Hayward’s Red Boat Fish Sauce chef on must-have umami ingredient

From the banks of Phú Quốc island in Vietnam to a production facility in Hayward, Cuong Pham's chef-lauded fish sauce -- and his family's best recipes -- are the subject of this 10th anniversary cookbook.

As a young child growing up in Orange County, Vietnam-born Diep Tran shopped with her grandparents in the markets of Little Saigon. And every weekend, her elders would inevitably stand and stare, disappointedly, at the walls of condiments, shaking their heads and mumbling that nothing available here was even close to the dish-transforming fish sauces back home.

That changed in 2011, when a determined Pleasanton ex-Apple engineer launched Red Boat Fish Sauce. Instantly embraced by culinary titans like David Chang and Andrea Nguyen, Cuong Pham’s sauce was the first premium, sustainably-sourced fish sauce made using a centuries-old fermentation process and only two ingredients: black anchovies and salt from the island of Phú Quốc in Vietnam. The sauce is produced and packaged at Red Boat’s factory in Hayward.

Tran, a Los Angeles chef, was among the earliest adopters. At the time, she was running Good Girl Dinette, her popular Vietnamese eatery in Highland Park. After one taste, she purchased multiple cases of the amber, intensely fragrant “first-press” sauce and recalibrated all of her recipes — pho, curry, porridge and more — to this one ingredient.

“I was evangelical about it,” recalls Tran, now the R&D chef for Red Boat. “I touched my grandmother’s Catholic medallion that I wear and said, “Props to you, grandma. I get you now.”

Pham himself drove those cases down to L.A. and quickly developed a friendship with Tran. Now, together with Tran’s girlfriend, the writer Tien Nguyen (“L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food” with chef Roy Choi), they have released “The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook: Beloved Recipes from the Family Behind the Purest Fish Sauce” (Harvest, $25).

The book chronicles Pham’s many journeys: His year-long journey from Vietnam to America following the war and later, his journeys back to his home country, beginning in 2006, to recreate the flavors missing in his favorite childhood dishes. The book delves into the art of making fish sauce, from the evaporation ponds where the salt is harvested to the barrel house on Phú Quốc, known as the Champagne of fish sauce for its ideal fermenting environment. There, wild anchovies are caught, immediately salted and fermented for more than a year.

The cookbook includes 100-plus recipes from Pham’s childhood, his current weeknight family table, newly-developed Red Boat recipes and contributions from some of the many chefs who are obsessed with the sauce, like San Francisco’s Stuart Brioza (The Progress, State Bird Provisions) and Santa Monica’s Bryant Ng (Cassia). Tran, who developed the recipes, shares the secrets to superior bánh mì and thịt kho tiêu (braised black pepper pork) and how fish sauce can transform roast chicken, burgers and marinara, and is the perfect substitute for hard cheese in pesto.

In writing the cookbook, it was important to Tran to showcase both Vietnamese and American dishes. And not just savory appetizers, salads and braises, but breakfast staples, like her Good Girl Dinette cured bacon, desserts and drinks, too.

“We wanted to reflect that people, no matter what their ethnicity, do not just cook their own food,” she says. “We’re putting fish sauce in everything.”

Tran was tasked with recreating Pham’s mother’s recipes. She passed away in 2012, a year after she watched her son succeed in his quest to bring premium fish sauce to America. And her recipe notebooks — two of the four found their way to the States after the war — are Pham family treasures.

“It was fun for me,” Tran says. “Her script looked a lot like my grandma’s. Neat and upright. Some of her recipes were detailed. Others were very general. It was all a mnemonic device for her.”

Tran updated Mom’s Gà Quay (roast chicken), traditionally cooked on the stove, with an overnight marinated version that is butterflied and cooked in the oven. But Tran’s tribute to bún kèn, a coconut fish noodle soup found in Phú Quốc, appears untouched. Its complex flavors are achieved by that thoughtful layering of components and textures that makes Vietnamese cuisine so magical.

Most recently, Tran and Pham have worked with local farms on Phú Quốc to bring other products to market, including Red Boat palm sugar, black peppercorns and chef salts. For Tran, however, traveling to Phú Quốc — her first time back in Vietnam since she was 6 — has been one of the most rewarding experiences of this culinary journey.

“Fish sauce is something that most consumers experience just as an end product, so to stand with Cuong at the banks of the Red Boat barrel house was an absolutely unforgettable experience,” she says. “What struck me the most was watching his fishing boats return to the loading dock and seeing the crew transfer, by hand, a literal boatful of salted anchovies to barrels where they will ferment for 12 months before becoming the amber fish sauce that we will eventually see on supermarket shelves.”

And that would have made her grandparents smile with approval.