Village Craft · Slow-Fermented Fish Sauce

Tuk Trei Kampot (Kampot Fish Sauce)

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Kampot's largest producer alone ferments about 10,000 liters of it a day in traditional wooden vats, some of it aged as long as two years before it's ever bottled.

Saltwater fish is layered with Kampot sea salt and left to ferment for months to years in wooden barrels, producing a dark, pungent, deeply savory sauce that's ladled over rice, dipped into, or used to season nearly every stall dish in the province. Market stalls and roadside shops sell it by the bottle straight from the source village.

Why it's made this way: Kampot's coastal salt flats and fishing grounds made it a natural fish sauce-producing region for generations, and by early 2023 Cambodia's Ministry of Commerce had moved Kampot-Kep fish sauce into the final stages of official Geographical Indication registration, aiming to protect the name for sauce made only there.

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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.