Teach a Man to Fish Sauce

Today I went to the market and bought 1 kilogram of sardines and 300 grams of garfish. Why?

As an experiment to improve future kimchi making, Hamish suggested we make some fish sauce. The ingredients are simple, fish and salt. I thought it was a no brainer.

We purchased the fish from the Queen Vic Market. The only criteria being that the fish was small and still had its guts. The fish needs to have its guts because the way fish becomes fish sauce is by digesting itself. If the guts were removed, the fish would remain undigested and no (tasty) sauce would appear. The reason for the fish being small is more of a practical one. Small fish tend to be cheaper and more plentiful, so these fish were used historically. Additionally, by having multiple small fish each with their own guts, the saucification occurs over a larger surface area and thus faster and more reliably.

Because of these reasons, we settled on sardines, with a little bit of garfish to add something interesting. We also could have included crustaceans and molluscs - so perhaps a calamari and oyster fish sauce is in the cards for a future version.

The process here is beyond simple. We washed the jars and the fish, then put the fish into the jars, with some salt on each fish, and some extra on top. We were aiming for 15% salt, as in $\text{mass}({\text{salt}}) = 15\% \times \text{mass}({\text{fish}})$. It ended up being roughly 16%.

Here is the final jar. We managed to fit roughly 1.5 kg of fish and salt in one jar.

After leaving it out in the sun for the afternoon the juice level rose significantly, so it is looking pretty promising.

Now we leave it to process for 6-16 months, then we filter out everything that is left.

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