Premium Fish Sauce

As long as I was finding benefits in higher grade and more expensive soy sauce, this Red Boat Fish Sauce caught my eye, especially the high price.
The price at Amazon is outrageous. At my local asian grocer it was $7.49 which is still pretty steep for fish sauce.

Notice it says Nuoc Mam Nhi on the label. Nuoc Mam is the Vietnamese term for fish sauce. In Thai, it's Nam Pla. The "nhi" means first pressing for fish sauce.

The labeling is following the same ideas as high grade olive oil, though extra virgin has no defined meaning for Fish Sauce.

The 40 degree N doesn't make sense as latitude because they're much closer to the Equator. Turns out it's a reference to degrees of nitrogen, a reflection of protein content. Most other fish sauces are said to be about 20 degrees. This leads me to think that it would have a greater nucleotide impact as well as discussed in the Marinades part II post.

As an aside, proteins and carbs have the same calorie content per gram consumed. The difference is that the body has to strip nitrogen from the protein before it is used as a carbohydrate.


I've been a 3 Crabs user for most of my Fish Sauce needs. It's also a nhi grade fish sauce.  I've heard good things about Squid and Tiparos brands as well. Squid is more of a Vietnamese style, and 3 Crabs is Thai in origin.

I am interested in giving this a try. And they do have a catchy website, Red Boat Fish Sauce.

See my follow up post http://itsallabouttohappen.blogspot.com/2013/11/fish-sauces-compared.html

Soy Sauce Choices 2013

As I've mentioned before, I'm changing my preferred soy sauce. Or at least using this as a reason to look at the market afresh and see what's good in the market.

The Contenders (in left to right order)

Lee Kum Kee Less Sodium Soy Sauce
Lee Kum Kee Double Fermented Soy Sauce
Pearl River Bridge Superior Light Soy Sauce
Koon Chun Thin Soy Sauce
Ve Wong Anka XO Soy Sauce with monacolin K
Amoy First Extract Light Soy Sauce

Just to get it out of the way, the LKK Less Sodium Soy Sauce was pretty poor. I won't be talking about it much. The others are all pretty good, but the differences do stand out.

One of my goals was to find a good soy sauce with a lower sodium content. Except for the Ve Wong Anka  XO and the purposely reduced LKK green labeled soy, these are all as salty or more so than the Pearl River Bridge I was hoping to replace. Just keep an eye on the VE Wong Anka. Most are right around 1000 mg sodium per tablespoon. The Koon Chun was the highest sodium with 1400 and the Ve Wong Anka XO the lowest with 235.

If you click on the image below, you can read the nutritional analysis for the different brands. The Anka XO bottle was too fine of print and not quite in focus, so sorry about that.

There were a couple of phases of use this time. There was some side by side tasting and testing and then just using the different soy sauces as I cooked. The more critical tasting tests were three things:

1. Tasted straight up  
2. Tasted as a salad dressing recipe
3. tasted in a potsticker style dip recipe

Tasting straight has the most range of responses. Used in dressings and dips, the differences become much more subtle, the exception being intentionally lowered sodium soy sauce. Taking the lesson from the first testing I did as linked at the top of this post, that you need to rebalance recipes to really let the soy sauce shine in the dish, I did increase the amount of soy or dip base to create a dressing/dip that I felt was good.

Lee Kum Kee Less Sodium 

Tasted Straight

Off, sweet sour thing going on

Salad Dressing

Still seems sweet and won't balance right. Off, yuck.

Dip

Fruity, sweet, wrong, strongly disfavored. I added extra 

soy to try to balance it. While extra soy helped, it just 

wouldn't balance. 

Lee Kum Kee Double Fermented Premium Soy Sauce

Tasted Straight

 Most balanced, full, rich, high complexity

 

Salad Dressing

Winner for it's good flavor

Dip

Comments were very close between this and the Amoy 

First Pressing.  LKK probably just edges out the Amoy 

in flavor both from the extra ferment and the slightly 

higher salt. This needed no extra tweaks to balance. 

Pearl River Bridge Superior Light Soy Sauce

Tasted Straight

SALTY!!!  Slight delay, then impact. Good balance between 

salty and sweet, hint of malty even

Salad dressing

Good, some sweet sourness in play that was not 

appreciated even though that is a an aspect of this 

recipe. So it didn't balance as well as some of the other

 soy sauces. 

Dip

In this testing, my baseline sauce struggled to stand out. 

There were dips people were liking better or worse. This 

has been my baseline sauce and so I think with the 

experience my family has with this, it just played up the 

middle in testing. 

Amoy First Extract Light Soy Sauce

Tasted Straight

more balanced, a bit sweet, greater complexity than PRB

Salad dressing

 Was liked, with a comment on being a bit sweet.

 

Dip

Comments were very close between this and the LKK 

Double Ferment. The claim of extra flavors present in the 

first extraction seem to be upheld. It took a little extra 

soy to balance out.

Ve Wong Anka XO Soy Sauce

Tasted Straight

Smooth, good flavor, close to pleasant even. Stronger 

bean impact sort of tamari like 

Salad Dressing

They were very close. When this was salted, it was as 

good as any of them and still well liked even without the 

extra salt. Some commenters couldn't decide between 

this and the double fermented. 

Dip

The first to try this commented on it being salty which 

surprised me. Comments were positive but salty notes 

continued to be recorded. I suspect  the first comment 

biased the other tasters who confused the stronger bean 

impact with saltiness.  It took extra soy to bring balance 

to the dip, likely because of the low salt in my opinion. 

Koon Chun Thin Soy Sauce

Tasted Straight

SALTY, Highest complexity, more flavor notes

Salad Dressing

Was liked but perceived as different. Koon Chun is a 

distinctive soy sauce. It was liked the best in the 

original tests, but it really isn't how I cook.  High salt is 

probably sensed but not directly percieved. 

Dip

Struggled in this testing this time. My family has 

become more used to my style of cooking and I think 

that hindered it's performance. Comments noted it 

saltiness and just different. I had to add more dip base

base to bring this dip into balance and even then it's 

saltiness was noted. I still like this soy sauce a lot, 

but my cooking would need adapting to really use this 

sauce to its potential. 

As with the Reduced Sodium Kikkoman in the first test, the Less Sodium Lee Kum Kee was obviously off. It really can't be balanced well in my opinion.

The Salad Dressing test was very close, with the power of the rice vinegar, sugar and sesame oil balancing well with all the soys except Less Sodium from LKK. Even the Ve Wong with its very low sodium did well. Note that Ve Wong is not marketed as low sodium.  Towards the end of the sample salad testing, I added a little bit of salt to the Ve Wong sample and it became indistinguishable to the blind tasters. I still thought it had a more pronounced bean flavor, but 1, I knew the difference which is a bias and 2, I'm a more discriminating taster in general than the rest of my family who I used as tasters. 

Some of these soy sauces are considered premium. The Amoy for being a first extraction, comparable to an extra virgin olive oil in concept. The minimal processing preserves some of the more subtle flavors. As with the olive oil, this commands a higher price. 

The Lee Kum Kee Double Fermented soy also is a premium process. The soy from a single ferment process is used as the liquid for a fresh set of beans and wheat and fermented again intensifying the flavors. But at added cost. 

And the Ve Wong Anka XO Soy Sauce is playing to a premium market. XO refers to Extra Old, a reference to XO sauce which itself is a reference to high grade brandy. I've seen two different XO Soy from Ve Wong. A tan label, that's a little cheaper and just as low in sodium. The red labeled variety I used here uses a higher grade of yeast, called out on the label as Monacolin K. There are claims that it reduces cholesterol and other health claims. 

I want to compare the tan label XO to the red label XO and see what the differences are. 

Ve Wong, also makes soy sauce under the Kim Ve Wong label. They make a wide range of things so check labels carefully to be sure you know what you're getting. 

Those steps to produce quality do actually work. But you'll pay for them.  The Amoy, LKK Double Ferment and Ve Wong are more expensive soy sauce than the rest.  The finer nuances are most evident in uncooked accents and dishes. And many would keep these more expensive sauces just for that purpose, just as they would with their best extra virgin olive oils. 

For a cooked dish, they'd reach for something less expensive, again as they do for their olive oil.   And were I not on a sodium restriction, I'd probably do the same, keeping the PRB or Koon Chun for cooking and the LKK for dipping. 

But I do have a sodium restriction. Ve Wong's performance was good enough that I'll be using it primarily, even with the added cost.  I may add some salt along the way to bring the full flavor up, but I'll have the control over the sodium, not the maker of the soy sauce. That's an important factor for me. 

I'll also keep LKK Double Ferment on hand and play with some mix ratios for that perfect soy for me and for use in uncooked dips and such.

My family is used to the reduced sodium flavors I cook with. This tends to mean stronger aromatics, herbs, and other seasonings. The soy sauces I used here are generally well regarded, but  you should do a similar test yourself and find what you like best. 

Related posts

• Revisiting my Soy Sauce Selection
• Soy Sauce

Revisiting my Soy Sauce Selection

I've discussed Soy Sauce before. In that post, I mentioned the difference between the plastic jug of Pearl River Bridge and the bottle with the same label. The jug soy was saltier.  Recently, those labels became consistent and the bottled soy is now rated at the higher sodium level.  

I had thought I was just using less than before or my taste was changing, but this is also an explanation. 

I don't like the low sodium Kikkoman soy sauce really, though its the easiest to find. My preferences run toward naturally brewed sauces over the forced fermentation sauces.  I do like the Amoy First Extract soy sauce and it's only 100 mg more sodium than Pearl River Bridge's old sodium rating. That might become my preference.   And I picked up some brewed  Lee Kum Kee reduced sodium soy sauce as well to try.

I'll let you know what I end up choosing.

Experiment: Oil Poaching in Sesame Oil

While the Chinese have used a sort of oil poaching technique for velveting and par cooking of meat and such for a long time, in the West, oil poaching has been more a specialty technique for cooking seafood. 

Use a flavorful fat like butter or olive oil, keep the temperature low and use a protein that will take on the best character of the fat. Thus the use of lobster or such as the most frequent protein poaching in butter. It's very good too. 

Ming Tsai has a recipe for tuna in blend of oils that include sesame oil. But I thought that a pork tenderloin would also be well suited to this technique and use only toasted sesame oil. Googling, I found a picture of a pork tenderloin a restaurant oil poaches, but not any real details on the method.

• I needed to find the right pot that would hold the tenderloin snugly and minimize the amount of oil needed. 
• I wanted to flavor the oil. 
• I wanted the meat to have a roasted look instead of the grayness of just poaching at a low temperature.

For pan fitting, I folded the thin end of the tenderloin and tied it in place, then cut the loin in half. I wrapped it in plastic  so I could do some test fitting and not have to wash a lot of dishes. 

 

For flavor, ginger, garlic, star anise, a little cinnamon stick and some Sichuan peppercorns.  In the end, this wasn't enough and I'll also change my technique a bit next time I try this. I was afraid the cinnamon would overpower it so I used only a tiny bit. I was wrong. For fish, this would have probably been too strongly flavored from the sesame oil.

For color on the roast, I painted it with a mixture of dark soy, soy and rice wine. This is after three coats, drying about 10 minutes in between. This too came out lighter than I wanted so I'd do more coats, and maybe add a some red food coloring to punch it up a bit. 

 

 

Here, I'm bringing the oil up to temperature. Note the temp is set to 180 degrees, I don't want to fry this roast, just poach it to about 140 internal temperature. Using an induction burner really made holding the right poaching temperature much easier.

Here it is after 50 minutes in the 180 degree oil. It's 145, so a bit higher than I wanted, but still just pink inside. I wasn't sure how long it would take to get to temp and it will vary with your equipment if you try this. Monitor it carefully. Let it rest 10 or 15 minutes before carving.

Carve it and then I dressed it with with a sauce like you would use on a steamed fish.  Sizzling hot sesame oil (from the poaching oil), scallion, some soy and rice wine. The outer edge color looks better after carving as you get the contrast with the pink interior.

A better knife and fork meal than a chopstick one.  Something I'll revisit and tweak on to build a recipe that you can follow some time in the future. 

The leftover sesame oil can be kept for a couple of weeks REFRIGERATED. As it's infused with garlic and ginger it's at risk of growing botulism. You can keep it only for a short time.  This is true of many of the flavored oils used in Chinese cooking that are home-made. Sadly, this is rarely discussed. I'll cover this in a post soon.

Towards a Theory of Chinese Marinades: Part 3--Beef

While looking through my copy of Mai Leung's New Classic Chinese Cookbook, I noticed something interesting in her stir-fried beef recipes. She never used ShaoHsing wine or other alcohol for the marinade, but always sugar. Usually brown sugar.  So I pored through my other books and here's what I noted. 

There is a general trend away from wine in beef marinades and using sugar instead. Sugar is often used instead of wine as I noted in  Part 1. It's not universal with the beef though.  And it's more pronounced the older the source material is.

The other interesting thing that correlates with the age of the source material is that beef for stir-fries was universally velveted in the older cookbooks. Ken Lo, Virginia Lee, Mai Leung velvet beef for stir-fries.  Nina Simonds not so much, Fuchsia Dunlop rarely,  Ken Hom rarely in his modern work either. 

In her Cantonese cookbook, Eileen Yin Fei Lo uses  a small amount of wine, 1 teaspoon, with 1/2 teaspoon of ginger juice quite frequently with beef marinades. But her other books trend away from that and towards sugar.

Historically, beef was not a common ingredient. Cattle were work animals primarily and there wasn't enough arable land to dedicate to feeding beef solely for food purposes. So the beef that did make it to stir fries was likely tough. And velveting helps mask that. Further, the oil blanching of beef, even if not velveted, is the easiest only reliable method to cook thinly sliced beef  evenly to only medium or medium rare. 

Also, beef is more of a Northern food item, and the rice for the wine is more of a Southern food item. So geography plays in to this trend somewhat too. 

But in the modern kitchen, deep frying has a negative connotation for health. Plus all that oil is extra work and mess. And commercial beef in the West is tender.

Given these factors, modern stir-fries tend to use equal parts ShaoHsing to Soy sauce in the marinades. And usually in slightly heavier doses than for pork or chicken which are more subtle and nuanced in taste to begin with.

So consider sugar next time you're stir-frying beef. And also think about oil blanching it to keep it pink in the center. 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 4

Towards a theory of Chinese Marinades: Part 2

The traditional method for marinades in the west has been to work with acid and oil as the basis. The acid was to help tenderize and flavor the meat, the oil to improve the mouthfeel and succulence of the final product. 

It doesn't really work on cuts of meat common in the west and is dropping from favor. 

First off, there's no real penetration of flavor beyond the outer 1/4 inch. Secondly, the acid tended to make the meat mushy and the oil didn't offer much most of the time.

These marinades have fallen from favor in the west, and rightly so. However, with the thinly sliced meats of many asian cuisines, this sort of marinade for the shorter times still has some value. Or if you're cooking thin cutlets or paillards, don't discard the standard marinade technique either.

Of interest though is the rise of salt, glutamate and nucleotide marination. Salt and glutamates can penetrate deeply in meat in common marination times. Cook's Illustrated, particularly in their PBS shows America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Country have pushed this sort of marinade into the public eye. 

Glutamate combined with nucleotides offer a boosted savoriness to a dish. The common example is Caesar Salad with glutamate from the Parmesan cheese and nucleotides from the anchovies. 
 

What does any of this mean for Asian marinades. 

Soy sauce is salty of course, but also a good source of glutamates. The rice wine, is acidic as well as offering it's own flavors.  Wikipedia offers a good list for common foods high in glutamate. Scroll down to the section on Concentration in Foods.

Salt penetrates into the meat. Depending on the length of time and concentration, salt can denature protein and help retain moisture as seen in the popularity of brining, or the recommendation of Kosher poultry, which has been salted as part of the Kosher butchering.  This last part doesn't really apply to marinades in general, but I do sometimes wonder about it Asian food where the meat is so thin. In the first link below, Jack Bishop indicates it does, but that seems fast compared to the effect in brining so I still wonder.

Fish sauce offers nucleotides. Also other meaty products that often show up in the completed dish such as mushroom, mushroom based condiments, and stock are more sources of nucleotides. 

It seems that the Asians had stumbled into this combination of flavors intuitively.

Worth reading for more information:

• NPR interview with America's Test Kitchen
• Culinary Guild interview with a Test Kitchen employee, particularly the last third or so
• IFT article on umami
• CJBIO actually about nucleotides as a food additive, but still interesting and with some good information
• Principles of Food Chemistry via Google Books  the section titled Flavor Enhancers

Part 1
Part 3
Part 4

CNN: 50 best Chinese Restaurants in the US

CNN has a fun listing of what they consider the best Chinese Restaurants in the US. The two they picked for my area, Utah, are certainly good choices.  But Red Maple is no longer at that location as they had an oil fire that ruined the kitchen.

They're supposed to be re-opening in a new location soon out in Taylorsville. Originally, they were supposed to open in January, but they're still not open yet.

There have been some who disagree that Red Maple is particularly good. Lisa Dang's blog has a pointed critique with some valid points.  And I think they're sloppy with too much oil in many of their stir fries, but Red Maple is better than most of the other Chinese places in Salt Lake City.

I look forward to their re-opening and need to give the Golden Dragon's dim sum a try.