in the sun, cookbooks helpfully tell you. It's stinky, but don't let that put you off!
Well, of course that puts people off. And if you go into the fish sauce section of a well-stocked Asian grocery, you'll see a bewildering variety of bottles, often with little or no English on the labels. Some of the bottles contain a clear whiskey-colored liquid, but others are filled with a grey-brown puree that frankly does not look very nice. (The pureed ones are actually a different ingredient which I haven't tried, though I probably will eventually.)
The truth is, fish sauce is delicious and it doesn't stink. I've poured out a little measure to sip and taste as I write this, so I can describe it more easily, and the best word I can use for its smell is delicious. Of course, I say this as someone who loves fish sauce, but honestly I liked it from the start and I never thought it stank.
I think the best western comparison to the smell of fermented fish products is the smell of real traditionally-made cheese. These foods may actually have microorganisms in common, although I don't know that for sure. The fish sauce I have before me (Flying Lion brand "phu quoc") has a rich, salty-sweet aroma that's a bit like a really good aged cheddar, plus a fermented tang that's more like a soft, flavorful ripened cheese such as a Taleggio. But it's not as strong as Taleggio (which I know from experience can stink up your entire car in transport); my nose has to be within a couple of inches of the fish sauce to smell it.
The taste is mostly pure umami goodness (yes, I really like fish sauce) with a bit of sweetness, a lot of salt, and a bit of tartness from the fermentation. It doesn't taste "fishy," in my opinion, not even in the good way that, say, smoked salmon is fishy. And one thing fish sauce definitely doesn't remind me of is salted anchovies, even though most fish sauce is made from anchovies. Anchovies are typically too strong for me except in small quantities as a flavoring (in e.g. puttanesca sauce), while fish sauce is one of my favorite flavors. *dips finger into fish sauce again and licks it off*
There are, however, variations in both taste and quality among fish sauces, which I'll address in a little bit.
Using Fish Sauce
If you want to try fish sauce for the first time, I recommend moderation. Maybe add a little to some stir-fried vegetables or shrimp, or use it instead of soy sauce in fried rice or fried noodles. Fish sauce goes beautifully with chiles and lime juice, so consider adding some chiles or chile paste (I have a weakness for Huy Fong brand chili garlic sauce, which is convenient, tasty, and readily available) and some lime juice at the end. Fish sauce can flavor just about any Thai or Vietnamese style dish. It's used in a lot of other cuisines as well, including Indonesian and Filipino, but I believe those areas have their own local fish sauce styles that I'm not familiar with.
If you want to experience fish sauce more directly, try it as a dipping sauce or a salad dressing. You can add sliced chiles and sliced shallots, plus sugar and lime juice to taste (and maybe a little water if you find it too strong) and dip spring rolls or batter-fried vegetables in it. This recipe for crispy okra with dipping sauce is heavenly and easy to make. Basically the same fish sauce preparation, perhaps without the shallots, can be used to dress cucumber salads (top with chopped roasted peanuts), papaya salads, etc. Dried shrimp are also excellent in these salads, but that's a post for another day.
Fish sauce is also, because of its umami quality, incredibly useful as a "secret ingredient" in western-style soups and sauces. If a dish is lacking a certain depth or complexity, a few drops of fish sauce can fix that. Obviously this won't work if you're cooking for people who don't eat fish, but otherwise it's worth a try.
Buying Fish Sauce
I think I've bought and consumed enough fish sauce, and read enough of other people's advice about it, that I can offer some suggestions.
The short version is: buy the most expensive one, in a glass bottle, that the store carries. Price is a pretty good indicator of quality.
The longer version is a little more complicated. The best fish sauces are said to be Vietnamese, but so far as I know, real Vietnamese fish sauce cannot be imported into the United States. It may be more readily available elsewhere. Most brands in Asian groceries in the US are Thai, although some try to grab the cachet of Vietnamese fish sauces, in particular by sticking the words "phu quoc" on the label. Phu Quoc is a island region of Vietnam that's famous for its fish sauce, so the name is used as a synonym for "first quality." I've read that if the label says "hon phu quoc," which means "island of Phu Quoc," it's a more genuine indication of a Vietnamese-style sauce. But I've never tasted a fish sauce so labelled, and since I've never had Vietnamese fish sauce I wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
The brand of fish sauce I currently have, Flying Lion "phu quoc" is actually not the brand I prefer. Both Flying Lion and Three Crabs brands, which are currently owned by the same company, used to be excellent and were recommended everywhere. Then the formula was changed. I don't know if there was a buyout or what, but they're now made in Hong Kong and contain ingredients like fructose and hydrolized vegetable protein. If you can manage it, try to buy fish sauce that contains only fish (which may be on the label as "anchovies" or "anchovy extract"), salt, and sugar.
Tiparos brand is highly recommended by some, highly scorned by others. It was the first commercial Thai brand of fish sauce (people used to make their own) so it's widely used, but I've heard mixed things about quality and I've never bought it myself.
My favorite brand is Golden Boy, although I'm seeing Tra Chang brand recommended a lot too and am curious to try it. Golden Boy isn't as easy to find as some other brands, which is why I have Flying Lion right now, but it can be bought online.
There's an interesting post here taste-testing various Thai fish sauce brands, including Golden Boy, Tra Chang, Tiparos, and Three Crabs.
Questions, comments, suggestions, recipes (yes please!) and corrections are welcome.
Next time: dried shrimp!
Before I get down to it, a little background about me, cooking, and eating. I'm a white US-ian from a working class (and often unemployed-class) background who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Minnesota, a state in the north central part of the US. Minnesota is somewhat unfairly notorious as the home of Bland. The Europeans who settled there were largely Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, and Eastern European, with a lot of Irish in some parts of the state. There's still a considerable population of Native Americans, too, who live mostly on geographically isolated reservations or in the larger cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul (technically two cities that blur into one another) and Duluth. Until about the late 1970s there was very little immigration of people from anywhere else, but there's been a lot since then: a group of Hmong refugees who resettled in Minnesota after the Vietnam war were among the first, followed by other southeast Asians, then groups of Somali refugees, and starting around 2000 a big wave of people from Mexico and Latin America. These people still mostly live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but they're moving out into small towns too, and the whole state is becoming more culturally diverse. In my childhood, however, and especially in rural northern Minnesota where I grew up, this wasn't happening yet.
My own background is maybe a little different than most. My ancestry is Swedish on my father's side and mostly Scottish on my mother's, but my parents divorced when I was a baby, and I grew up with a stepfather who was Native American. We lived on the reservation, and my stepfather hunted and fished (as well as working a poorly paid job in a lumber mill, until he became disabled in a workplace accident) to help us survive. And northern Minnesota is wild rice country: each fall my parents gathered wild rice from the lakes, which by the way is very hard work, sold some for cash and kept some for our own use. (Incidentally, if you eat "wild rice," be aware that it's now mostly paddy grown by commercial producers, and if it is wild grown and hand harvested, the harvesters only receive a fraction of what you pay. Try to buy fair trade wild rice or rice that's produced by a Native-controlled cooperative.)
This means that my childhood foods included, besides wild rice, game such as venison (we called it "deer meat," and "venison" still seems like a slightly foreign term to me), rabbit, and partridge, and freshly caught fish. It also included lots of canned foods (we received government food assistance, mostly the kind called "commodities" which is food that's given directly to you rather than vouchers you use to buy the food of your choice, because you get a lot more commodities than food stamps will stretch to) such as canned chicken and beef, canned soups, canned vegetables and fruits, powdered and canned milk, and things like peanut butter, shortening, and flour. Once a month or so we might have TV dinners, frozen fried chicken, frozen pizzas, and that kind of thing as a treat. Also about once a month or so, when we went into town (the nearest substantial town with a halfway decent grocery store was 50 miles away) to do our shopping, we'd eat out. Mostly it was fast food, but occasionally, if it was just my mom and me (my stepfather and brother didn't like it), we'd go to the Chinese Dragon restaurant.
I can see now that it was absolutely the most depressing kind of Amercanized faux-Chinese food: egg drop soup, sweet and sour pork, fried rice, the works. But it was different from what we usually ate, and I loved it.
My mom didn't really like cooking and, probably as a consequence, wasn't a great cook. Admittedly there's not much you can do with what she had to work with, but my memory is that we ate a lot of simple, repetitive meals: meat with boiled potatoes, fried fish with boiled potatoes or, if we were lucky, French fries, wild rice hot dish with meat, bean soup with ham, and a dreadful "goulash" of hamburger, canned tomatoes, and macaroni. We seldom had fresh vegetables, because we couldn't afford them, they wouldn't keep given that we could only shop once a month, and it was difficult to garden in the clay-ey soil and cold climate where we lived.
When I was fourteen, I decided to become a semi-vegetarian (I ate fish but no other meat), and my mom quite reasonably refused to cook separate meals for me. That was when I began to really learn how to cook. I'd cooked a bit before then, helping out, but as I did more cooking I started to be more interested in it. My cooking wasn't adventurous--honestly I can't really remember what I made in most cases apart from tuna casserole--but it gave me a few skills. I also learned to bake simple bread and cakes, though I never did learn the secret of my mother's much-admired fry bread (the only dish she was really good at), and now she's gone so I never will.
I went to college, leaving Minnesota for the east coast and discovering things like bagels and knishes and drinking wine for the first time; I went to France for a year studying abroad, where I was alas too poor to eat in restaurants and too shy and too young to go to farmers' markets to try the wonderful cheeses etc., but where I dated an Algerian man and ate coucous and brik á l'oeuf; I went back to Minnesota for graduate school and was too busy to do more than the most basic cooking; I got a job in Washington DC and spent six years too depressed, I think, to do much cooking.
Then I moved back to Minnesota and was unemployed for two and a half years, and that was the start of my coming back seriously to cooking. I didn't have great facilities--I only had one small pot and one skillet, the sink was usually filled with my housemate's unwashed dishes, and there was hardly any room to work. On the plus side, Minneapolis/St. Paul had by this time an established community of people originally from Southeast Asia, and a number of grocery stores that catered to them. I began, tentatively, trying to reproduce the flavors I'd liked in restaurants. I had small encouraging successes, and so I kept on and branched out and I'm still exploring and learning.
I'm not an expert at cooking, and I'm especially not an expert at any of the Asian cuisines that I (try to) cook in. I read cookbooks and cooking blogs and I play along at home, but that's all. And even a single cuisine is so immensely complicated that it would be a lifetime's task (and for somewhere like India or China, much more than a lifetime's) to be an expert in it. I welcome correction from anyone more knowledgeable than me. These posts, I hope, are more about opening up conversations than about me pontificating, and they're geared towards other people like me, who may not have a background with these cuisines but are starting to explore them, or thinking about it, or are just curious.
So, at last we come to fish sauce.
This was one of the first Southeast Asian ingredients I learned to use, because it's difficult to cook Thai and Vietnamese food without it. But it took me a long time to get around to trying, because cookbooks for westerners make it sound scary. It's made from fish that are salted, packed in barrels, and fermented in the sun, cookbooks helpfully tell you. It's stinky, but don't let that put you off!
Well, of course that puts people off. And if you go into the fish sauce section of a well-stocked Asian grocery, you'll see a bewildering variety of bottles, often with little or no English on the labels. Some of the bottles contain a clear whiskey-colored liquid, but others are filled with a grey-brown puree that frankly does not look very nice. (The pureed ones are actually a different ingredient which I haven't tried, though I probably will eventually.)
The truth is, fish sauce is delicious and it doesn't stink. I've poured out a little measure to sip and taste as I write this, so I can describe it more easily, and the best word I can use for its smell is delicious. Of course, I say this as someone who loves fish sauce, but honestly I liked it from the start and I never thought it stank.
I think the best western comparison to the smell of fermented fish products is the smell of real traditionally-made cheese. These foods may actually have microorganisms in common, although I don't know that for sure. The fish sauce I have before me (Flying Lion brand "phu quoc") has a rich, salty-sweet aroma that's a bit like a really good aged cheddar, plus a fermented tang that's more like a soft, flavorful ripened cheese such as a Taleggio. But it's not as strong as Taleggio (which I know from experience can stink up your entire car in transport); my nose has to be within a couple of inches of the fish sauce to smell it.
The taste is mostly pure umami goodness (yes, I really like fish sauce) with a bit of sweetness, a lot of salt, and a bit of tartness from the fermentation. It doesn't taste "fishy," in my opinion, not even in the good way that, say, smoked salmon is fishy. And one thing fish sauce definitely doesn't remind me of is salted anchovies, even though most fish sauce is made from anchovies. Anchovies are typically too strong for me except in small quantities as a flavoring (in e.g. puttanesca sauce), while fish sauce is one of my favorite flavors. *dips finger into fish sauce again and licks it off*
There are, however, variations in both taste and quality among fish sauces, which I'll address in a little bit.
If you want to try fish sauce for the first time, I recommend moderation. Maybe add a little to some stir-fried vegetables or shrimp, or use it instead of soy sauce in fried rice or fried noodles. Fish sauce goes beautifully with chiles and lime juice, so consider adding some chiles or chile paste (I have a weakness for Huy Fong brand chili garlic sauce, which is convenient, tasty, and readily available) and some lime juice at the end. Fish sauce can flavor just about any Thai or Vietnamese style dish. It's used in a lot of other cuisines as well, including Indonesian and Filipino, but I believe those areas have their own local fish sauce styles that I'm not familiar with.
If you want to experience fish sauce more directly, try it as a dipping sauce or a salad dressing. You can add sliced chiles and sliced shallots, plus sugar and lime juice to taste (and maybe a little water if you find it too strong) and dip spring rolls or batter-fried vegetables in it. This recipe for crispy okra with dipping sauce is heavenly and easy to make. Basically the same fish sauce preparation, perhaps without the shallots, can be used to dress cucumber salads (top with chopped roasted peanuts), papaya salads, etc. Dried shrimp are also excellent in these salads, but that's a post for another day.
Fish sauce is also, because of its umami quality, incredibly useful as a "secret ingredient" in western-style soups and sauces. If a dish is lacking a certain depth or complexity, a few drops of fish sauce can fix that. Obviously this won't work if you're cooking for people who don't eat fish, but otherwise it's worth a try.
I think I've bought and consumed enough fish sauce, and read enough of other people's advice about it, that I can offer some suggestions.
The short version is: buy the most expensive one, in a glass bottle, that the store carries. Price is a pretty good indicator of quality.
The longer version is a little more complicated. The best fish sauces are said to be Vietnamese, but so far as I know, real Vietnamese fish sauce cannot be imported into the United States. It may be more readily available elsewhere. Most brands in Asian groceries in the US are Thai, although some try to grab the cachet of Vietnamese fish sauces, in particular by sticking the words "phu quoc" on the label. Phu Quoc is a island region of Vietnam that's famous for its fish sauce, so the name is used as a synonym for "first quality." I've read that if the label says "hon phu quoc," which means "island of Phu Quoc," it's a more genuine indication of a Vietnamese-style sauce. But I've never tasted a fish sauce so labelled, and since I've never had Vietnamese fish sauce I wouldn't be able to tell anyway.
The brand of fish sauce I currently have, Flying Lion "phu quoc" is actually not the brand I prefer. Both Flying Lion and Three Crabs brands, which are currently owned by the same company, used to be excellent and were recommended everywhere. Then the formula was changed. I don't know if there was a buyout or what, but they're now made in Hong Kong and contain ingredients like fructose and hydrolized vegetable protein. If you can manage it, try to buy fish sauce that contains only fish (which may be on the label as "anchovies" or "anchovy extract"), salt, and sugar.
Tiparos brand is highly recommended by some, highly scorned by others. It was the first commercial Thai brand of fish sauce (people used to make their own) so it's widely used, but I've heard mixed things about quality and I've never bought it myself.
My favorite brand is Golden Boy, although I'm seeing Tra Chang brand recommended a lot too and am curious to try it. Golden Boy isn't as easy to find as some other brands, which is why I have Flying Lion right now, but it can be bought online.
There's an interesting post here taste-testing various Thai fish sauce brands, including Golden Boy, Tra Chang, Tiparos, and Three Crabs.
Questions, comments, suggestions, recipes (yes please!) and corrections are welcome.
Next time: dried shrimp!
no subject
Date: 2013-11-23 05:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-25 01:37 am (UTC)Anyway, yeah, I'm glad that my sense that fish sauce isn't "fishy" also matches your experience. My sense of smell can be a little weird, so I'm never entirely sure how much to trust that my own perceptions align with other people's.
(Horror story: I think the weirdness of my sense of smell came about because about 7 or 8 years ago I got a terrible sinus infection that first knocked out my sense of smell entirely, then caused everything to smell of dead fish. For about two months. Including my toothpaste. Fun times. Everything went mostly back to normal, but sometimes I do seem to perceive some smells differently from other people.)
no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 05:09 am (UTC)Some of them smell very strongly fishy to me (to the point I can't use them because they'll make entire pots of things smell of old fish), but others (like the brand I used in my dinner tonight) are nice. I wish I could figure out what it was that made the difference.
no subject
Date: 2013-11-27 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-11-28 02:19 am (UTC)I should note that the most recent one that I thought made everything smell of old fish, my husband loved, and thought I couldn't possibly be serious about not eating my duck curry. But it actually put me off duck curry entirely, and I haven't eaten it since, that's how bad it was! Clearly that was some kind of highly individual reaction, since one of us LOVED it.
no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 10:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-11 11:33 am (UTC)It may still be a delicious sauce, but anything with vinegar and spices in it won't taste the same as Thai fish sauce, which is made entirely from salted, fermented fish. So if you substitute it for fish sauce, you're going to get somewhat different-tasting results.
I don't think fish sauce is easy to find in supermarkets (outside of the countries where it's commonly used, of course). I have to go to a specialty store to buy mine, and many people have to order it online. If you do want to try the real thing and feel like going through the bother, maybe try that? And if possible, try to get Golden Boy or another recommended brand.
no subject
Date: 2015-05-15 12:29 pm (UTC)The brand is "Thai heritage". I haven't tried it yet (literally brought the bottle today) but I'm excited to use it. It was very cheap (1.25 € for a 200ml bottle). I just opened the bottle to try it on some stir-fry rice I had left over.
The smell is repulsive - but the taste is completely different. Not fishy at all.