Cooking Recipes

Fish sauce is a staple in Southeast and East Asian cooking, but finding a substitute can be challenging for vegetarians and vegans. This plant-based, Vegan Fish Sauce is made with dried shiitake mushrooms, liquid aminos, and soy sauce and adds umami to your favorite dishes!

I quickly learned that one of the challenges of cooking many Southeast and East Asian dishes and transforming it into a vegetarian dish wasn’t the question of what to do with the meat or seafood, but rather how to season it without a very critical ingredient: fish sauce.

Used in place of salt, fish sauce is not only important for making a dish salty, but giving it that certain umami that can’t be achieved with kosher salt alone. I quickly learned this when making vegetarian pad Thai and vegetarian pancit. Traditional fish sauce is made by fermenting anchovies and salt for 1 year or up to 18 months, and when the precious liquid is pressed, it adds a very concentrated depth of flavor to dishes. Between you and me, when cooking a vegetarian dish for myself, I would let a teaspoon of fish sauce slide in the dish, but I knew I had to try a substitute since the challenge of making a dish truly vegetarian isn’t complete without one.

I did some quick investigation of what products are out there and found that the answer is, well, not much. But I did find that there are other ways to create a vegan fish sauce at home. Methods and ingredients vary, and of course, some are more complicated than others – some use dried mushrooms, others soy sauce, and some had longer ingredient lists than others. I wanted something simple, because cooking is hard enough, and cooking a delicious vegetarian dish should not be any harder.

This vegan fish sauce can’t get any simpler. Dried shiitake mushrooms, water, soy sauce, and liquid aminos – four ingredients that simmer and reduce to resemble the salty, flavorful depth of flavor found in fish sauce. I found it worked quite well in those noodle dishes – to be honest, I was surprised how well, actually! My discerning tongue was satisfied, and my family didn’t notice a difference, which means I’ll be keeping this on hand from now on!