Vietnamese Ginger Fish Sauce- (Nuoc Mam Gung)

Vietnamese Ginger Fish Sauce (aka Nuoc Mam Gung) is a salty, fishy, sweet, with a little sour and spicy zing. My family would use this as a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce for plain or poached duck, chicken, chicken rice soup (chao ga), steamed stuffed snails (oc nhoi) and pan fried stuffed squid (muc nhoi) and also for grilled seafood like deep fried catfish.

INGREDIENTS

1/4 cup fish sauce
1 tablespoons + 1 tsp granulated white sugar
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh ginger
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh garlic
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice
3 red thai (about 2 tsp) chili peppers (slice thin; remove seeds to reduce heat if needed, you can also sub with jalepeno or any other red hot chili pepper)
1/8 cup water

PREPARATION

1. In a medium bowl, mix together fish sauce and sugar until completely dissolved.
2. Peel the ginger skin (I like to use a spoon to scrape skin off) and discard skins
3. Cut/dice/chop the ginger into smaller minced pieces
4. Peel garlic, cut/dice/chop the ginger into smaller minced pieces
(Or place ginger and garlic clove into a small food processor until finely minced)
5. In medium bowl mix minced ginger and garlic to the fish sauce/sugar mixture and lime juice and chili peppers.
6. Stir to combine, store in fridge, I find that this keeps for quite a while in fridge, couple to few weeks if uncontaminated.

PS- If you don’t have one, I love using my Mexican Beehive Juicer from @Bluecashew Kitchen)