Belecan | Sybaritica

Fermented shrimp products are widely used throughout southeast Asia and even, albeit to a lesser degree, in India and China. Indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine Thai, Malay or Indonesian cookery without this unique and interesting ingredient.

Essentially, shrimp pastes are made by salting and then partially drying shrimp, allowing them to ferment, and then pounding the resultant mass into a generally homogenous mush. In some cases, the paste is then sold and used in it’s ‘wet’ form (particularly in Vietnam and China), but it is also dried and pressed into hard blocks. I use the soft paste forms from time to time, and I will feature one or more of these in an upcoming post, but for today we are going to have a look at the hard, dried variety… Read more