Fish Sauce

by Ben Reade.

Fish sauce is made all over the world, especially in the far east. It used to be a staple seasoning of the Romans here in Europe and some versions still exist in and around the Mediterranean. We’ve been developing a Nordic equivalent. These sauces of herring and mackerel have been sitting in our incubator tanks for some time now, and they’re starting to ripen up nicely. Most of the world’s home-made fish sauces are made over long periods of time, which allows them to mellow down slowly.

We’re trying to speed up the process by inoculating with protein breaking microorganisms. Currently the samples pictured above are making their way to Harvard University for a deeper chemical analysis while we are use sensory analysis here in the Lab. Sensory analysis can be really useful to see how variations in the recipe change the final characteristics of the product.