The Fish Sauce Trail: Phan Thiet - Deep Dive into Fish Sauce

Phan Thiet

Car service Saigon to Phan Thiet takes about 4 ½ hours, it can be a nondescript and boring ride, or it can tell a story.

The landscape itself is old, a flat, arid plain, interspersed with a few muddy rivers feeding the occasional fruit orchard or rubber tree grove. Single standing hills with rounded, conical tops reminding that the volcanic Indonesian “Ring of Fire” is not far away, and a coastal mountain range, separating the plain from the sea, allows a mild breeze to slip through its low points, keeping the otherwise dusty air from stifling. But the landscape is also littered. Littered with the refuse of humanity. Abandoned store fronts and businesses side by side with busy ones, all shabbily adorned with the kind of litter we don’t see in the US anymore, but, if not for the environmental movement, EPA regulation, and local anti-littering campaigns from the 1970s, we would. It’s tempting to rant about the lack of environmental respect in the US, or take the opposite view, and preach how over regulation slows business without tangible benefit to the land or the health of those on it, but a 4-hour drive across the southern plain of Vietnam illustrates the benefit of environmental policy and refutes the idea that good environment and successful business are mutually exclusive goals. Abandoned or busy, the businesses here all share a common grime.

Entering Phan Thiet, crossing several canals, the smell and feel of the sea abruptly replaces the brown plains. Hundreds of bright blue boats line the canals, moored and waiting for the business of night fishing – when the schools of small anchovies and sardines, attracted by lantern light on the boats, are most easily caught. (The boats, we’re told, are painted blue in order to match the sea and camouflage them from the fish).

The beach front of Phan Thiet is in the midst of transition from a culture based upon fish and coconut to the more lucrative tourism industry – both foreign and domestic. The build up of Phan Thiet, unlike some of the already over built beach towns further north, is being planned to keep the contour of the land and view to the sea more accessible and “eco-friendly”; the market driving environmental awareness?

We arrive at the hotel to meet our guide “Vu”, a local restaurant owner who speaks enough English and Russian to act as tour guide and ambassador. We’ve hired him for the weekend for his ability to translate and gain us access to local fish sauce makers – many of whom avoid outside visitors out of protectiveness of proprietary “secrets”, and in the wake of a recent scandal involving one unscrupulous producer being exposed in the media for using non-traditional, potentially toxic additives to speed up and increase yield in their production.

Before beginning our immersion into nuoc mam, Vu insists on our taking Lunch with a View at an open-air restaurant, overlooking the ocean and catering to Russian tourists. Vu steers us toward the fresh, local seafood, but the menu is printed in Vietnamese and Russian, a lot of it thick with Russian comfort food.

At Vu’s recommendation, we order the local fried chopped squid cakes and a salad of fresh, raw white anchovy filets, both served with table salad and sesame rice papers, and see a repeated trend from a previous meal in Saigon- the new style and old style nuoc cham, served side by side.

Traditional nouc cham is made of nuoc mam (fish sauce), water, lime juice, sugar, chilies, garlic, carrot, and daikon. The new style – increasingly popular among younger consumers with more “western” taste”, is more like a thin Thai peanut sauce – sweeter, with no pungency from fish sauce and no heat from chilies. I’m not a fan of the “New Style” nuoc cham.

"New Style"- left / Traditional, on the right.

Raw white anchovy salad, pickled onion, chilies, and peanuts

Sesame Rice Paper – no added tapioca – handmade.

Lunch concluded, we board the mini bus and head out to what will become our primary source of information, aroma, and flavor for the next two days: The Tuan Fish Sauce Facility; producing nouc mam in the traditional manner for consumption within Vietnam. Although wholesome and delicious, the traditional process will not meet health and safety standards for export.

Using the traditional method of the central coast, detailed below, Tuan produces six grades of fish sauce under it's own label, and supplies other companies in bulk to bottle and label for subsidiary brands. The basics of nuoc mam require fresh, whole, un- eviscerated fish, preferably small anchovies and sardines, sea salt, and one year of fermentation. The difference in grade is largely determined by protein content, expressed as "degrees nitrogen" dissolved in the liquid. By international agreement, 10 grams (degrees) of nitrogen per liter of fish sauce is the accepted minimum to be sold as "Fish Sauce" or "Nuoc Mam", with the best containing as high as 40g/liter.
Concentrations of dissolved protein are traditionally derived through natural proteolytic fermentation using enzymes from the intestines of the fish (hence their not being eviscerated). The natural concentration may be diluted using water to produce a lower cost, lesser quality, end product.

The fish are harvested fresh each day, year round, so although the anchovy population has been dropping in recent years (from 15,000 tons in 2012 to 10,000 in 2015 - and almost doubling the cost), the processing continues as long as the fish are delivered.

Modern, industrial facilities in both Vietnam and Thailand are able to extract higher quantities of nouc mam with fewer fish, but they can't compare with the depth of flavor and aroma of properly fermented, undiluted, aged nuoc mam.

The work at Tuan is continuous (no down days), and almost entirely manual. With the exception of gravity flow and several mechanized pumps, every step in the process is done by hand.

Check out this woman unloading 280kg of fish by hand...it's only a 90 second clip.

Bulk fermentation of 3 tons fish/1 ton salt is done in concrete vats.

To facilitate even fermentation in such large containers, the liquid is drained from the bottom of the upper vat into a lower one, and then pumped back over the top. This is done twice each day for a year.

When fermentation is complete, the finished product is first transferred into storage containers,

and then pumped through a simple filter, before being pumped once again into barrels for shipping to the bottling facility.

In addition to producing their own line of nuoc mam, and bulk fermenting for others, the Tuan facility produces very small batches of mam nem (fermented fish paste) and mam tom (fermented shrimp paste). These extremely pungent cousins to fish sauce are made only for family and "special" customers.

The mam tam is even more aromatic, dark, and deeply pungent

Considered by many to be "too stinky"these funky ferments are essential to some traditional dishes, especially Bun Mam, thin rice noodles tossed with cooked pork and dressed with mam nem , chiles, herbs, and pineapple

Bun Mam

At the end of our 24 hour total immersion in all things Funky East of Saigon, we stocked up on "research material" - Tuan's entire product line, plus some of their Family Only mam nem and mam tom