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In a lot of ways, I like my food simple. When you have quality ingredients, you don’t need to do much more than cook and season them properly in order to eat extremely well — i.e., to taste the things you’ve cooked. Got salt? You can grill a steak, roast a chicken, broil a fish, though it never hurts to be generous with extra-virgin olive oil and fresh herbs. The same goes for vegetables: arugula with lemon juice, olive oil, and parmesan cheese; yu choy stir-fried with garlic; broccoli steamed with butter and salt. There’s almost no point even writing a recipe for these — the instructions should be self-evident. If they’re not, well, I’ve got a book to sell you¹!

At the same time, the simple dish is sometimes not quite enough. As beautifully direct as a medium-rare slab of well-marbled New York strip can be, it occasionally needs a little extra — a sauce to remind your tongue and your brain of what its beefy richness stands in contrast to, of why you love it in the first place.

And still, when it comes to sauces, I also want to stay simple. The swirling whirl of French sauces is beyond me, requiring more technique and more time than I’m ever willing to put in. Instead, I take a very Southeast Asian approach to my saucing. I say “Southeast Asian” because I’m hesitant to present any of the sauces that I’m about to describe as authentically Vietnamese, or authentically Lao, Thai, Khmer, Hmong, or tied to any pinpointable locale or tradition (although surely each has its own specific history). I’ve spent months and years traveling that part of the world, and there’s so much spillover — ingredients that cross borders, ratios that vary from family to family — that it’s hard to say where one approach stops and another begins, and which belongs to which subregion or nationality. All I know is that these taste good, and they’re easy to make, and you’ll want to make all of them over the course of the next five months, when the weather is nice and you might as well fire up the grill.

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This one is transcendent in its stupid simplicity. In Vietnam, you’ll see it all the time, served with everything from steamed shrimp to fried chicken. And now that you know how to make it, you’ll serve it with everything, too.

Put the salt and pepper in a tiny little sauce-sized saucer-ish dish. Don’t mix them together, but it’s okay if they do mix. Put the wedge of lime on top, skin side down, and when the time comes, you squeeze all the juice onto the salt and pepper. That’s it — there’s your sauce right there! Note: This is enough sauce for one person. I’ll leave it to you to figure out how to multiply it for more.

Before we go any further, we need to talk about how to cut up a lime. That is, don’t take what seems like the obvious approach and cut your limes pole to pole. Instead, cut a few millimeters off to the side of the pole. Then rotate and do it again, and again, and again. You’ll wind up with four chunks of lime, all of slightly different sizes, plus the long thin bit that connects the poles. Why do this? For one, it somehow makes the lime chunks easier to squeeze for juice. I don’t know why, but it does. Also, it makes those chunks look nicer when serving — that pithy central bit just ain’t pretty, and this gets rid of it.

I call this “Sauce no. 1” because that’s the only number you need to remember: 1².

Mix everything together, and serve. The sugar may take a bit of time to dissolve, so stir well and give this a bit of time to sit before serving.

The second best part of this sauce is how it iterates on Sauce no. 1: You do a couple of bits slightly differently, add one more ingredient, and you’ve got what feels like a whole new creation. The best part, of course, is that it tastes so incredible it reverses the usual dish-sauce relationship — you’ll want to cook dishes just so you have the opportunity to eat more of this sauce.

Using a big mortar and pestle, add the first three ingredients one by one, churning each to a paste before adding the next. (This may take both time and effort. Tough.) Then work in the sugar, fish sauce, and lime juice, and finally the shrimp paste.

This one is inspired by the Minnesota-based Hmong chef Yia Vang, who published a version of it in Bon Appétit some years back. I’ve been serving it at my barbecues for a long while now, and I can never make enough of it. Guests eat it with smoked tri-tip or pork butt, but they’ve been known to use it as a bruschetta topping, along with a bit of ricotta. This is the baseline recipe, but you can easily scale it up by doubling (or quadrupling) the ingredients.

Start a fire in your grill, or turn the broiler of your oven to high, with the rack about 6 inches away. Rub the cherry tomatoes all over with the oil. Put them in a grill basket and set them over the flame to char, shaking them occasionally until they burst and the edges are blackened. If you’re using a broiler, put them on a sheet pan and shake it every once in a while to cook all sides. When the tomatoes are done, add them and all the other ingredients to a mixing bowl or, better yet, a large mortar and pestle. Stir vigorously, so the tomatoes break apart and release their juices. Okay, now it’s done! Go eat! 🪨🪨🪨

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