My high school Latin classmates and I made garum and left it to ferment in my back yard for a month. Young and foolish as we were, we stored it in a plastic Tupperware container. The day I brought it back to school for the class tasting, I had it sitting on a stack of piano books in the passenger seat of my car.

Weeks later, the rotted fish stench just wouldn't fade from my book of Beethoven sonatas. I ended up throwing it away.

I bought a bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce (Red Boat brand, the most recommended brand) and added a teaspoon to some pea leaves. I loved the resulting flavor, but my partner did not and complained that it had too much of a fishy smell. A lot of cooking techniques actually seek to remove this fishy smell even when cooking fish, so it was not welcome to add this to something that didn’t contain fish in the first place. It’s certainly not a flavor everyone would like.

I'm just here to thank Kenji for making me try fish sauce.

Thanks for sharing. It is especially interesting to hear the factors that contributed to the decline of fish sauce use in the west.

One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.

Homemade garum is a fun kitchen experiment, if you have the equipment and patience. Heat + protease + protein substrate is really all you need.