My 1-Ingredient Upgrade for Better Beef Stew

You know that je ne sais quoi punch of umami you get when pho broth hits your tongue? It doesn’t just come from the beef bones; it’s from the fish sauce incorporated into the broth. Fish sauce is a staple in Vietnamese and Southeast Asian cuisines, and I use it to add depth to everything from tofu to seafood to beef to salads, like my favorite papaya salads. 

Vietnamese cuisine has a lot of French influences because of seven decades of colonization. Beef stews like boeuf bourguignon and pot-au-feu are classic French dishes, so it's no surprise to me that the Vietnamese also have a beef stew dish. It’s called bò kho, and my family and I often enjoy it with rice noodles or rice. While bò kho is only sometimes spicy, it’s almost always umami-laden, thanks to splashes of fish sauce. 

Fish sauce will upgrade any beef stew, bringing out the richness of the beef and balancing all the other flavors with a satisfying kick of umami, much like it does in a great bowl of homemade pho.

How To Add Fish Sauce to Beef Stew

As an award-winning Vietnamese cookbook author and food journalist, I encourage you to add fish sauce to your favorite beef stew recipe. Let’s take this Easy Beef Stew recipe, for example. Since fish sauce is quite salty when undiluted, I recommend you reduce the salt in the recipe by half. Then, mix two tablespoons of fish sauce into the broth 20 to 30 minutes before you stop simmering the stew.

If you're new to using fish sauce, start with a smaller amount (one tablespoon) and taste the stew before adding more. This allows you to adjust the flavor and ensure it doesn’t overwhelm the dish.

Adding the fish sauce about half an hour before the stew is done allows its flavor to fully develop, meld, and enhance the stew’s depth without overpowering the other flavors. I follow this rule when I make my Instant Pot pho and add fish sauce to the broth early in the cooking process. 

When you add fish sauce at the end of cooking, its pungency can be too pronounced. You want your beef stew to taste and smell like a meaty dish, rather than a seafood dish. While I love fish sauce in everything, including my cookies and desserts, my Filipino-Taiwanese husband finds it way too strong when added at the end of cooking.

Tips for Adding Fish Sauce to Beef Stew

To further balance the flavors of your beef stew, I recommend adding a little sugar to the dish when using fish sauce. For example, I always add rock sugar to my pho broth: one-quarter cup of rock sugar to one-half cup of fish sauce. To the beef stew recipe I referenced above, add about one tablespoon of sugar to the broth. 

Following in the footsteps of my Vietnamese granny and aunties, I only use Three Crabs Brand fish sauce, but other brands work as well.