I once mentioned, we have three regions: North, Middle and South ... travelling from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City you can experience the changes in culture, language and cuisine. But however the change, food from all regions are seasoned by nuoc mam and complemented by nuoc mam. Like olive oil and lemon in Italian cooking, like soy sauce in Chinese and Japanese cooking, nuoc mam is irreplaceable in Vietnamese cooking.
Basically, it's the liquid extracted from prolonged fermented salted anchovy, mainly. It then went through a process which purifies and addes flavor to it. You can compare nuoc mam with salt as it add saltiness to dishes. however, if salt alone is quite plain, nuoc mam is more pleasant:
"Fish sauce, and its derivatives, impart an Umami flavor to food due to their glutamate content"
"Umami (IPA: [uː mɑː mi]), popularly referred to as savoriness,is one of the five basic tastes together with sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. Umami is a loanword from the Japanese umami (うま味) meaning "pleasant savory taste".This particular writing was chosen by Professor Kikunae Ikeda from umai (うまい) "delicious" and mi (味) "taste". The Chinese characters 旨味 are used for a more general meaning, when a particular food is delicious." (wikipedia)
I wont go on talking about this as you can just google.
If possible, you should use two types of nuoc mam, a normal one for seasoning and a fine one (nuoc mam nhi) for making nuoc cham - dipping sauce, salad sauce (I'll write about dipping sauce another time) but generally, you can use all-purposed nuoc mam from squid brand
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| recommended by many people for dipping sauce |
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| Chin-su is also good for dipping sauce, my mum like it |
vietnamese food, vietnamese recipe
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