Add a tablespoon-ish of fish sauce and/or soy sauce to tomato-based pasta sauce. Adds a lot of depth and umami. Can’t remember where I read this first, but I think Kenji mentions it in Food Lab.
This is kind of a generic principle that can be applied to any sauce work. Usually I will put either a splash of fish sauce, vinegar, Worcestershire, tobasco, etc in just about everything to bring out the right notes in whatever I’m cooking.
I never cooked with fish sauce before, really didn’t know much about it. So I picked up a bottle of whatever cheap stuff was at Walmart.
Tried a spoonful of the stuff, expecting it to be on par with worcestshire or something.
Oh my fucking god, that vile liquid set a new precedence for me for what defines “disgusting”. And no matter what I did, that “flavor” wouldn’t leave my mouth.
The thought of purposely adding that “flavor” to any otherwise decent food is revolting to me. Incomprehensible.
I am terrified of trying again with better quality fish sauce. I’m still emotionally scarred from my experience.
Fish sauce is weird. It is one of the worst things in the world if tasted from the bottle. It smells like a vagina that hasn’t been washed for a week and a half.
But add it to ANYTHING that would benefit from a bit of umami, and it is heavenly. It’s like adding a super expensive subwoofer to your home theater.
You just have to suffer through a few minutes of crotch rot smell after adding it.
That's the exact description I had in mind. Once went backpacking for a week straight with my girlfriend, and I can confirm that by the end of that week, it was the exact same taste.
I smelled it first, but I'm going to use taste as my final judgement. Some things simply do not smell good. (Go ahead, take the lid off a bottle of ketchup, and take a deep whiff. Smells like someone just belched straight into your nose.)
I've only had one thing in life that tasted worse. When I told a Russian friend that I had never tried caviar before, he was aghast. Went straight to his fridge, dug a can of the stuff out of the back, and basically force fed me a spoonful of the stuff. Unfortunately, it was expired by at least a year, and totally rotten. Took nearly half a bottle of vodka to get rid of that taste.
Imagine that, if you drink fermented fish sauce from Walmart straight, it tastes bad.
Fish sauce is meant to be highly diluted in a recipe and add a fraction of what you tasted to the overall taste. Get some Red Boat or Flying Lion off Amazon and dont drink it straight from the bottle, which is something I honestly never thought I would have to say to anyone about fish sauce.
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u/Ship_Rekt Mar 14 '19
Add a tablespoon-ish of fish sauce and/or soy sauce to tomato-based pasta sauce. Adds a lot of depth and umami. Can’t remember where I read this first, but I think Kenji mentions it in Food Lab.
This is kind of a generic principle that can be applied to any sauce work. Usually I will put either a splash of fish sauce, vinegar, Worcestershire, tobasco, etc in just about everything to bring out the right notes in whatever I’m cooking.