Red Boat is a brand of premium Phu Quoc fish sauce.
Red Boat is a brand of premium Phu Quoc fish sauce.
The company was founded by Cuong Pham, who was born in Vietnam and grew up in Saigon. [1] [2] [3] His family had a small fish sauce factory in Phu Quoc. [1] [2] Cuong emigrated to the United States in 1979 to join his siblings when he was 20, after having spent nine months in a refugee camp in Malaysia. [1] [2] [4]
Dissatisfied with the Thai-style fish sauce available in the United States, which was more suited to Thai cuisine than to that of Vietnam, and dismayed when on a 2005 visit to Phu Quoc he discovered that artisanal producers were being forced to either cut down on production or produce lower-quality products, in 2006 Cuong returned to Vietnam and bought a friend's family-operated fish sauce barrel house in Phu Quoc. [1] [5] He incorporated in Milpitas, California, as Viet Phu in 2011. [5]
The first bottles were sold in 2011. [5] Pham sold the first bottles from the back of an SUV to Asian supermarkets in California. [5] He sent bottles to food influencers such as chefs and bloggers. [5]
In 2014 the company won a trademark infringement suit that had been brought against it by Anhing, a California maker of fish sauce whose logo included the image of a red junk. [6]
Anchovies used in production are salted on the fishing boat before being transported. [7] The salt is locally harvested and is stored for several months before using to mellow its flavor. [7] The anchovies are fermented with salt in a 3:1 ratio in large wooden barrels holding about 13 tons of anchovies each. [7]
The company as of 2024 had 85 12-ton barrels of salted anchovies fermenting at a time. [1] Only the first pressings of the fermented anchovies is bottled as sauce. [1] Final sauces are blended from various vats to achieve consistency in flavor across batches. [1] The ingredients of the final sauces are black anchovies and local sea salt; no other ingredients are added. [1] [2] [8] [9]
The fermenting plant is located on a river; fishing boats unload their anchovies directly onto the dock. [10] [7]
As of 2024 the brand is only available in the United States. According to Saveur, this is "due in part to its significantly higher price point"; at the time a 17 oz (525ml) bottle of Red Boat cost approximately US$13. [1] According to Bloomberg News, Red Boat's prices are typically three or four times the price of mass-produced fish sauces. [5]
Red Boat produces several fish sauces. The original version, which has a nitrogen grade (°N) of 40, [1] and a Phamily Reserve graded at 50°N, which according to Saveur has an intense umami flavor. [7] [11] [5] At one time they produced a 35°N version. [2] The company also creates custom blends for several chefs. [1]
In addition to fish sauces, the company makes fish "salts", which are a dehydrated version of the sauces. [12] [13] [7] [5]
In 2021 Pham, Diep Tran, and Tien Nguyen released a cookbook, The Red Boat Fish Sauce Cookbook. [3] [14] [4]
In 2012 Food & Wine named it to their list of the year's 10 best products. [15] America's Test Kitchen rated it the highest among the fish sauces they reviewed, crediting its high nitgrogen grade for mellowing the saltiness typical of lower-protein fish sauces. [16] Bloomberg News call the flavor "singular...less of a fish taste and more of a tantalizing funk like that of Iberico ham or Parmesan cheese", also crediting the higher nitrogen grade. [5] German chef The Duc Ngo credits Red Boat for "generating a new global interest in fish sauce". [5] According to the LA Times, Red Boat is "the darling of celebrity chefs". [5] Sunset Magazine called Red Boat "the world's premier manufacturer of the essential Vietnamese condiment". [3]
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