Posted on 02/07/2020 9:20:48 AM PST by SunkenCiv
When 1st hubby was in the AF, we were friends with a couple-the wife was Japanese-once when she and I were sampling each others’ ethnic foods, I gave her some marinated and grilled rattlesnake and she gave me a container of some brownish gooey stuff-fermented soybean sauce-explaining that it is made by cooking the soybeans in saki, putting in a pottery container and allowing it to ferment (she used the words-”you let it rot”) for 2 weeks. I thanked her-it smelled like sour milk left in the sun-I didn’t eat any, but my husband loved the stuff...
I think that she gave some Natto to you.
And here I thought some British dude invented Worcestershire sauce just a few hundred years ago....
It was sealed and it was ceramic tile... mam nem is insidious. A wiff and you are heaving and retching. A drop in a gallon of chili and you have a winner. That same drop under your nose and you know what bulimia feels like.
The S. E.Asian countries all use a “fragrant” fermented fish sauce that will give garum a run for the money. I used to frequent a restaurant where a group of Asian businessmen met in a private room for lunch. When the Nuoc Cham came out, I saw the rest of the restaurant diners begin to order their checks and leave, those closest to the private area first.
The Quality of Fish Sauce
An article on a Vietnamese website describes the fermentation process in detail: As soon as fishing boats return with their catch, the fish are rinsed and drained, then mixed with sea salt—two to three parts fish to one part salt by weight. They are then pressed into large earthenware jars, lined on the bottom with a layer of salt, and topped with a layer of salt. A woven bamboo mat is placed over the fish and weighed down with heavy rocks to prevent the fish floating when the water inside them is extracted by the salt and fermentation process. The jars are covered and left in the sun for nine months to a year.
The flavor takes time to develop, as the article goes on to explain: From time to time, they are uncovered to expose the mixture to direct, hot sunshine, which helps to ‘digest’ the fish and turn it into a fluid. Periodic ‘sunning’ produces a superior fragrant fish sauce with a clear, reddish-brown color. Eventually, the liquid is removed from the jars, preferably through a spigot on the bottom so that it passes through the layers of fish remains. Any sediment is removed and the filtered fish sauce is transferred to clean jars and allowed to air in the sun for a couple of weeks to dissipate the strong fishy odor. It is then ready for bottling. The finished product is 100 percent, top-grade, genuine fish sauce.
I googled it-and yeah, that looks like the stuff, and the description of the smell is pretty accurate, too-I’m a healthy diet freak-and it says Natto is very healthy-but no way I’m eating that, even if it was the secret of eternal youth...
It's tasty, though!
They still have to make it in vats outside the city...
:]
Oh heck yeah!
Who has the cooking thread ping list?
And what about the sewing thread?!? ;^)
Those sewing ping list members really keep this place in stitches.
the feed lots and holding pens outside of Amarillo have a “unique” aroma, shall I say.
I’m out here in the mushroom capital of the world, maybe a nice fragrant fish sauce could improve the local olfactory experience.
Thai fish sauce is my soy. There’s a few variants that I never learned the names so I labeled them by smell; “feet sauce”, “@ss sauce” .
As a kid, I never considered anything “we” ate odd, pungent or ethnic for that matter. It was food and you’ll eat it or it’ll be waiting for you at breakfast.
I eat a lot of Mexican, some Cuban & PR too and haven’t found anything that I didn’t want seconds. “Hispanic” foods, if not done with dairy, tend to agree with me. Menudo sounds like pepper pot, I’d eat it - bring on the fish sauce!
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