Few ingredients bring as much immediate, show-stopping flavor to a dish as fish sauce does. It's sweet, salty, fishy, and funky all at once, a prismatic tsunami of flavor. But...what is fish sauce? We've all had it at some point or another whether we knew it or not—pad thai, anyone?—but that doesn't mean we know what's in it.
Well...fish, actually. Fish sauce lives up to the name. It does, as advertised, derive most of its flavor from fish, but you don't just smack a fish around and out plops a bottle of fish sauce. The real flavor comes from the process of fermenting fish for anywhere from a couple months to a few years. Small fish like anchovies are coated in salt and packed in large barrels to hang out. The natural bacterias start to break down the fish, producing a briny, fishy, savory liquid. That, friends, is fish sauce.
Fermentation has been used for thousands of years to develop flavor in anything from fish to meat to beans to vegetables. Many cultures use or have used a fermented fish sauce, from the Greeks to the Chinese, but we most commonly associate it with Southeast Asian cooking. It provides one of the driving flavors in dishes like larb, Vietnamese marinated meats, green papaya salad, and stir-fries, as well as pad thai.
We love the flavor of fish sauce for its umami, the earthy, savory flavor field that makes things like mushrooms, roasted tomatoes, and soy sauce taste so complex and crave-able. There’s a distinct, pungent fishiness to the sauce, sure, but that flavor is flanked by a salty, briny, caramel-y sweetness. It’s an ingredient that gives you a little bit of everything when thrown into marinades, stir-fries, and salad dressings, and it's just as useful in non-Asian cooking too. A little fish sauce can boost salty, savory flavor in sautéed greens, pastas, roast chicken, or broths. Generally speaking, we're down to experiment with a dash of fish sauce whenever we would otherwise add salt. It’s aggressively flavorful though, so be sure to add just a bit at a time and taste as you go. A little goes a long way.
