Amy Wong’s Three-Flavour Sauce

This is another handy sauce from Amy Wong’s Savoury Sauces: Favourite Cooking Hacks, which I bought in Penang a few years ago.

But there are more than three flavours at work in this sauce. There is sweet from Thai sweet chili sauce and sugar; sour, from tamarind paste; spicy from fresh red chilies; salty/umami from Chinese bean paste; lemony from lemongrass; and garlicky from a lot of garlic.

The ingredients are all listed by weight, so having a small digital scale will make it easier. (If you can, default to the metric measurements given in case I have screwed up the conversion to standard measurements.)

Once you have collected the ingredients and blended them, you have just two steps to do. Pretty easy. I made a half batch of the recipe to try it out, and ended up with about 2 pints (4 cups) of sauce:

Amy Wong’s Three-Flavour Sauce

Ingredients:

• 

  90g / 3.2oz fresh red chilies, blended

• 125g / 4.4oz lemongrass, blended or pounded
• 100g / 3.5oz garlic, blended
• 150g / 5.3oz bean paste
• 250ml / 1c oil

Seasonings:

• 200g / 7oz Thai chili sauce
• 150g / 5.3oz tamarind paste, mixed with 250ml / 1c of water
• 50g / 1/4c chicken stock powder
• 90g / 1/2c sugar
• 1.5T white vinegar

Method:

1. Heat the oil in a wok and stir-fry all the ingredients over low heat until fragrant.
2. Add the tamarind water and the seasonings and bring to a boil.

My Improvisations:

Since I didn’t have any stock powder and generally avoid stuff like that, I just added some homemade chicken stock that I had in the freezer.  You could also use vegetable stock or veggie stock powder if you want to keep it vegetarian/vegan.

How to Use It

In her book, Amy Wong has a few example recipes for how to use this sauce, among others, one with steamed enoki mushrooms and fish, another stir-fried with spare ribs and tomatoes.

I’ve found it makes a great Pad Thai noodles sauce with the addition of a bit of fish sauce.

Tonight I broiled some eggplant slices after brushing them with oil, then topped them with a couple of pan-fried salmon fillets, and then poured some heated up 3-flavour sauce over it. Yumm!