I have an extensive collection of fish sauces but it hasn't included fish-less fish sauce simply because vegetarian fish sauce has always disappointed me. However, I recently came across two brands of pineapple-based vegetarian fish sauce that looked promising. They were about $4 each at the Green Farm market in Orange County’s Little Saigon in Southern California. I’ve since seen them at other Viet markets such as Shun Fat (Thuan Phat).
The relatively high price point signaled a potentially good product. Maybe these brands would be better than the bland, insipid vegetarian fish sauce that I’d sampled in the past? I bought them both and here are my thoughts, plus a vegetarian fish sauce recipe for you to experiment with making your own since you may not live near a Viet market.
Regular vs. Vegetarian Fish Sauce
I usually rate fish sauce by considering many factors, including color (a rich reddish brown marks high quality nuoc mam), smell (a dried porcini-like briny aroma with a hint of the sea is good) and taste (ultimately, I’m looking for a deep flavor that’s not fishy but salty and savory).
How did the vegetarian fish sauces compare to regular fish sauce? The vegetarian nuoc mam had a nice brown color, little aroma, and a faintly sweet, savory flavor. It’s not salty and definitely not fishy.
Most Viet vegetarian dishes tend to be delicate in flavor so I can see the vegetarian fish sauces working well in those kinds of dishes. The sodium levels are slightly lower than most regular fish sauce (around 1500 mg sodium per tablespoon), which explains the lighter flavor of the vegetarian fish sauce.
Fish sauce magic lies in how you can use it to imbue umami in food. Among the umami boosters in the vegetarian fish sauces I bought are yeast extract and monosodium glutamate. Without animal protein involved, you need something to push the umami-ness and to unite the ingredients to produce a desirable nuoc mam-like flavor.
Regular vs irregular vegetarians
If you’re a vegetarian, why would you want to eat fake fish sauce? Vietnam has always had a large Buddhist population and having a decent alternative to fish sauce helps people to remain on their religious path. Some Buddhists are hardcore, 100 percent vegetarians while other practice intermittent vegetarianism. On one of the vegetarian fish sauce labels, full-time vegetarians are referred to as ‘regular’ while the later are called ‘irregular’ vegetarians.
The terms are religious in nature, not meant to slight anyone’s personal character or digestive health.
In addition to a vegetarian audience, I suppose vegan fish sauce would be good for people with seafood allergies. If the ingredients were kosher, it would work for those keeping kosher. See the recipe at the end of this article, if you want to make your own!
Using Vegetarian Fish Sauce
I first tried sprinkling the vegetarian fish sauce onto hot cooked rice and it was fine. But what if I mixed it with other ingredients? I have a vegetarian nuoc cham recipe in Vietnamese Food Any Day, but being curious, I used the vegetarian fish sauce to make nuoc cham chay (chay is the Viet term for anything that’s vegetarian). The result was a little lighter than regular nuoc cham made with actual nuoc mam.
The two kinds of fish sauces are cousins of different mothers rather than siblings. Regular and vegetarian/vegan fish sauce are similar but not the same.
Making Vegetarian Fish Sauce
I know most of you don’t have a Viet market nearby so I wondered if I could make vegetarian fish sauce that was better than the one I made a few years ago. I started combining canned Trader Joe’s pineapple juice (a very good product that tastes fresh, despite being in a can), my favorite light soy sauce (light in color, not low sodium; see the soy sauce buying guide if you need an assist), fine sea salt (it tastes good and comes from the ocean, since the idea is to mimic something from the sea), and cassava syrup (sugar that delivers a round mouthfeel plus a delicate sweetness).
After playing with the proportions of salty-savory (soy sauce adds umami but too much and the result is too dark but too much salt created a sharp finish) and sweetness (pineapple has a natural sweet tang that needed to be curbed by the cassava syrup), my homemade vegetarian fish sauce was surprisingly serviceable. Appearance wise, the pineapple juice’s cloudiness could be dealt with by decanting and/or filtering. But the nuoc mam chay needed an umami boost, which is why I reached for a bit of MSG. (For a discussion on MSG, see this post on MSG in pho or you may try mushroom powder, which will turn the vegetarian fish sauce a bit cloudy.)
Once the MSG crystals dissolved, the vegetarian fish sauce tasted good. It was a close facsimile to the commercial condiment I purchased in Little Saigon.
Next up, I’m going to cook with the commercial and homemade vegetarian fish sauce and see what happens. For now, you can look to buying Viet vegetarian fish sauces or make your own!
Related articles
- One Bottle of Fish Sauce Is Not Enough (my pan-Asian nuoc mam collection, on Taste.com)
- How to Buy and Use Fish Sauce
- Fish Sauce Worth Seeking: Son, Megachef, 3 Mien
Vegan Fish Sauce
Ingredients
- 1 cup pineapple juice such as Trader Joe's canned
- 2 tablespoons cassava syrup
- 1 ½ tablespoons light soy sauce such as Pearl River Bridge Premium Label
- 1 ½ tablespoons fine sea salt
- ½ teaspoon monosodium glutamate or rounded ¾ teaspoon mushroom seasoning powder
Instructions
- In a measuring cup, stir together the juice, cassava syrup, soy sauce, salt, and MSG. Let sit for about 10 minutes to meld flavors. Then taste and adjust things to arrive at a savory-salty-very-lightly sweet finish. You want to make the condiment a little uncomfortably too salty because when you use it, you'll likely be diluting it with water, lime juice, etc. Push it a bit, then jot down your proportions for the future. Or, hedge by keeping the vegetarian fish sauce moderately salty and remember to add salt when you use the condiment in dishes.
- If you want a clear liquid, let the condiment sit for a few hours then decant to a jar or bottle. Use a coffee filter for super clear results. Store in the fridge and bring to room temperature before using.
Matthew says
thank you andrea! i've always been slightly put off by all kinds of fish flavours (despite growing up in cape breton). wasn't sure which post to leave this comment on, but i guess it doesn't matter too much:
i've been thinking about making a vegetarian fish sauce, but i'm feeling like trying actual fish sauce this weekend. i'm going to get one of the brands you've recommended in your other posts. if everybody else but me can appreciate fish, i'm sure i can come along eventually - after all, when i get thai food at a restaurant, i don't ask them to hold the fish sauce! bun noodles tonight, so my first adventure will be making (non-veg!) nuoc cham.
i hope to also give this recipe a whirl soon, but probably not this weekend.
Andrea Nguyen says
I just tweaked the original recipe to make it saltier. I'm sure you haven't made it yet but if you printed it out before this comment of mine, note the revised quantities of salt, soy sauce, and MSG.
Let me know your feedback on the recipe when you try it!
Susan says
Hello Andrea. I just googled “substitutions for fish sauce” and finally found this post. I am allergic to fish sauce and oyster sauce, and have been trying to find viable alternatives for years. I will be making your Vegan Fish Sauce recipe and am quite excited about it. There are so many lovely Asian recipes I can’t try because the dreaded fish sauce is an essential element. I am also going to scare up the 2 vegetarian fish sauce products you found. I live in a university town with a huge Asian student, scholar and professor population, and we have some really extensive Asian markets. I have also subscribed to your blog; you are obviously an expert and I have never really sampled Vietnamese food before, again due to the ever present fish sauce dilemma! This is the most progress that I have made in years of looking for a fish sauce alternative, and I am really grateful and eager to avail myself of your expertise.
Andrea Nguyen says
Hello Susan, I'm so glad this helps you! I hope you're closer to enjoying these flavors. So sorry to know of your allergies but you're persistent and I'm stoked about that!
marigael says
About the cloudiness of the canned pineapple juice, let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days and it will self filter with one being able to pour off the clear juice from the top which is pretty much 90% of the juice. From my experience it is very easy to observe the separation so you don't end up pouring the sediment along with the clear juice.
Andrea Nguyen says
Yes, that's true! Let it settle before measuring. The thing is, in that little can of Trader Joe's juice, there's about 1 cup of juice so it's perfect for the recipe. In the end, I filtered the nuoc mam through a coffee filter.
Hugh says
I’m excited to try this! I’ve been disappointed by the vegetarian fish sauces I’ve bought over the years so homemade sounds great. I haven’t tried the brands in the post though so will look for them in the local Viet markets as well.
Andrea Nguyen says
You'll be the better judge than me, Hugh! The ones I've tried in the past were so lackluster.
Tram says
“The terms are religious in nature, not meant to slight anyone’s personal character or digestive health. “
Ha! This cracked me up! 🙂
Andrea Nguyen says
Glad you got that! 😉
David Windle says
Im sorry, Im sure your sauce is lovely. We eat a mainly vegetarian diet but how can you call it "fish" sauce when really it isn't. It is like vegans giving meat names to dishes, it just boggles the mind, I mean are you a vegan that dreams of eating meat or fish because I just do not understand it.
I make my sauces and I do not use msg but I don't give it a meat name. The base of one of those sauces was pineapple so why not call it an Asian Pineapple Sauce and on the label add "great substitute for fish sauce".
The vegan/vegetarian market has become very commercialised and most of theses meat named vegan substitutes are commercially made by big corporations and I won't be part of it.
You are a Vegan/vegetarian or you are not. Please stop giving things meat names like Fish sauce when it us not.
Andrea Nguyen says
David -- it's the direct translation from the Vietnamese -- nuoc mam chay literally means vegetarian fish sauce. It's fine for you to have a perspective but as a food writer, I try to minimize confusion. To create a new name like Asian Pineapple Sauce would confuse a lot of people. There is a Viet fermented fish and pineapple sauce, for example.
My work aims to balance and honor Vietnamese foodways. There are plenty of Vietnamese vegetarians, some of whom are hardcore Buddhists and do not use aliums. They're likely to use nuoc mam chay. I'd rather just call the condiment by it's Viet name -- nuoc mam chay. Imposing a purist notion on the name of the condiment would do it a disservice.
I appreciate your weighing in.
Zeke says
What matters is that there's no fish harmed or any animal products in it. It's just a name and it makes it a lot easier for people to find what it is meant to replace. If a recipe calls for fish sauce and I need a substitute, I'll look for 'vegan fish sauce' and not plant-based sauce to replace fish.
Looking forward to this vegan fish sauce, Andrea! Thanks!
Andrea Nguyen says
Thanks for weighing in, Zeke!
Rowan says
How long can you keep this sauce in the refrigerator before you need to throw it out?
Andrea Nguyen says
I'm thinking for 3 months, at least. I've used it up in less time, though.