The Popular Vietnamese Fish Sauce Chef Melissa King Swears By

If you're new to it, the sauce aisle at Asian grocery stores can be downright intimidating. There's a whole universe of soy sauces, versatile ingredients like oyster sauce, and one kitchen staple for many households: fish sauce. And even then, there's a wide array of fish sauce brands available. Celebrity chef Melissa King once posted a helpful video on Instagram giving her followers a bird's-eye view of the sauce aisle, and couched within it was her recommendation for the very fish sauce that she buys.

That would be the Viet Huong Three Crabs fish sauce, simply called "Three Crabs" by most. It comes in a clear glass bottle featuring a white-pink gradient label (with three crabs for the logo, naturally), and it's also the same fish sauce I keep stocked in my home kitchen. 

While Viet Huong is a company founded by a Chinese-born Vietnamese immigrant to the United States, it's actually a product of Thailand that's processed in Hong Kong (I know, confusing). To top it off, it's so popular in other types of cuisines that it has multiple languages written on the label, including Korean. Three Crabs is the sauce I watched my mom use while growing up, and it's my favorite for its balanced flavor and sweetness, though its savory and deeply umami punch is typically what you use it for.

When you take your first whiff of any fish sauce, you'll notice it smells awfully strong. It's tangy and pungent to some, perhaps, but once you get used to cooking with it, you'll understand why it's such a useful ingredient to have on hand. 

Traditionally, you can use fish sauce to make Southeast dipping sauces like Thai nam jim jaew or Vietnamese nuoc cham, or incorporate it into pretty much anything that requires a back-end dose of umami flavor. (I'm a particular fan of the Laotian jeow som sauce, which is easy to make.) That means you can include a splash of the fish sauce in things like meatloaf, scrambled eggs, tomato-based sauces, chili, and even use it in a pinch for Caesar salad dressing if you're out of anchovies. 

As you'd imagine, there are other fish sauces for different sub-categories of Asian cuisines, like Thai, Korean, and Vietnamese — but the one that I've found that covers everything well, including Western cooking, has always been Three Crabs. So if the Asian grocery sauce aisle has always been daunting to you, at least you know which bottle of fish sauce to start with; it's celebrity chef Melissa King-approved.