Oyster Sauce Takes Any Dish From Good to Great

My family, like many families, heralds ourspaghettirecipe as the supreme formula. Its core ingredients—warmed garlic, Rao’s tomato sauce, and a heaping spoonful (conservative estimate) of salty Pecorino—are nothing to call home about on their own. It’s the final, secret ingredient that takes the dish up a noticeable notch: oyster sauce. A couple shakes of this molasses-colored nectar lends umami to classic spaghetti—and virtually any other dish. It doesn’t register as fishiness, but rather a rich and savory depth.

In a lot of ways, this oyster sauce–enhanced spaghetti embodies my multicultural palate, something I owe to my mother’s cooking repertoire having been shaped by life in both Hong Kong and the US. Oyster sauce, a seamless complement to so many cuisines, is the bridge between the traditional Cantonese fare she was raised on and the more Western dishes she came to love too.

My mother keeps our house stocked withLee Kum Kee premium oyster sauceat all times: one bottle at the ready in the fridge and another (or two) waiting in the wings in the pantry. It’s a no-brainer addition to stir-fries and pastas and a perfectly salty dipping condiment on its own, for leafy gai lan or any other steamed Chinese veggie at the dinner table. For me, it’s comfort in a bottle, a panacea for dinners lacking inspiration. If my mother’s cooking has taught me anything, it’s that if you have a bottle of oyster sauce, an egg, and some rice, you have a meal—and a delicious one at that.

My affection for oyster sauce is hardly unique. In fact, many, many Cantonese families can relate to reaching for that red-capped Lee Kum Kee bottle on a near nightly basis.

Calvin Eng, the chef at Brooklyn’s lauded Cantonese restaurant,Bonnie’s, recalls growing up with Lee Kum Kee, with backup bottles at the ready. His mother, too, slathered an oyster sauce-based marinade on almost every protein, drizzled it over eggs at breakfast, and mixed it into stir-fries.

“Oyster sauce just has that perfect viscosity and body,” says Eng. While he doesn’t use oyster sauce at Bonnie’s out of caution for patrons with shellfish allergies, subbing inmushroom oyster sauceto achieve a similar effect, he nonetheless considers the classic versiontheparamount Cantonese pantry staple.

“I remember even just shaking some out of the bottle and putting it over cooked pasta with sesame oil,” Eng recalls.

Lee Kum Kee is bottled nostalgia for many; the stand-alone reference point for oyster sauce. It’s no surprise that it remains the de facto staple—after all, Lee Kum Kee invented the stuff more than 130 years ago. The company’s corporate chef Fred Wang tells me that the sauce was invented when overcooked oysters turned into a happy accident, miraculously producing the syrupy concoction that’s been replicated for both Chinese and American audiences in the century-plus since. Today, the brand’s main ingredients are “oyster extractives,” MSG, and sugar.

Grace Young, a James Beard Award–winning Cantonese chef and cookbook author, was also raised on Lee Kum Kee. But in recent years, she’s pivoted entirely to usingMegachefoyster sauce in her cooking.

“It's like Lee Kum Kee was your first love, and you’re all starry-eyed for a long time,” Young says. “But then Megachef came along and there’s no comparison. You realize that you were young and foolish when you were with Lee Kum Kee.”

Oyster sauce gently enhances nearly any recipe, Young says. She braises dried shiitake mushrooms with oyster sauce, ginger, Smithfield ham, and the mushroom soaking liquid, and simmers oyster sauce with rice wine, a pinch of sugar, and sesame oil to drizzle over blanched gai lan. She’ll toss it in chilis and stews too. The oyster sauce skeptics among your dinner guests won’t taste the sauce itself, she says. What theywillperceive, however, is the intensification of other complementary flavors, and the dimension provided by as little as a teaspoon of the condiment. “It really just melts into the flavors that you already have,” she says.

“You can add it to an Italian dish, a French dish—nobody will ever know,” Young says. “But it’s actually intensifying the umami flavor.”

While oyster sauce may not yet appear on as many American tables as chili crisp or sriracha, Wang says that Lee Kum Kee encourages experimentation by posting recipes outside of theChinese canonon its website (take spinach and bacon quiche with oyster sauce and pulled pork with oyster sauce, for two).

“More and more there is just constant crossover,” Young says, and many home cooks “are much more likely to kind of mix and match and play around.”

As my own cooking adapts to the bounds of my tiny New York kitchen, it’ll always be anchored by that bottle of oyster sauce that lives in my fridge—ready to season a late night bowl of eggs and rice.