Game Cookery

Crying tiger sauce is hot stuff and one for those who like strong flavours, but Tim Maddams pairs it with goose rather than supermarket beef

Have you tried a crying tiger salad? It’s basically a marinated beef steak, cooked rare, served with some chopped crunchy salad and with a dipping sauce that is knock-your-socks-off hot. That’s where the crying tiger comes in, the idea being that the sauce has enough hot chilli in it to make even a tiger weep. But who can tell exactly how much chilli that is likely to require?

It breaks a hitherto hard-and-fast rule of mine: only ever use fish sauce very sparingly. This recipe throws that rule out of the window. The incredibly rich and very potent fermented fish sauce is one of those things, a very powerful flavour, yet in this instance, rather than being used like a seasoning, it is pretty much the base flavour for the whole dish.

Effectively the crying tiger sauce combines fish sauce, chilli, sugar, more chilli, lime juice and that’s pretty much it.

There’s a little chopped fresh tomato, some shredded onion and a smidgen of soy and garlic, but this is not, I repeat not, a dipping sauce for the faint hearted.

Nor is crying tiger sauce, in my opinion, an ideal dipping accompaniment for beef, with which it is almost always served.

“Crying tiger sauce combines fish sauce, chilli, sugar, more chilli and lime juice”

These days most beef is fairly timid in flavour, coming from cattle under 30 months old and not hung anything like long enough. So the goose breast here works well, as the strong and texturally complex meat stands up to sauce rather better than some insipid supermarket beef steak.

As to the authenticity of the dish, I remain in the dark. Maybe it’s some delightfully old and traditional ancient Thai dish, handed down lovingly from generation to generation, or maybe it’s some contrived nonsense to please the tourists.

Either way, the dipping sauce is great and you can always turn down the heat by adding less chilli.