How Much Fish Sauce is Too Much Fish Sauce?

Finding the line between Good Funk and Funked Up

To be fair, this question is applicable in just about any situation where fish sauce is called for. Fish sauce (especially the good brands) is an incredible ingredient. I’m relatively certain that the list of things that you could salt and ferment for 2 years and get delicious sauce out of is actually quite long, but small fish seem to be what we’ve aligned to as the apex predator of the category and I can get behind that.

But, given that process, it’s no surprise that the predominant descriptor tends to be “funk.” The same term is used in wine and beer and often refers to an amount of wild yeast fermentation, but in savory foods it tends to mean “extremely umami.” And because we’re dealing in extremes here, it’s pretty easy to over do it.

I have most often encountered this when eating a bun bowl - the first dash of nuoc cham is amazing, the second is equally great, and then the third puts it just over the edge and now I’m fighting the umami bomb back to normal savory territory.

But there at least you have some control - the delicious combination of fish sauce and lime juice sits in a bowl on the side, and you can dial in your preferred ratios accordingly. When you’re essentially building that into a cocktail, there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide if it’s wrong.

Obviously, the right ratio here is different than a dipping sauce. The dominant flavor needs to still be lime juice, but it needs that strong umami hit to balance the sour. Obviously there’s more going on with the savory syrup and cucumber, but I think the drink hangs on the sour and umami combo.

And I think the right ratio there is 5 parts lime juice to 1 part fish sauce. It’s obviously super intense, but it’s balanced. With less sauce, you’re searching for it; it’s not obvious what’s going on and just feels like something is still missing. With more, it quickly approximates a dipping sauce a bit too closely. But at that 5-to-1, I think you’re getting the right amount of funk.

This may change a bit as I lock in the other components, but this is going to be the base I build on.

Now to figure out how many green onions, shallots, and cucumbers to blend into a simple syrup…