Fish Sauce

This is, hands down, the best fish sauce available outside of Vietnam -- and possibly even including Southeast Asia! But you don't have to wait to cook Vietnamese or Thai food to use it. This thin sauce is all about umami -- that's the Japanese word for the 5th taste that humans can distinguish. You know -- sweet, salty, sour and bitter. Everything else is actually aroma. But it turns out that our taste buds actually can detect another sensation and the scientist who discovered this was Japanese so it used a Japanese word and called it umami. It translates as delisciousness -- well, not literally, but in the sense that when we eat a tomato, or mushrooms, or meat and say "that is delicious", it is umami that we are tasting. So add a couple of dashes of it to a tomato sauce -- don't bother to tell me that your grandmother from Naples would never do such a thing -- and you will be amazed at the lift it gives. No one will say -- What? did you put fish sauce in this?! They will just say it tastes great. Try a little in soups, in stews, in anything you want to give a lift to. It is salty, so I usually use it before adding salt because it has a much more flavorful quality than just salty. Don't be without it. And no, I'm not a relative nor do I work for this company. I'm just a fan of their product.