Fall in love with jellyfish dipped in fish sauce

04/04/2022 08:17 GMT+7

After being treated for COVID-19, I didn’t feel good about anything I ate. I remember and crave the jellyfish dipping sauce my mother made; You can clearly feel the spicy, acrid, bitter, and salty flavors that are attractively mixed with spices, served with crunchy jellyfish. Although I have tried many dishes from jellyfish, for me, jellyfish with fish sauce made by my mother is still the best.

In my hometown, the jellyfish season usually starts in December of the previous year and ends in the third lunar month of the following year. The caught jellyfish are both sold and used to make dishes for family meals. In those days, jellyfish were very cheap because few people knew how to eat and sell, and no one bought them, so people didn’t catch much. Only those who like to eat, wait for the jellyfish to drift near the shore, then wade out to catch it by hand.

The new jellyfish brought back from the beach still has a lot of water and sand. To remove the fishy smell, remove the sand and help the jellyfish to be firm, my mother often uses guava leaves and cooks them with water to soak the jellyfish. If she doesn’t use guava leaves, she cooks the bark of the poplar tree (Casuarina) to soak, the jellyfish is both crispy and pink-red, looking very beautiful.

At this stage, the water just needs to be warm, but if it’s too hot, the jellyfish will melt. The acrid taste of guava leaves helps to firm up the jellyfish meat and make it more crispy. Soak the jellyfish for about an hour, my mother took the jellyfish out of the basket to drain.

The accompanying vegetables such as figs, eggplants, bananas, jackfruit bran are thinly sliced, soaked in salt water to prevent darkening, along with parsley, herbs, and many other vegetables depending on the taste of each person. . After the preliminary processing of jellyfish, just add a cup of fish sauce to serve.

Mam ruoc in my hometown is made from fresh sea snails. The incubation time is at least six months, delicious fish sauce has a beautiful red color, often used as a condiment to make the dish more delicious.

To make jellyfish sauce, you just need to crush garlic and chili thoroughly with roasted peanuts, add the shrimp paste and add MSG, sugar and then steam it. When I was a child, my mother would make a cup of fish sauce that was not spicy, only fatty peanuts mixed with shrimp paste for my sisters.

When I grew up, I realized that fish sauce to eat with jellyfish must be very spicy to be delicious. When eaten with a piece of jellyfish and vegetables with spicy sauce, the eater will feel the crunchy, lumpy jellyfish pieces that melt in the mouth with enough spicy, acrid, and very attractive taste. I remember once, during a meal with jellyfish dipped in fish sauce, my sister did not dare to eat it because she thought the jellyfish had not been cooked. I picked up a few pieces of jellyfish and put them in the pot to boil, the result was only one pot of water, making the whole family laugh.

In recent years, jellyfish has become a popular food, purchased at boats and distributed by traders everywhere, so I can still buy dried jellyfish in the city. Pre-prepared dried jellyfish is very convenient, but I can’t find the crispy sweet taste of fresh jellyfish brought back from the beach with a cup of home-flavoured fish sauce.

According to www.phunuonline.com.vn