Thai dipping sauce is versatile and can be served with various dishes. The base can be soy sauce, fish sauce, or rice vinegar, and additional flavorings can include herbs, spices, sugar, and carrots. Fresh ingredients are preferred, and sauces can be simmered for hours to enhance the flavor.
Thai dipping sauce is often served with fish strips, grilled chicken, prawns, Thai spring rolls, or stuffed dumplings. There are just a few rules to making your own Thai dipping sauce, which means you can pick your favorite Asian flavors and mix and match them. Typically, Thai dipping sauce recipes include both spicy and sweet notes, as well as something savory. The base is usually soy sauce, fish sauce or rice vinegar.
The first choice you have to make when choosing a Thai dipping sauce is about the base. Fish sauce has a very salty and distinctly fishy taste that some enjoy and others find very unpleasant. Soy sauce is dark, salty, and tangy, while rice vinegar is light, acidic, and very thin. Choose the base that best suits your personal tastes, as there are no wrong choices. You can also mix bases, choosing two or mixing all three together. You can only add one at a time until you discover a pleasing combination.
The next thing to consider for your Thai dipping sauce is additional flavoring. These are usually herbs and spices, both fresh and dried, which give the dipping sauce a very Asian flavor. Traditional Thai dipping sauce recipes may contain lemongrass, ginger, garlic, chives and red pepper flakes. You can add a little of all of these ingredients or just mix and match your favorites. A sweet sauce may contain ginger, lemongrass and sugar mixed with rice vinegar and a little soy sauce. A more savory recipe might contain a base of fish sauce and soy sauce mixed with garlic, red pepper flakes and chives.
Fresh or powdered versions of all your herbs can be used, but fresh ingredients tend to infuse more flavor into the Thai sauce. Once chopped, the fresh herbs release their juices and flavors into the base of the sauce. Cooks sometimes prepare their dipping sauces ahead of time and let them simmer for several hours before serving. This helps complement the taste of the sauces.
Sugar and carrots are also popular ingredients in Thai dipping sauce. Carrots, especially when grated or finely julienned, give the sauce a light sweetness and draw a lot of flavor out of the sauce. This means carrots can be sprinkled on dipped food to add flavor without dipping that food into the sauce. Many cooks use sugar to counteract tartness and spiciness, so if you taste the sauce and its flavors are overwhelming, a spoonful of sugar might help.
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