Sriracha sauce that is: A Chili Sauce to Crow About
My parents had a bottle of Sriracha on the table ever since I was about ten, so I literally grew up with it. Last year when a university van drove us back home from Pattaya through the actual town of Sriracha, I was all jazzed about buying local sauces there, but that wasn’t their specialty – their specialty was marble mortar and pestles, and we did buy a good set of those.
The equivalent chili sauces in Thailand are horridly sweet except for a few brands, which are decent but not nearly as good as Sriracha. When you go to a noodle stand in Thailand, you are presented with a plethora of flavorings to add, such as fish sauce, dried chili, wet chili paste, Sriracha-like sauce, vinegar (or vinegar-infused chili), sugar, ground peanuts, thai lime, etc., so it’s not such a huge deal for noodles, but Sriracha is sorely missed for other foods. You end up substituting things like prik-nampla-manao (literally, chili-fishsauce-lime), but just end up wishing SE Asians would just realize how damn good Sriracha is and just import it by the boatload from the US of A. Kind of like a reverse (culinary) FOB type thing I guess.
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All I can say is – Sriracha should have “Tran 84” on the bottles.
Raising a family in Thailand // Documenting Issan food, culture, music, and people
even i, a chonburi local, had once asked my mom when we visited sriracha to buy one original sriracha sauce..unfortunately it was not such thing available on earth… another dish i like to recommend u to add sriracha sauce on it is Mee Teaw, white fried noodle specially cooked during chinese new year, it’s a great match actually..