The motivation for the original post was to make a vegan version of Andrea Nguyen’s butternut ginger congee, which uses fish sauce. Thank you for the miso suggestions— miso made the dish a success! I committed to miso after toying around with nutritional yeast flakes, miso, and Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for vegan fish sauce (nuoc mam chay) in a coconut curry soup and random leftovers.
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Miso: I tempered the miso in hot soups (coconut curry, and a butternut squash and rice congee), and incorporated enough of the mixture back into the pots until the umami became present. The miso added richness and umami. Note that once the soup cooled, the extra umami was hard to taste!
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Andrea Nguyen’s recipe for vegetarian fish sauce smells and tastes like kombu, and has the tongue feel you get when MSG is added to a dish. It tastes potent, but I had to add so much to the soups that it began to water them down before I could even taste their presence. Vegetarian fish sauce seems better suited to dipping sauces or lighter broths than what I was using. But it’s promising-- the ingredients (mushroom seasoning and kombu) are things I’ll keep around for future tweaks.
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Nutritional yeast flakes didn’t match the flavors of the dishes I tested them with,
but it’s something I’ll start keeping on the table top for seasoning dishes. -
Fish sauce: not surprisingly, real fish sauce was the best of all worlds. Cheap, long shelf life, doesn’t add excess liquid, and doesn’t require an extra trip to the supermarket. Magical stuff. Unless I’m making it for a vegetarian audience again, I’ll continue to use it in butternut squash congee instead of miso.
