Five Asian Sauces That Make Everything Taste Better

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Growing up, I was obsessed with helping my mom cook. Though she would dabble in making Italian food or try out popular boxed ingredients of the time, most nights featured what she knew best—giant pots of Thai comfort fare and heaping mounds of jasmine rice.

My childhood of ad hoc cooking lessons taught me two things: Jasmine rice goes with everything, and anything can taste good with the help of one of five bottled Asian sauces. I'll assume you have the rice covered, so let me tell you about these sauces.

Fish sauce

This sauce gives you the most flavor bang for your buck. The thin, reddish-brown liquid is made by fermenting small fish, like anchovies, with salt for up to two years. The juice extracted from the mixture is a pungent sauce that brings a blast of umami to any and everything it touches. Add a few drops to fill out the flavor profile of your stir fry, or use it as a major ingredient, like in Thai som tum salad. For fish sauce newbies, just add a few drops to a hearty dish with many components.

You’ll notice a difference in flavor, but you won’t be overwhelmed by fishy flavor. I don’t consider myself much of a fish-head, and this sauce really does taste like fermented fish, but somehow it just works. You can use fish sauce during cooking or as a finishing sauce while eating. I like to add a few dashes to hamburger meat, or make a nam jim with chili peppers and sliced garlic to drizzle it over eggs and rice; and Claire likes to use it to funk up butter, tuna, and chili.

Whichever fish sauce you find will be the best one, but if you have a choice, I like: Squid Brand Fish Sauce

Oyster sauce

The name might include another sea-faring friend, but oyster sauce is entirely different from fish sauce. There are a few sauces that might be described as “oyster sauce,” but in this case I’m talking about a dark brown sauce that’s so thick it’s almost gelatinous. Oyster sauce is often made with oyster extracts, soy sauce, and thickeners, and is both sweet and salty. Add a tablespoon of oyster sauce to deepen the flavors of a dish, or use a few tablespoons as the primary ingredient of a sweet and savory sauce. I add oyster sauce to beef stews in the winter, and use it to build the quintessential sticky glaze for chicken pad see ew.

My favorite oyster sauce: Mae Krua Oyster Sauce

I usually use a combination of two or three sauces in a noodle stir-fry like this one. Credit: Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Mushroom soy sauce

It might be easy to box-in soy sauce as a mere salty condiment, but this liquid gold is as nuanced as wine. I usually keep at least three different types of soy sauce on hand, because they all provide something different. And I need them. All of them.

Mushroom soy sauce can range from thin and medium-brown in color, to slightly viscous and nearly black. Mushroom soy sauce is made using dried black mushrooms and a light soy sauce, and though it doesn’t taste exactly like the fungi, it does taste notably earthier than standard soy sauce. I use light brown mushroom soy sauce rather liberally in dishes, or as a replacement for “regular” soy sauce. If I’m making a pot of turkey chili and looking for a salty, earthy flavor, I’ll splash this in to add some depth to the tomato base.

My fridge houses: Dek Som Boon, also called Healthy Boy Brand Mushroom Soy Sauce

Black mushroom soy sauce

Sometimes, if you’re adding fish sauce and regular soy sauce to a dish already, you don’t necessarily need another salty component. A teaspoon of black mushroom soy sauce, however, gives an entire stir fry a beautiful dark brown color with a touch of sweet, earthy umami, and much less salt. This type of soy sauce still uses dried black mushrooms for added flavor, but the mushroom extracts are added to dark soy sauce, instead of a light one. Dark soy sauce is usually aged longer than the light variety, and some bottles might even include molasses. I like Pearl River Bridge superior black mushroom soy sauce for its dark color and sweet flavor. I splash it (lightly!) into my fried rice, along with regular soy sauce and Golden Mountain Sauce.

My go-to: Pearl River Bridge mushroom flavored superior black soy sauce

Golden Mountain Sauce

The four products I’ve mentioned so far are types of sauces, and you could explore different brands to find your favorite, but Golden Mountain Sauce is a brand of very special seasoning sauce. The ingredient list consists of “soybean sauce,” made from soybeans, corn, water, sugar, and salt. The flavor is salty, malty, savory, and ever-so-slightly sweet. It’s incredibly flavorful, and it’s my favorite all-purpose sauce by a long shot. There's just something about it that tastes like nothing else around. It's perfect dashed upon leftover rice with an egg. (A little dose will do it, but when I was a kid I had to make sure every grain of rice had a pool of this sauce around it.)

Golden Mountain Sauce is great in stir fries, as a dipping sauce for dumplings, and is an exceptional partner for eggs, but you can sprinkle it over anything to improve the flavor. If you can’t find Golden Mountain Sauce, you can try the very similar Maggi Seasoning, but keep your eyes peeled for the real deal with a green and yellow label at your local Asian grocery stores.

Or you could order it, of course: Golden Mountain Sauce

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