By Andrea Nguyen
Every good Vietnamese cook needs to master this dipping sauce. It's used in many dishes to bring all the elements together. However, it can be easily botched, especially if your taste buds are not well versed in balancing subtle nuances between sour, sweet, salty and spicy. Additionally, flavoring with fish sauce is tough if you're not used to working with it everyday, not to mention the fact that fish sauce qualities differ from brand to brand and sometimes from lot to lot!
Growing up, I was given the task of being our family's dipping saucier. We are a serious group of eaters prone to chiding the cook for poor food preparation. So out of self-preservation, I devised the method below that's served me well over the years. Rather than mix everything together at once, I've broken up the process to simplify matters for the taste buds.
Fish Sauce Choices
You have many choices of fish sauce these days. Many people prefer brands such as Viet Huong's Three Crabs or Flying Lion, which are made in a light Vietnamese style, rather than the heavier Thai or Filipino styles. Nowadays, there are artisanal options from Vietnam, such as Red Boat and Son fish sauce too! For a general discussion, take a look at my guide on how to buy and use fish sauce. If you shop at regular supermarkets, check out my supermarket fish sauce tasting notes to help you shop and select a brand. Many people wonder how to keep fish sauce around, so I also have tips on how to store fish sauce.
Interested in vegetarian or vegan takes? Check thevegetarian fish sauce dipping sauce recipe (nuoc cham chay). If you have my 2023 book, Ever-Green Vietnamese, use the vegan fish sauce recipe on page 29 to make excellent nuoc mam chay!
Print Recipe
Nước Chấm Dipping Sauce
One batch of this recipe yields 1 cup. Simply double or triple the amount when scaling up. UPDATED: 2023
Servings: 4
Ingredients
- 3 to 4 tablespoons fresh lime juice (2 limes)
- 2 to 2 ½ tablespoons sugar, agave, or honey
- ½ cup lukewarm water
- Unseasoned rice vinegar
- 3 to 4 tablespoons fish sauce
Optional additions
- 1 large garlic clove, minced
- 1 or 2 Thai chilis, thinly sliced, or 2 or 3 teaspoons chili garlic sauce
- ¼ cup coarsely grated carrot
Instructions
Make a tangy base. Combine the lime juice, sugar, and water, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Taste and as yourself this question: Does this limeade taste good? Adjust the flavors to balance out the sweet and sour. If the flavor is bitter, add a teaspoon or so of rice vinegar.
Finish with fish sauce. Add the fish sauce and any of the optional ingredients. Taste again and adjust the flavors to your liking, balancing out the sour, sweet, salty and spicy. Aim for a bold, forward finish -- perhaps a little stronger than what you'd normally like. This sauce is likely to be used to add final flavor to foods wrapped in lettuce or herbs, which are not salted and therefore need a little lift to heighten the overall eating experience. My mother looks for color to gauge her dipping sauce. When it's a light honey or amber, she knows she's close.
Add extras. Add enough of the chile for heat, garlic for pungency, and carrot for color, slight crunch and a touch of sweetness. Set the sauce at the table so dinners may help themselves, or portion into individual dipping sauce bowls.
Notes
Advance Preparation: This sauce may be prepared early in the day and left to sit at room temperature.
Variation: To make nước chấm that can be stored for a week, instead of lime juice use apple cider or rice vinegar. Or, do a combo by using 2 ½ tablespoons of the vinegar and 2 teaspoons of lime juice.
More Recipes: All
- Vietnamese Bolognese (Bo Kho Meat Sauce)
- Hawaiian Tofu Watercress Salad Recipe
- Vietnamese Chile Sauce Recipe (Tuong Ot Vietnam)
- Persimmon Spice Cookies
Reader Interactions
Comments
sue bette
This is a great post & I really appreciate the buying guide that you have put together! I've been using fish sauce in a chicken wing recipe lately and it has been out of this world.
Naomi
Thanks for another great post! My nuoc cham never quite turns out right and I can't wait to give this approach a try!
Andrea Nguyen
This method allows you to take control of the flavoring process! Enjoy.
Joel
Is it usual to use vinegar in the preparation of nuoc cham? Probably 90% of the nuoc cham I have tried in Hong Kong, New Zealand, or the States and Canada have vinegar in it. Another optional addition is very finely julienned carrot to thickness of just a little thicker than human hair.
Aside: I'm now aware it is traditionally not served with pho, but many Chinese in HK mistaken nuoc cham as a condiment for pho and use it as a dipping for the beef slices. I even at one point used nuoc cham asAndrea Nguyen
All over lot of restaurants nowadays use vinegar instead of lime juice for nuoc cham as it's more consistent, cheaper and convenient. The flavor is flat by comparison, and the sauce is devoid of the lime pulp, which lends great body. The carrot is a beautiful addition and sometimes, it adds a certain tang and obvious crunch too. Usually, there's a jar of pickled shredded (finely julienned) carrot and/or daikon around, you add it to nuoc cham for interest. I often find that it gets in the way, th
Anonymous
Good observation, Andrea. Usually there isn't as much fish sauce added in the nuoc cham, which makes it more like a hot (spicy) and sour sauce with a kick of fishy taste.
Joel
Oops, forgot to add my name in the last post...
Andrea Nguyen
Joel, So kinda like a fishy tasting light vinegar. Hmm...
Aparna
Thanks for this great post.
It looks really delicious.Maggie
I bought your book last fall and finally made this recipe. I was wondering if it is the same sauce used for the dish bun cha, which I tried to recreate for the first time. I followed your instructions in the book, for grinding the garlic and chili in a mortar and "smearing it" ; then added the sugar (even I had raw sugar, the big chunky brown raw sugar) and that worked fine. I didn't realize the differences between fish sauce, the kind I used (3 crabs) was really strong and dark so I ended up ad
Lauren
Don't know if it's that my tastebuds got used to something different used here in San Francisco's Vietnamese restaurants (though during my trip to Vietnam I had the same flavor experience), but I like my nuoc cham with about half that amount of water for bun salads in particular. It can always be watered down but harder to make it more intensely flavored
Excellent base recipe!CR CONDOS
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Do you think they should split the fish catagory into saltwater and freshwater and then other stuff? Would make sense to me but i dunno Where can you make suggestions? lol
Alain
I made nuoc cham from this recipe and although it tasted fantastic, the dipping sauce is cloudy compared with the posted pictures or the nuoc cham restaurant. I wonder where I go wrong..I think it is due to the lime juice...Would you please help?
J
I always heat mine up on med-low heat for about 10 mins- the water evaporates and the flavors of the lime, vinegar, fish sauce, chilis and sometimes garlic, intensifies.
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Thanks a lot for this recipe, now I'll know what I'm eating when I go to a chinese restaurant. I even will try your recipe 😀
A Davis
This sauce has become a staple in my refrigerator, it is so delicious on everything. Thank you!
jacki
Hi. I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out a vietnamese dessert I once ate as a child. I remember that it was sweet, wrapped in banana leaf (I think) and it was refrigerated. There was no meat in the middle like some of the recipes I've seen and again, it was very sweet. I remember sticky rice in it though. I've been to vietnamese grocery stores and have bought several packages of sweet rice wrapped in banana leaves but have not found that dessert. I know that some of these banan
John
See Also50 Keto Ground Turkey RecipesI've recently learned how to make this from my mom. She, on the other hand, never actually measures anything. She just puts things in and stops when there's "enough," so learning how much of each ingredient have been a long process.
I've gotten very close to her nuoc cham. It is similar to yours but is much stronger, and it seems that most restaurants use this recipe (which we consider flat tasting).
I'd say that the main difference between her recipe and this one is that her's is more of flaDenise
I am so glad I found this site. I just made the chili-garlic paste with a mixture of I think red jalapenos and one yellow habanero. I think I may have been too cautious. I tried the recipe that is cooked and just as you said it had a sweet note but definitely some heat, not overpowering or as hot as I expected though. I probably could have left more of the seeds or stem in tack to pick up the heat.
I proceeded to then make the Nuoc Cham recipe above. I didn't use quite as much sugar because IAlbuthtot
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This recipie looks amazing!
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Love the red ones, this is better matched with fried fish or breaded pork don't you think?
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Yea, those red ones look great... add some fried fish and you're set.
James
I've to try the recipe for my pleasure of eating:)
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Great dipping sauce recipe. Hardly you see sweet go with spices so this is a challenging and innovative recipe.
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I love the asian foods, so a tasty recipe I never refuse.
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This is perfect I had never seen a dip like this one it's really creative I think I'm gonna improvise something like this sauce at home because it seems exotic.
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nonymoose
this tastes awful, nothing like the one at the restaurant i ate it at.
the minute i put the fish sauce in, it went kablooey. tasted like salty-sweet fish. i didnt even know how to adjust this because it tasted so bad.Usha Hannigan
Fell in love with this sauce when I lived in Minneapolis, where we had many good, inexpensive Vietnamese restaurants. Now I live in Pennsylvania, with no good Vietnamese food. Glad to find this recipe and website. (It must drive you crazy that some people think its the same as Chinese food.)
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Bubo
I love introduce the Viet foods to my friends. However, some of them don't like the smell of nước nắm. Last summer, when I went back to Sài Gòn, a Chef in a local restaurant told me to cook the sauce and show me the sample. It had the subtle savory flavor and less fishy and looked more viscous. He recommended me to use nước mắm nhĩ anh frend coconut juice for my dipping sauce. But when I made this some weeks ago, it didn't work out. The outcome was not only salty but also bitter. An
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J
Would anyone happen to know why my nuoc cham taste/smell really fishy? I used the Three Crab brand fish sauce but I don't know how long I've had it...definitely more than 3 months. I store it in the back of the cabinet; it's pretty cool here in Portland, OR. Is it because my fish sauce is "too old?" I was told that fish sauce can be stored forever like soy sauce as long as they don't mold. I'm more experienced with soy sauce since I'm Chinese. Though older soy sauce never got me or my family sic
erin
Your method works so well: It was relatively easy to put this together for the first time and make a sauce that everyone liked!
Thank you for the recipe!lola
this recipe is SO GOOD! i searched far and wide on the internet for nuoc cham recipes and the majority of them all tell you to put equal parts fish sauce to water which does not result in the taste i wanted, but this recipe is perfect! and you can always tweak it to your personal preferences
Goody2shz
Just made this sauce. It's fantastic! Lots of interesting stuff on this site. Thanks!
On another note, is anyone actively maintaining the site? Can't you remove the spam, like Albuthtot's above?Skagway AK
Thanks for the recipe! I’ve been making up my own nuoc cham for awhile, but wanted to see if mine was even close (it is – we use the same brand of fish sauce!). I LOVE Vietnamese food!
Leo
Bakka,,,, y? Think~~!!!
What vinegar taste like?
And,what lime juice taste like?
U get it?Thomas
Great post! Have nice day ! 🙂 hsckh
Frances
Thank you for this recipe. I used half lime juice and half rice vinegar -- I had a tiny, skinny lime. Anthony Bourdain's death brought me here: I watched his episode of Parts Unknown on Vietnam, had a hankering for bun cha and, living in the Vietnamese food wasteland that is northern NJ, decided to make my own.
Andrea Nguyen
That's wonderful, Frances. Welcome and thank you!
Y Wang
I tried the fish sauce recipe and it was a great success! The lime is the key that makes the whole sauce came together! We have our first cold rice noodle for lunch today - a very hot summer weekend even in Southern California by the beach - 92 degree! Would recommend this recipe to my friends!
Andrea Nguyen
Hooray!!! It was incredibly hot in SoCal last week so I'm thrilled you had a cooling noodle dish at your hand. Thank you for writing.
