My mother kept her sauces, oils, and vinegars in a deep cupboard next to her stove—the kind you’d have to squat to see at eye level. Lined with both contact paper and a paper towel, it carried an assortment of half-empty bottles, their twisty tops often hanging by a thread: multiple kinds of soy sauce—known as ganjang in Korean—a canteen of toasted sesame oil, glass vials of rice vinegar and mirin, and, of course, the sticky bottle of fish sauce.
By the time I was 10, I knew my way around the kitchen well enough to make myself a bowl of rice with some soy sauce and sesame oil (still one of my favorite snacks). And although I was unfamiliar with how to use the vinegars and rice wines my mother kept, they looked harmless enough. The fish sauce, however, was pungent and smelled like, well, fish, and I steered clear of it until I was far more adept at cooking. Having never seen Omma use it, I had no idea where this powerful sauce fit into the foods she and my grandmothers prepared for our family.
In Korea fish sauce is usually made of fermented anchovies. Indeed, the preparation of fish sauce in Korea is similar to how kimchi is prepared—just add salt and time. Fish sauce is typically a nonnegotiable ingredient when making cabbage kimchi—it imparts an intense flavor that pairs perfectly with the pickled cabbage, while the bacteria in the fermented anchovies facilitate faster fermentation of the vegetable. Given how one tablespoon of fish sauce can inject massive amounts of flavor, however, it’s no wonder that fish sauce is a component in not just kimchi but a number of banchan and even stews.
Take, for example, gamja tang, a stew traditionally made with pork and potatoes. Many recipes of this classic Korean comfort dish call for fish sauce. Not only does it infuse the stew with the rich piquancy of the sea, fish sauce also enhances all the other flavors that combine to create a powerful and satisfying broth.
Although I eventually grew confident enough in the kitchen to start adding fish sauce to my own dishes, it wasn’t until I started trying to veganize fish sauce for my cookbook that I discovered all the different kinds of fish sauce (including the kind used most often in Korean cooking) and its multifaceted utility in cooking. So this presents a challenge for vegan cooks: How can you create a fish sauce that does all these things, without using any actual fish?
First, start with something that is already fermented. Enter ganjang, or soy sauce. (In fact, it’s easy to mix up ganjang and fish sauce when you’re severely congested and can’t read the labels, because they look identical.) Soy sauce is essentially the leftover liquid that is created from fermented soybeans, known as doenjang. Soy sauce is used in a number of Korean dishes to help with pickling and fermentation (for example, pickled perilla leaves), and therefore it’s a natural starting point for vegan fish sauce.
