Very intensive history of the Red Boat Company and fish sauce. I liked the personal influence, and even pictures straight from family recipe books! Many of the recipes were for larger servings but leftovers were still delicious. Let me tell you, the Red Boat Bric-a-brac is addictive so beware!! That one I would make in bulk and eat it all myself. Very informative, super fun and colorful, lots of pictures, and great recipes. Red Boat is now a staple in my pantry! I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving a free copy.

I love everything about this book. It's vibrant and bursting with life from the book cover down to the very last page. The style in which this was written is direct and engaging yet heartfelt. I've known about the author for all of 24 pages and already I found myself getting inspired by his him being inspired by Steve Jobs; cheering for the highs and crying for the lows of his life. And as for the recipes, they're amazing and delicious!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for this free digital ARC. This review is made of my own accord with no monetary compensation whatsoever from the names listed above and/or the rightful owners of this ARC.

The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook is a beautiful fusion of cross-culture synergy and tasty twists on familiar traditional recipes. Due out in late 2021 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it's 320 pages and will be available in hardcover and ebook formats.

This is, certainly, a recipe collection and cookbook packed with tasty recipes. More than that, though, it's a readable and engaging family story of food and hospitality which tie us all together with bonds of culture and the very basic desire to feed and care for our families and our wider communities. The highlights of the book for me were the asides and the story of the origins of the Red Boat company and the owner/proprietor.

I also liked the logical and accessible layout of the book. Following the introduction, there is an information dense and useful primer on the special ingredients used in many Southeast Asian cuisines (and where to find them and how to choose the best quality). The recipes which follow are grouped thematically: breakfast, appetizers & snacks, salads & vegetables, braises, seafood, pork, chicken & beef, feasts, sweets & drinks, and pickles sauces condiments & stock.

Recipes have their ingredients listed in bullet lists (American standard measures only), followed by step-by-step prep and serving instructions. Nutritional information is not included. The photography is abundant and colorful. The foods in the photographs are appealingly realistic and not over-styled. Serving suggestions are appealing and appropriate. Sprinkled throughout the recipes are glimpses into the history, culture, production, and packing of Red Boat sauce and other products. The authors have also included some menu planning advice and restaurant tips for visitors who find themselves in Sài Gòn. All of these are accompanied by family photos.

Five stars. Five stars. Five stars. This is a beautifully warm and welcoming family cookbook filled with good food. One of the best American cookbooks I've seen in a while.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

I've only cooked a handful of Vietnamese dishes in my life, so I was very excited to see this cookbook come out! There's some great background into the business and the importance and history of certain ingredients that make it more than a cookbook. A lot of the recipes are easy to make but some have slightly harder ingredients to source than from your regular supermarket. The food photography also looks appetizing and I love the bright colors on every page as well!

Because this is an advance copy, some of the recipes are a bit hard to follow because it will say "for recipe see x" and there is no page referenced to go back to, but this is a small peeve. I wish the chapter titles were written horizontally instead of vertically because it feels weird to have to flip the book to read it. Overall, some really delicious recipes, and I love seeing basics covered so you can change things up to your own taste.

I received The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook as part of a NetGalley giveaway.

The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook is, as you might guess, created by the family business behind Red Boat Fish Sauce, and exclusively contains recipes featuring it. In that sense, it's certainly an advertisement, but in other ways it's very enjoyable. The layout is bright and fun and a contrast to the more streamlined, minimalist approach used with cookbooks today. The recipes are appealing, with lots of fresh ingredients and flavors; however, as a fair warning for people who may not have experience with sourcing Asian ingredients, some of what's listed may be difficult to find. Tor anyone well-versed in it, though, I think this is a great read.

Although I love Vietnamese food, I have to admit to not knowing about the cult status of the famed Red Boat fish sauce, but I'm glad that I do now! This cookbook is also a very effective sales strategy, as I now want to try their fish sauce as well as their salt and peppercorns. More than that, though, the cookbook is also a family history, a treatise on how fish sauce is, and should be, made, and an explanation of the importance of sustainability in production. I really appreciate a cookbook that's inclusive and strives to present a well-rounded worldview of the cuisine it discusses.

The recipes themselves are traditional Vietnamese dishes, many of them from the author's mother and others recreated to his memories of her cooking. There are some other fun gems in there, like pasta, and breakfasts and desserts, showcasing that everything is better with a little quality fish sauce. Some are simple, and some are multi-day or many-hands affairs, perfect for a gathering of family and friends where everyone can pitch in. The design of the book is fun and vibrant with a retro vibe, so I can imagine what a joy it would be to read the hard copy. I definitely recommend this cookbook to anyone with a passing interest in Vietnamese food!

What a sensational cookbook to match such a sensational product. I have been a fan of Red Boat Fish Sauce for years and it has been incredible to witness the growth and success.
The Introduction sets you right into the author's shoes of Vietnam as they walk us through their life in Vietnam, their voyage to the States, and the lovely history of their family and cooking.
The process is fascinating and enriching to discover how much care and consideration goes into this product. I will be reading this one cover to cover and annotating some recipes easy enough to switch to Gluten-Free
and Pork Free.
I will be purchasing a hard copy of this book as soon as it is available. I highly recommend anyone who is interested in Vietnamese cooking or incorporating fish sauce to pick it up.

Just packed with brilliance - I haven't found a bad recipe yet. It's been such a treat to find so many new ways to cook with fish sauce, and to learn more about the culinary history behind it.

I have been a fan of fish sauce for years, ever since my first taste, and always have a bottle of Red Boat Fish Sauce in my pantry being a firm believer that everything is better with fish sauce. When I saw that a cookbook from Red Boat was coming out I knew I had to have it! This cookbook was more than I even imagined. The history of Red Boat was very interesting! Its founder, Cuong Pham, a Vietnamese refugee found himself working for Apple in the early days of Steve Jobs but couldn't forget the flavors of his childhood. He realized that Vietnamese food in the US didn't taste right because the fish sauce wasn't right. He became committed to discovering what made premium authentic fish sauce and invested in a small company in Vietnam. Shortly there after the company told him they wanted out and left him with the company which he parlayed into the number one name in fish sauce.

This is no meager cookbook. There are recipes for everything from breakfast to dinner and cocktails. The Vietnamese standards, Banh Mi and Noodle bowls are included, along with others I've never heard of. Also are several decidedly not Vietnamese dishes that have me the most excited to try. Pasta Marinara, Ribeye w/Red Boat Butter, Burgers with Red Boat Dressing, Bacon, and Bric-a-Brac (their take on Chex Mix). I can only imagine the umami “essence of deliciousness” that Red Boat Fish Sauce will bring to all these dishes.

I also learned that Red Boat has several other products that I was completely unaware of: salt, peppercorns, sugar and others. This cookbook will be released for publication on October 12, 2021 but it available from all the typical booksellers and their website. I will getting mine!

I would like to thank #NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for allowing me to review an e-copy of #TheRedBoatFishSauceCookbook.

I am a big fan of Red Boat Fish Sauce and have been using it in my cooking for a few years now. So when I saw that the people behind the sauce came out with a cookbook I knew I had to check it out. Fun layout with mouth-watering photos. I plan to try some of the recipes. I did notice that there are at least a couple where the ingredients are quite hard to find in the United States so I will have to make some substitutions. I enjoyed reading the stories that are included in the cookbook. Interesting and informative.

This cookbook has a lot of yummy looking recipes. Living in a small town in South Dakota, I do not have access to some of the ingredients, but will be on the lookout for them the next time I am in a city grocery store or specialty store.

As an experienced cook I am continually seeking interesting books to add to my huge culinary (aka out of control) library. This one is educational and inspiring, so much so that I have made several delicious recipes from it. Red Boat fish sauce is sublime and not available in my region so I order it. Now I know the fascinating history behind it! Saveur magazine extols its virtues and Eric Ripert's Le Barnardin was the first restaurant to use it. David Chang is smitten with it. The author is also the founder of the Red Boat company and describes how the sauce is made including the anchovies themselves, the water in which they are fished from, fishing at night, layering into barrels and the pure extraction. Time consuming for sure.

Spices and ingredients are explained, such as the definition of "kho" and palm sugar information. Details like this elevates a good book to a great book. The recipes are explained very well, too. So far I have made and loved Fried Skillet Meat Loaf (wow!), Chicken Wings (oh, man!), Taro Shrimp Fritters (superb) and Braised Ginger Chicken (insanely good). I plan to make many other dishes, too, including Pickled Cabbage, Pasta Marinara (!) and various versions of Nuoc Cham and know some will become favourites. I have never made a peanut coconut Nuoc Cham before but often fry shallots to sprinkle over all sorts of dishes.

Beginner cooks and experts alike will find something in this book to learn and to make. The photographs are not only useful but induce drooling. If this book doesn't inspire you, nothing will.

My sincere thank you to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for the privilege of reading (and cooking from) the e-ARC of this marvelous, marvelous book.

If you like Red Boat Fish Sauce, you need this cookbook. I have tried the reader provided recipes on their website, but really like some of these recipes in the cookbook. A very colorful and full of pictures cookbook.

I received this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Even before this book, I used red boat fish sauce- recommendation of NomNomPaleo, I am lucky I live in Toronto, where asian ingredients and condiments are always readily available.

But I didn't know Red Boat brand also made sugar, salt and other stuff, I'll keep my eyes open for those.

Out of the book, the recipes I tried so far are:

Fish Sauce Marinated Egg- soft boiled egg with runny centres taste so good in this fish sauce mixture.

Stuffed Bitter Melon Soup- I substituted the bitter melon with cucumbers. reduced the cooking time, its very refreshing and "homey" tasting.

Morning Glory with Garlic- one of my fav stir fry veggies

Mango sticky rice- probably my fav Asian dessert, very simple to make, the salt in the coconut cream is vital.

When I first spent a month in Southeast Asia I fell in love with the food. The flavors were unlike anything I had ever experienced and I wanted to take home as much of that as I could. The best I could do was some dry herbs and recipes that I collected throughout my trip. I could never quite duplicate it the way it was there and attributed that to two things: it ALWAYS tastes better when someone else is cooking, even if you follow their recipe to the letter, and the ingredients at home were just not on the same level. That’s when a friend introduced me to Red Boat Fish Sauce. It was the start of my journey to getting as close to the original recipes as I could.

While I have since moved and have a large Asian grocery supermarket I frequent, I still only use Red Boat Fish Sauce. This book is filled with so many great recipes that my husband is going to start complaining that I’ve become Asian again…with blonde hair and blue eyes, I doubt anyone will buy that, but man, I am ready to make a boat load of these recipes! I see a trip to Super Cao Nguyen in my future this weekend!

I loved this cookbook as much for the human story as for the recipes. Author Cuong Pham's tale of his escape from war torn Vietnam in 1979 and arriving in the United States nine months later, aged just twenty, is absolutely gripping. He took a degree and then got a job with Steve Jobs at a small computer company called Apple. This section of his story is surely worth an entire book in it's own right as his five siblings and other family members were also escaping from Vietnam to join him at this time, with their mother only able to join them in 1990.

While you could get fish sauce in California, none tasted anywhere hear as good as the fish sauce they'd grown up with in Saigon which came from Phú Quốc, an island off Vietnam. In 2006, Cuong, was visiting Vietnam a lot on business and went to meet the owners of a fish sauce factory in Phú Quốc. This led to a deal and him eventually becoming the owner of this factory and spending many years on perfecting the making of the best ever fish sauce which is now sold and marketing as Red Boat Fish Sauce. I loved the section on the process of the making with details of finding the right anchovies, the right salt, the right combinations and timings of mixing the two and all about the importance of nitrogen levels, The best fish sauce, as exemplified by Red Boat Fish Sauce, should only contain two ingredients - anchovies and salt - had have a high nitrogen level. It is also a little like extra virgin olive oil in that the first extraction is the best and subsequent ones are of inferior quality.

Red Boat Fish Sauce is not easy to find in the UK - I have resorted to buying a bottle online at a rather eye-wateringly high price but I was very keen to have the real thing to try some of these recipes in the book and to support this family run business. I am very pleased with my purchase and look forward to trying lots of the recipes and also live in hope that in time it will be easier to source in the UK. Meanwhile I shall be popping into every shop I pass that sells ethnic ingredients in the hope of seeing a bottle.

The book is very much geared to the US market in the use of food language and ingredients such as tapioca flour, baking soda, cilantro, kosher salt, zucchini, eggplant and scallion. Most are quite widely known in the UK though and easily found/understood if not immediately obvious. Less hard to know what they are or to source are things like perilla, rau ram, taro, wood ear mushrooms, bitter melons and morning glory (rau muong) - or so I thought until I popped into a local Asian specialist food store the other day and found bitter melons and morning glory. How exciting - my repertoire of recipes I can try from this book has now increased and I look forward to using the book a lot.

With thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I am not very familiar with Vietnamese cuisine. This book was very educational giving the background of obtaining the right ingredients for success. I also appreciated the stories behind the recipes, allowing me to gain some cultural insights through the recipes. I am excited to try these recipes and continue to broaden my taste palate. I also appreciate the number and quality of photographs that accompany most of the recipes, especially since I am unfamiliar with what outcome I should expect.

Gorgeous photographs and a great condiment section. I appreciated the history behind the family's story and the ease of most of the recipes. I haven't cooked anything from the Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook yet, but I will.

I knew that fish sauce was versatile but I was so surprised by how much more I didn't know that fish sauce could do. And the pictures in this cookbook are gorgeous. I love that it's not just food shots but beautiful photographs of scenery as well. Everything is laid out thoughtfully and handled with care. I really enjoyed this cookbook.

Red Boat Fish sauce is my go-to product for all things umami so when I saw the Red Boat Fish Sauce cookbook I knew I had to have it! I received an ARC digital copy from NetGalley but I will definitely be buying a hard copy for my bookshelf as well. The pictures are GORGEOUS and include photos of the family recipes and the author's family along with pictures of the food. The "chicken wings for a party" are awesome. Very flavorful and crispy. I also enjoyed the chicken tinga recipe. Can't wait to work my way through the entire cookbook.