Ingredients

Bagoong
Alamang

Bagoong
Monamon

Fish Sauce
[Nam Pla (Thai); Nuoc Mam (Viet), Patis (Philippine; Garum, Liquamen, Muria, Allec (Roman); Garos (Greek)]

Fish sauce is essential to several cuisines, particularly those of Vietnam and Thailand today and of the Roman Empire. Fish sauce is made by packing small fish or fish blood and innards or a combination of both into large barrels or jars layered with salt and setting the barrels out in the hot sun for around a year. The fish is digested by its own digestive enzymes and a clear salty liquid is eventually drained off and bottled. The paste left in the bottom of the barrels is also bottled and sold as a different kind of fish sauce.

In view of the number of these fish sauces and their importance to the cuisines of Southeast Asia I have written a separate Fish Sauce Page covering them in depth.

Subst: there is no true substitute for fish sauce. If you have none or are a strict vegetarian a fermented yellow bean sauce is about as close as you can get. Lacking both you must resort to just salt.

Shrimp Sauce / Paste

[Gkabpi / Kapi (Thai), Terasi (Indonesia), Blachan / Petis Udang (Malay), Mam tom / Mam ruoc (Vietnam), Bagoong alamang (Philippine), Hom ha / Hay koh (China)]

Shrimp paste is very important to sauces and dishes throughout Southeast Asia and Southern China. Basically it's shrimp, usually very tiny shrimp, salted, fermented, and dried until it breaks down into a paste which may be bottled or pressed into cakes. For details see our Shrimp Sauce Page.

Much has been made of the overpowering smell and strong salty taste, but I haven't noticed these to be a problem, at least in high quality bottled products. Now the pressed block products are another matter entirely, you're going to want to seal them up tight in a jar.

Bonito Flake / Shaved Bonito [katsuobushi (Japan)]
Bonito Flakes are extremely important in Japanese cuisine and are also used in Korea. They are used both to make soup stock and sprinkled on dishes as a condiment. Bonito fillets are smoked, fermented and dried to the hardness of a board, then shaved extremely thin. This is quite similar to the process of making Maldive Fish except for the final shaving. Similar flakes (sababushi) are made from mackerel.

Mackerel Flakes / Shaved Mackerel - [Sababushi (Japan)]
This is similar to Bonito Flakes but made from mackerel instead. Since bonito are members of the Mackerel/Tuna family the difference is not great.

Maldive Fish - [Hiki-kandu mas]
Producing this dried fish product, made from fresh bonito, is the major industry of the Maldive Islands southwest of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). It is as essential to the cuisine of Sri Lanka as fish sauce is in Thailand. Bonito fillets are boiled, smoked and sun dried until hard as a board. They will then keep indefinitely stored in a dry place.

Traditionally this fish was sold by the piece. For use it was pounded in a large mortar until broken into tiny slivers. Today it is more often sold chipped or pre-pounded in plastic bags. The photo shows chips as I purchased them on the left and after pounding in my large stone mortar on the right.

Subst: Japanese bonito flakes are made by a similar process but shaved rather than splintered. They are much less dense so use a larger measure -or- Philippine Tinapang Durog, a very similar pounded product made out of round scad can be substituted in the measure the recipe calls for.

Tinapang Durog
This dried, smoked, fermented and pounded fish product is similar to Maldive Fish but made in the Philippines from round scad instead of Bonito. The samples I purchased were not completely dried and were sold from a refrigerated case in small plastic bags. While it could be dried more completely for room temperature storage it's not a big deal to keep it in the freezer compartment.

Subst: Japanese bonito flakes are made by a similar process but shaved rather than splintered. They are much less dense so use a larger measure -or- Maldive Fish can be substituted in the same measure called for in the recipe.

Salted Fish