# Fish sauce **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [November 24, 2011, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954 "2011-11-24T04:08:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 4:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/1 "2011-11-24T04:08:26Z")
Does it taste fishy to you? Just sort of like weak soy sauce to me. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/2 "2011-11-24T04:11:29Z")
Not like soy sauce. It’s usually kind of sweet when I have it. Of course, Worcestershire sauce is technically a fish sauce. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/3 "2011-11-24T04:16:17Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > Of course, Worcestershire sauce is technically a fish sauce. 😉 Yeah, but it ranks right down there with marmite or however you spell it. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/4 "2011-11-24T05:00:57Z")
Worcestershire sauce does have anchovies but the overwhelming taste is tamarind. Fish sauce doesn’t taste fishy to me. Umami and salt. It smells appalling when you cook it on a high heat, but the taste is worth it. By the way in my Thai cookery course I was told you should match it 1:1 with lime juice. Or rather, if you ever use lime juice you should match it 1:1 with fish sauce, but you can use fish sauce on its own. You can’t cook lime juice. Finally don’t keep it in the fridge as it crystallizes. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/5 "2011-11-24T05:14:00Z")
Depends on the brand. I bought a bottle at a Whole Foods knockoff, and it tasted mostly like syrup. I bought a bottle at an Asian market, and people three blocks away knew when I opened the bottle. That stuff was _pungent_. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 5:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/6 "2011-11-24T05:28:23Z")
> [@jjimm](#): > > Fish sauce doesn’t taste fishy to me. Umami and salt. It smells appalling when you cook it on a high heat, but the taste is worth it. > > By the way in my Thai cookery course I was told you should match it 1:1 with lime juice. Both of those might apease the New and Improved Mrs. Plant, in whose good graces I wish to stay. Left Hand, you’ve obviously not seen the fish sauce at Bubba’s Oriental Grocery. The fish sauce has…stuff…floating around in it. Looks like egg drop soup. NAIMP says it is fish heads and scales. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/7 "2011-11-24T06:11:01Z")
Tastes almost nothing like soy to me. Definitely has a funk to it that soy doesn’t. I far prefer fish sauce to soy for generic stir fry applications. Never noticed any sweetness to the fish sauce brand I use (Squid), as opposed to soy, which does have a slight sweetness to my palate. Oyster sauces, though, are definitely sweet. Some fish sauces get downright nasty in flavor (there’s a Filipino brand of fish sauce I once bought that I actually had to throw out, it tasted completely of ammonia and salt. I like a good deal of funk in my food, but that was beyond what I was used to.) Fish sauce and soy sauce taste almost nothing alike to me, except they’re both salty umami bombs. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/8 "2011-11-24T06:15:34Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > Definitely has a funk to it that soy doesn’t… Never noticed any sweetness to the fish sauce brand I use… I’ve used it straight out of the bottle at Vietnamese restaurants. Definite funk. Didn’t like it. Typically though, the restaurant serves fish sauce with the meal. They ‘doctor’ it, making it better than right out of the bottle, and it’s usually a little sweet tasting to me. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/9 "2011-11-24T06:23:52Z")
> [@Johnny\_L.A](#): > > I’ve used it straight out of the bottle at Vietnamese restaurants. Definite funk. Didn’t like it. Typically though, the restaurant serves fish sauce with the meal. They ‘doctor’ it, making it better than right out of the bottle, and it’s usually a little sweet tasting to me. Are you talking about the fish sauce that’s doctored with lime, sugar, maybe even vinegar? Sometimes garlic or birds chiles? (It can be any of a combination of things.) That’s [Nước chấm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C6%B0%E1%BB%9Bc_ch%E1%BA%A5m). ---
**Author:** ![ProbablyProcrastinating](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/57b2e6/32.png) [@ProbablyProcrastinating](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ProbablyProcrastinating)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/10 "2011-11-24T06:42:55Z")
:blink: I thought it was just called that because you are supposed to put it on fish. How interesting. ---
**Author:** ![mac\_bolan00](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b3f665/32.png) [@mac\_bolan00](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mac_bolan00)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 7:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/11 "2011-11-24T07:12:49Z")
4 years here in the philippines. westerners can take in most filipino foods, even murdered duck embryos still inside the egg. they take to the fish sauce and unripe green mangoes last. strangely, it was the first i got used to. for those interested, you make fish sauce by taking a fresh catch of silver-striped anchovies, salt them immediately, put them in large earthen pots, and then bury them in the ground for almost a month, much like the koreans age and ferment kimchi. what comes out is fermented fish paste colored reddish brown which, when filtered, produces the clear golden sauce you see. i got used to a bean dish which is a lot like beans and ham hocks except that one uses dry white stringbeans and flavored towrds the end with the fish paste. it’s three killers in one: salt, urea and cholesterol. yummy! ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/12 "2011-11-24T15:14:34Z")
> [@ProbablyProcrastinating](#): > > :blink: > > I thought it was just called that because you are supposed to put it on fish. How interesting. I was just going to ask you to unsubscribe before you found out, but tragically, I am too late. Sorry. “Funk” is a good term. ---
**Author:** ![hogarth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hogarth/32/1773_2.png) [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2011, 3:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/13 "2011-11-24T15:17:00Z")
I’ve had fishy fish sauce and non-fishy fish sauce. Usually it’s not very fishy, in my experience. But maybe that’s because I’m not going to “authentic” restaurants. ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 8:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/14 "2011-11-25T08:57:35Z")
> [@hogarth](#): > > I’ve had fishy fish sauce and non-fishy fish sauce. Usually it’s not very fishy, in my experience. But maybe that’s because I’m not going to “authentic” restaurants. Not at all. The authentic SEA stuff (nước mắm from Vietnam or nam pla from Thailand) isn’t fishy - it’s just made out of fish. ---
**Author:** ![mac\_bolan00](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b3f665/32.png) [@mac\_bolan00](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mac_bolan00)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 9:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/15 "2011-11-25T09:02:03Z")
non-fishy ones are either watered down, or have things added. real fish sauce has to be fishy, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 10:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/16 "2011-11-25T10:52:45Z")
> [@mac\_bolan00](#): > > non-fishy ones are either watered down, or have things added. real fish sauce has to be fishy, IMO. Maybe it’s different in the Philippines but the top-of-the-range stuff in Thailand is pungent, yes, but doesn’t smell like fish in the usual sense of the word. ---
**Author:** ![Rysdad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7cd45c/32.png) [@Rysdad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysdad)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2011, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/17 "2011-11-25T23:38:15Z")
My son and I ate a Vietnamese restaurant. They had several condiments on the table. I used the hot sauce and some vinegar. After I was done with the meal, I tasted a tiny little bit of the fish sauce. Good thing I waited. I can now say that there definitely is a taste worse than cilantro. Fish sauce tastes just like what I imagine shit tastes like. Literally, and I do mean literally. I have since refused to eat in any restaurant that uses or provides fish sauce. My justification is that, if the cooks think that something (anything) that tastes like fish sauce is an appropriate item to add to food, then I won’t eat there, since , if they’d add that, what wouldn’t they add? I refuse to give them the chance to do so. ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [November 26, 2011, 1:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/18 "2011-11-26T01:46:45Z")
**Rysdad** , some things taste different raw vs cooked. Many people like it raw but I can see why most westerners might not. However fish sauce is a constituent part of practically all Thai food, and most South East Asian curries, and though it smells bad when cooking, you can’t even taste it when it’s been cooked - but it adds saltiness and a rich umami to the food. I’d say give it a go (you might already be giving it a go without realising it) and just avoid it raw. ---
**Author:** ![Rysdad](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7cd45c/32.png) [@Rysdad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysdad)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/19 "2011-11-27T16:25:46Z")
I could be ingesting it without knowing it after it’s been cooked. I dunno. I typically don’t eat any kind of seafood, though (yuck), so it would be hard to slip some by me. I do enjoy some Indian/Ceylonese curries (sans cilantro), and there was some Singaporean chicken curry that was great, but I’m leaving the rest alone. Outta be some restaurants that cater to us super tasters. No cilantro, fish sauce, asparagus, grapefruit, green tea, etc., allowed. ---
**Author:** ![Ellen\_Cherry](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ellen_cherry/32/3600_2.png) [@Ellen\_Cherry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellen_Cherry)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2011, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954/20 "2011-11-27T18:03:10Z")
Moving from IMHO to Cafe Society. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/fish-sauce/603954.md?page=2)