Thai Secret Sauces: Healthy Boy and Gold Mountain
Thai secret sauces probably aren’t essential to cooking authentic Thai dishes, but they’re a powerful short cut and I suspect part of most street vendors’ repertoire. Gold Mountain Seasoning Sauce is the saltiest soy sauce you have ever tasted; it tastes like it contains fish sauce as well but the ingredient list says no. Healthy Boy Dark Soy Sauce is similar to molasses in its thickness and a sweetness which is also slightly bitter. You can find them at the aforementioned Amazon affiliate links as well as at many Asian groceries.
A nice platter of Kao Ka Moo.
We employed both sauces this week to make a kettle full of Kao Ka Moo, a comfort-food dish which is common in San Francisco but hard to find on the east coast. A chunk of pork leg (we use pork shoulder because it’s far cheaper) is simmered in a savory broth until tender, then the broth is strained and cooked down with pickled mustard greens and hard boiled eggs and served over rice. We used this recipe, which incorporates both sauces, and it wasn’t quite there so we added a few squirts of each Thai secret sauce as might be done at a street stand and we were good to go.
Amazon reviewers have lots of good ideas for how to use Gold Mountain which is why we included the above link, but you can get it quite a bit cheaper from their third party vendors. For the same reason we’ve included the most popular link for Healthy Boy Dark Soy Sauce and it’s not expensive but is a small container so you might want to buy something larger. In doctoring the above recipe we probably used a T of Gold Mountain and 2 T of Healthy Boy so the small Healthy Boy container would run out quickly.
If you prefer to go to your Asian market for these Thai secret sauces, you might have to snoop around a bit because they probably aren’t in the same aisle as mainstream soy sauces; we found them in the Indonesian section. (Along with ABC Kecap Manis, which we will report on at another time.) Enjoy!
Are you referring to the Asian supermarket in Colonie? I’m in no hurry to go. I haven’t been out of the house since October. The only times I’ve been out since last March have been to our cabin in the Berkshires. Heading through Albany isn’t out of the way time wise. BTW, I’ve got leftover Roma turkey sub in the fridge.
Yes, I’m referring to the Asian Supermarket on Central. The other on, on Colvin, has its fans but I have invested much time learning the layout at the first one. You will have to order from Amazon, then, which will probably still be cheaper than the gas and opportunity cost of the drive. As to that sub, you are implying it has been in there since pre-covid days, yes? Better eat it before it goes bad!
My wife still works.
Aha.