Shrimp paste

Funk, sugar, acid and a fruit that will not go to mush. Thailand built a salad on it.

Stir-fried in belacan, this is the Southeast Asian default and the bean can take the funk.

Fried in belacan, this is the definitive Southeast Asian treatment for the vegetable.

Pound them raw together — heat is the only thing that outranks the smell.

Acid neutralises the amines. Without it the paste stays on your breath.

Both are sulfur-heavy; fried together they resolve into one savoury note.

The funk is the base note. Without it this is just hot vegetable matter.

Fermented funk sits under sour fruit the way anchovy sits under tomato.

Pounded together: the funk needs something cold and resinous over the top.

Citral scrubs the top of the paste clean and leaves the salt behind.

Sweet allium is the ballast in every curry paste that contains this.

Concentrated funk; a teaspoon and a whole pot tastes seasoned.

A fingernail of it turns a bland broth savoury with nothing identifiable.

Fat absorbs the amines and turns them into something that reads cured.

The most fermented thing in the kitchen needs the least refined sugar.

Fermented marine funk against bright acid is a Malay rojak dressing in one line.

Fermented marine funk against sharp fruit is the Malay rojak dressing exactly.

Fermented funk turns the green fruit properly savoury without any meat in the pot.

Pomelo salad logic scaled up: funk and bitterness cancel each other out.

Rotten-sea funk against clean sweet fat. Southeast Asia never doubted it.

Same free glutamate, same cheesy isovaleric edge, different continent.

Bitter roast against putrid-savoury; the paste stops the cocoa drying out.