GoKawiilTake capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary's, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn't permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary's have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week.
There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove—some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador budgeted $2 million for the job, which was taken up by a local engineering firm and is expected to be completed in October. As workers cut open the vats, viscous brown fish goo shot out onto the factory floor. It will be mixed with peat moss, hauled out in about 200 truckloads, and thrown in a landfill lined with polyethylene, after which it will be sealed up "like a Ziploc," according to the lead engineer on the project. St. Mary's Mayor Steve Ryan reportedly teared up while describing new hope. "To be known as the 'sauce plant mayor' … it's time for that to be over," he said.
Even in ideal circumstances, the creation of good fish sauce is a stinky process, but the resulting umami bomb is well worth it. The Atlantic Seafood Sauce Company began in 1990 with the (sound!) idea to make use of someone else's waste product. A processing plant in St. Mary's was sending female capelin to Japan so their eggs could be used for masago; the male capelin were of no use to them. Vietnamese immigrant Sahn Ngo saw in these castoff fish an opportunity to brew one of the signature sauces of his cuisine. But after his company was blocked by regulators—check out this Eater feature for nuance—it closed up shop in 2001, leaving behind the vats of sauce in progress. I can't be the only person out there staring at these torrents of fish mud and wondering about the tasting notes. In fact, I know I'm not, having spoken to food scientist Bryan Quoc Le earlier this week. Given his background in chemistry and Vietnamese cuisine, he was the ideal expert to unpack this horrifying and possibly delicious situation.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I wanted to start off and take a more normal scenario and understand the chemistry in a more traditional fish sauce, where we start with the fish and the salt. My understanding is that enzymes from the gut of the fish do the work of digesting the proteins, and breaking them down into amino acids, which have tasty properties, and that's why we like the fish sauce. And the high salt content helps keep this process safe and makes sure that the right kinds of bacteria are able to outcompete the harmful kinds.
That's exactly right. Basically what's happening is in the intestines of the fish, the enzymes are being released, and the enzymes start to break down the proteins. First, they chop them up into fairly large chunks, but then over time they start to liquefy as you get down to the amino acid content. And most proteins are about 30 percent or 40 percent glutamic acid, and so a lot of the initial flavor profile is from that glutamic acid content that gives you the umami flavor.
The salt helps protect the fish. It protects it from the presence of pathogens. That's the really important part of that process. But it also protects it from bacteria and yeast that might cause some kind of rancidification that is undesirable, right? Then it serves as a sort of amplifier of the flavor, too. In order to have glutamic acid be experienced as umami, you also need sodium ions. Together, it's necessary—pure glutamic acid actually tastes like soap.
Fish sauce is typically made on something like a yearlong time frame. This is a very, very different situation, and I doubt there's any literature on long-term fish fermentation.
I would want to fly there and just see what happens.
That's how I feel.
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