6 Ingredient Vietnamese Dipping Sauce

This Vietnamese dipping sauce is so good that there’s always a batch in my fridge! Amazing what you can do with 6 ingredients (and one of them is water), and 6 minutes.

The official name is Mama Pham’s Nuoc Mam or Dipping Fish Sauce. It’s from the Omsom website and makes about a cup of dipping sauce.

Vietnamese Dipping Sauce

• 6 tablespoons warm water
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 6 tablespoons fish sauce
• 1 lime, halved
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 bird’s eye, or Thai chili, thinly sliced

Put sugar and water in a bowl and mix until sugar is completely dissolved.

Add fish sauce and stir. Juice the lime and add juice and any pulp to the mixture.

Add garlic and chilis to taste. Serve and enjoy!

My verdict:

Call me addicted! It was an add-on to the Omsom Lemon Grass Pork recipe, and I’m so glad I tried it.  Along with using it as a dipping sauce for their Lemon Grass Pork, I’ve been using it to make rice bowls for lunch. Some (cooked) jasmine rice, a little shredded chicken from a supermarket roast chicken, and what ever Asian vegetables we’ve gotten from our CSA, warmed up in the microwave and topped with the dipping sauce and I’ve got a great lunch! But so far, I haven’t had anything that this doesn’t make better, so experiment and let me know in the comments what you think.

Now when I make it, I put the warm water and sugar in a small container, shake until the sugar is dissolved, add the rest of the ingredients, and then just shake again. 2 large or 3 small garlic cloves and 1 Thai chili are my perfect mix. I’ve been using just slightly less than 6 tablespoons of fish sauce and if you’re not used to using it, you might want to start out with 4-5 and keep tasting until you get it to where you like it. I’ve been using Red Boat, but Squid is good too. If you have a problem getting Thai chilis try using some red pepper flakes.