Nước Chấm on a Fried Egg

I love Vietnamese food, and after having Nước Chấm, a traditional fish sauce dipping sauce, at one of my favorite restaurants, I knew I wanted to bring it to some breakfast.

Now to be clear, I took a few creative liberties with Nước Chấm, but I wanted to credit the original source and culture of the recipe. Nước Chấm serves as an all-encompassing word for dipping sauces in Vietnamese cuisine, and they typically combine sweet, sour and salty flavors. The sauce I made most closely resembles Nước mắm pham, which is a fish sauce based dipping sauce.

In this recipe I added cilantro and garlic, which are not traditional, but I feel add a bit something extra to this particular recipe. And the best part is marrying the sauce with a fried egg. You get the crispy egg edges, the sweet sour sauce, and it turns into the perfect breakfast

Ingredients for this recipe

• 1/4 cup fish sauce
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 2 tbsp rice vinegar
• 2 limes for juicing
• 1 handful cilantro finely chopped
• 2-3 small birds eye chilies seeds removed and finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 1″ knob fresh ginger minced
• 4 large eggs
• 2 tbsp neutral oil of choice

How to make these nước chấm dipped fried eggs

This recipe is so simple, it’s really just letting the sauce sit so that it can work its magic. Here’s a step by step breakdown:

• In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the fish sauce, sugar, rice vinegar and juice from two limes. Whisk until the sugar has dissolved.
• Add in the cilantro, chilies, garlic and ginger and whisk again. Add more rice vinegar if the sauce needs to thin out a bit more. Set this aside, it gets better as the ingredients meld together.
• Put a pan on medium heat and add the oil. When the oil is ready, fry the eggs one at a time, basting the oil over the egg white to make the edges crispy.
• Remove the eggs from the pan and immediately dip them in the nước chấm. Serve warm 🙂

And that’s it for this recipe! Short and sweet, because it’s the weekend, and we’re all just really looking forward to brunch 😉

But if you make this, please tag me on Pinterest or Instagram so I can see! It’s my favorite thing to scroll through stories and see what you all are making.

And of course feel free to leave any questions, comments or reviews! This is the best place to reach me, and I’d love to hear from you <3