Something Fishy

Quick but important lesson here, folks.  Last weekend I made a Thai style cucumber salad for a potluck birthday party, but I had just run out of Tiparos fish sauce.  Since I wasn't about to go into Chinatown just to pick up fish sauce for my dish, I decided to go ahead and try the Kame fish sauce my roommate had in the cupboard, unopened.  The faux-Asian font should have tipped me off to its quality, but I soldiered on anyway.

It tasted like...nothing.  Like salt water.  Fish sauce is supposed to have a pungency, an umami if you will, that lends complexity to Southeast Asian foods.  The Kame had nothing.  As you can see, I had to use half the little bottle for my salad, which in true fish sauce would be enough salt to cure whale meat.  Kame lists the ingredients as: water, salt, high fructose corn syrup (que? quoi? wha?), and "fish extract".  I had to compensate for the lack of flavor by grinding down extra dried shrimp.

Today I went to the excellent Thai grocery on Mosco St. and bought a squeeze bottle of trusty Squid fish sauce (which has no squid in it, by the way -- Squid is just the brand name.)  Squid lists the ingredients as a whopping 60% fish, 38% salt, and 2% granulated white sugar.  The label points out that there are no added preservatives.  Alright, I know there's gotta be water somewhere in there too, but the point is, it's fishier, it's saltier, and it doesn't have any high fructose gobbledygook.

The 207 mL Kame, which was probably purchased at Garden of Eden, was $2.85 according to the still attached price tag.  The 750 mL Squid fish sauce was $1.50.  And the price printed on the bottle is 23 baht, which is about 55 cents.  So even though the vastly inferior Kame is more than five times the price of the Squid, the fine folks at the Bangkok Center Grocery who sell the Squid can still turn a pretty profit.

The moral of the story?  Don't ever buy anything with the faux Asian font on it.  And you don't always get what you pay for.  Don't be a sucka.  I recommend Tiparos fish sauce and Squid fish sauce, the two brands I grew up with.

(Incidentally, Squid used to not add sugar to their fish sauce.  But Tiparos became the #1 brand of fish sauce in Thailand, and their formula required a touch of sugar.  So, interestingly enough, Squid now adds sugar too.)