Fish sauce is one of the fundamental ingredients in Thai cuisine. Like salt in western cuisines, and soy sauce for Chinese and Japanese cuisines, fish sauce is utilised to add a peculiar flavor distinctive to Thai cooking. There’s no Thai peculiarity kitchen that doesn’t have fish sauce in the cabinet, and very few recipes that don’t utilize it in one form or another.

Fish sauce is, in the most simple of terms, the essence of fish. Derived from the leftovers of fermented fish, it can have a rather fishy flavor or more subtle tones. The style of fish sauce is dependent on how long the fish is permitted to ferment. As a rule, the lengthier that it has fermented, the less it will taste like fish. High quality fish sauce has light undertones of fish also as other flavors. Younger fish sauce will taste strongly of fish.

Fish sauce is normally thick and brown in color, a result of being fermented for nine months to a year, on average. It is either added to water or oils to make a dipping sauce, or directly added to meat and vegetables while they cook.

While it’s most commonly utilised in Thai cuisine, it has found a place in other cuisines, such as Lao, Cambodian, Filipino and Vietnamese. It doesn’t tend to be utilized in Western cuisines oftentimes, as there’s less of a reliance on seafood and ensuring all catches of fish are utilized.

Fish sauce originally began to be utilised so that the little fish with little commercial value wouldnt go to waste. As the poorer people of Thailand were likewise resourceful, they found that the fermentation process had the benefit of this sort of sauce. As it grew in popularity, little fish were kept so that they could be utilized in fish sauce.

Depending on district, the ingredients of fish sauce may transform. Some areas will only utilise one specified sort of fish to make fish sauce. Others will employ any fish that doesn’t have commercial value. These variances allow for fish sauces to have different flavors and be partnered better with sure dishes. When you are selecting which fish sauce to utilise, you should experiment with the various types, as you can alter the last flavor just by being selective on which sauce you use.

Fish sauce may be purchased by the bottle in numerous stores that carry Asian goods.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Fish. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.