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Saucemare Garum Sauce and defrutum Ancient Rome 250 ml

View: Licorice color with medium intensity shine, coppery reflections.

Smell: Balsamic, mild acetic, umami, vinous with salty and sweet notes.

Taste: Mild acetic, smooth, highly palatable. Bittersweet with intense umami. Memories of balsamic spices.

PAIRINGS AND USES:

Ideal as a dressing for salads, cold and warm dressings, especially where it reaches its maximum expression. Highly recommended in marinating seafood, raw and grilled white and blue fish, vegetable stews and. Surprising in the finish of oriental cold soups, in the preparation of oriental, nikkei and fusion cuisine. Caramelization and glazing of fish and meats with intense flavor. It is a perfect ingredient to enhance the flavor of vegetable stews, meats and fish, providing intensity in the mouth and amplifying the aromas.

Garum, or garo for the Greeks, is a sauce, a powerful fermented product, with a high content of umami1 that prevailed in the Roman culinary repertoire. Garum is an industrial product, not a domestic one, since its processing and fermentation require processing in coastal salting factories, such as Carteia, Gades, Malaca, Cartago Nova and Baelo Claudia. After its fermentation, Garum, the Roman umami of the sea, is packaged in amphorae and destined for commercialization, being a highly demanded and gastronomically valued product throughout the Mediterranean.

Gastronomically, garum is a liquid preserve that had to be tamed, transformed, and incorporated into intermediate culinary preparations2 in most of its culinary uses, enhancing and implementing the organoleptic characteristics of the foods and ingredients with which they interacted, once these preparations with garum were added to the entire recipe. In this way, it merged with other ingredients such as wine, acetvm (vinegar), oil, honey, or spices in each type of preparation that modulated its aroma, flavor, and color, offering salty nuances, maritime or fruity aromatic sensations. Its presence is notable in the Apician recipe book, since its use is documented in a high percentage of recipes and also replaced salt in the preparations.

With the incorporation of Garum in Roman cuisine, the aim was to achieve balance and integration of all the elements that made up the recipe, or to enhance the main ingredient in the simplest recipes.

Garum could be present throughout the preparation process of the dish, which was common, or previously, acting on the main ingredient. To a lesser extent, it was added at the end of the preparations to enhance its flavor.

In this sense, Garum diversified Roman cooking techniques to levels that are still under continuous research today.

In terms of its flavor, specifically the liquamen, it is salty, with a taste of seafood and blue fish, seafood with hints of Mediterranean herbs. In addition to providing salinity, the spicy, botanical, and umami component, due to its high content of savory substances, amino acids, and peptides, garum enhanced the flavor of foods rich in vegetable proteins and of meat or fish origin, meat or fish3. Its use in Roman times is not limited to fish dishes, seafood, cephalopods, actiniarians, gastropods, or bivalves, among others.

Currently, both the Red Tuna Garum and the liquamen, both products have been scientifically reconstructed by the universities of Cadiz and Seville under the name of Flor de Garum, and it is the only fermented product that faithfully reconstructs the characteristics of the ancient Roman sauce.

Even the recipe attributed to Apicius, incorporated techniques to modulate and correct the potency of garum, since in combination with certain foods it offered excessive salinity if applied in excess, so one of the solutions was to modulate the salty edges of the dishes with honey, as indicated in the work Re Coquinaria (Re Coq. I, VI, 1).

In addition to its preserving