Adventure with Phu Quoc style herring salad

Herring salad, the name sounds very simple, but it makes those who have tried it remember it. Because there, the person enjoying it feels like they are in a world of sounds and colors, of the delicate blend of "homegrown" herbs and spices that many generations of people in Phu Quoc have created.

Herring salad is now available in many luxury restaurants, but if you try it once in Phu Quoc, gourmets will feel the difference right in the sea where it was born.

First is the dipping sauce. It is still sour, spicy, and sweet, but the authentic Phu Quoc dipping sauce for herring salad always has its own unique flavor.

According to the elders here, the sour taste in the dipping sauce does not come from lemon, tamarind or star fruit, but from another specialty of the Pearl Island, sour shrimp. After pounding and filtering, add minced garlic, chili, sugar, and crushed roasted peanuts until smooth and thick so that the dipping sauce can easily stick to the spring rolls, creating a rich flavor.

Freshly caught herring, after cleaning, fillet both sides, marinate in lemon juice until rare, then take out and wait for it to drain before arranging on a plate. Lemon juice to make rare herring is also very elaborate. The lemon must be peeled, seeded, separated into segments, then crushed. Therefore, it does not have the "bitter" taste of the peel, but has the right sour taste. The water used to soften the rice paper for the spring rolls is also unique. It is the juice from grated coconut, so the rice paper is both chewy and has a strange fatty taste.

And as the old saying goes: “the fish makes the vegetable leaves”. Phu Quoc style herring salad must have the right vegetables to go with it. Cucumber split lengthwise, pineapple split horizontally to stick a part of the crispy pulp, then herbs, chives, wild galangal shoots… and especially must have thinly shredded coconut. A little bit of each is placed on the rice paper, then add the cooked herring, roll it up to fit your mouth. Dip the spring roll into the thick dipping sauce… Oh my, the whole world of sounds, flavors, and colors seem to converge here. A little crunch of raw vegetables, mixed with the fatty taste of the coconut, soft, fragrant fish meat, blended with the taste of peanuts, creating a “chorus” with enough sour, spicy, sweet, fatty, and rich flavors to make you ecstatic.

Heritage Magazine