What garum actually is
Garum is a fermented fish sauce, made from oily fish, salt and time — nothing else goes into it. Salt keeps decay at bay while the fish's own enzymes, alongside naturally occurring microbial activity, slowly break the proteins down. What's left is an intensely savoury, faintly briny liquid that can transform a dish with only a few drops.
None of this is new. Roman Hispania had entire coastal industries built around it — sites near what's now Tarifa and Cartagena shipped garum across the Mediterranean by the barrel. Rome seasoned almost everything with it. Every time we chase that elusive fifth taste today, we're really only chasing the same thing the Romans were after.
How I make mine
My own ferments start with whatever oily fish is in season — mackerel, anchovy, the trim from a good tuna — packed in enough salt to keep the process stable and safe. From there, it's mostly patience: weeks, sometimes months, letting time do work that no modern technique can shortcut.
It won't taste like the Roman original — nobody alive knows exactly what that tasted like — but the principle holds: fermentation draws out everything an ingredient is holding back.
I've been working with ferments, garums and cured fish in my own kitchen for years — not because it's fashionable, but because good produce asks for it.
Why 2026 is looking at fermentation again
The trend reports all seem to be circling the same point from different directions: contemporary cooking wants more depth, more character, more truth in its flavours. Fermentation — garum, miso, lacto-ferments, pickles — has stopped being a niche interest and become one of the techniques now defining serious cooking, in Europe as much as in Asia or Latin America.
That tracks. At a moment when everything else moves faster, choosing a technique that demands weeks of waiting is, in itself, a kind of luxury.
Time is the one ingredient no technique can replace.
From the ferment to the private table
At a Vanguardia or Atelier evening, home-made garum tends to turn up without anyone noticing — in a stock, a dressing, the final touch on a dish that suddenly tastes of more. That's its real job: not to take the stage, but to hold everything else up.
It's probably the same thinking behind the whole evening: the work that matters happens long before the table is laid.
