Baking is an age-old pastime that is enjoyed by people of all generations, passing tips, hacks, and secret family recipes to each other. Everybody loves a freshly baked cookie, but sometimes if their flavour isn’t balanced correctly, they can taste bland.
However, a cooking expert argued that to amplify any cookie recipe, all you need is one very surprising ingredient – and it’s not what you think. A common ingredient added to cookie dough is salt to help balance out the sweetness of. But Simply Recipe’s Kat Lieu takes it one step further.
A secret she learned from her Vietnamese gran, Ah Ma, includes using fish sauce in sweet treats. An ingredient usually reserved for savoury dishes, Kat explained that it helps to balance out the brown sugar, while helping the chocolate to “shine brighter”, and also giving cookies a burst of umami.
Kat revealed: “A few years ago when I called her (she lived in Montreal then, and I lived in Brooklyn), I told her I was mixing miso and soy sauce into my cookie dough. She replied, ‘Try adding some fish sauce next time.’”
So what’s the best way of enhancing the flavour of the cookies to give it that salty, umami tang? To make sure you don’t overdo the salt or fishy flavour, use half a tablespoon of the sauce for a batch of 12 large cookies.
Kat explained that the best time to add fish sauce to the cookie dough is after you’ve creamed the butter and sugar together, just as you mix in the eggs. Make sure to add the fish sauce before you add any dry ingredients to the dough.
This will help to blend the fish sauce’s flavour “seamlessly” into the dough. If you’ve used the likes of miso or soy sauce to your sweet treats before, you can incorporate up to one whole tablespoon of the fish sauce, if you’re brave enough.
Fish sauce doesn’t have to be reserved for only savoury food, and Kat said that it works for a plethora of sweet treats, not just cookies. It can be incorporated into the likes of caramels, buttercreams, or even in a cake batter.
She said: “Fish sauce in cookies might sound chaotic, but trust the process. Bake them, share them, and let everyone in on the secret. It’s one worth sharing—and even passing down.”
