Why Shrimp Paste Belongs in Your Pantry

Open the cupboard of any cook serious about Southeast Asian food and, somewhere behind the more glamorous bottles, you will find a small foil-wrapped block that smells, frankly, alarming. Unwrapped and raw, shrimp paste is pungent enough to clear a room. Toasted and folded into a dish, it becomes something else entirely: the deep, savoury foundation that makes a rempah sing and a plate of greens taste of more than themselves. To understand shrimp paste is to understand a whole grammar of flavour.

Known as belacan in Malaysia and Singapore, terasi in Indonesia, kapi in Thailand and bagoong in the Philippines, this fermented paste of tiny shrimp and salt is one of the oldest seasonings in the region. It is cheap, it keeps for months, and a piece the size of a stock cube can transform a meal. Yet many home cooks are wary of it, put off by the smell and unsure how to begin. That caution is a shame, because few ingredients repay a little confidence so generously.

What it actually is

Shrimp paste is made by salting and fermenting small shrimp or krill, then drying and pounding the result into a dense block or a looser paste. The fermentation concentrates glutamates, which is a technical way of saying it is packed with savoury depth, the same quality that makes aged cheese and good soy so moreish. Raw, it tastes sharp and aggressive. Cooked, that sharpness mellows into a rounded, almost sweet umami that underpins rather than dominates.

There is enormous variation between types. Malaysian belacan is firm and dark, meant to be toasted. Thai kapi is softer and greyer, used in curry pastes and the beloved nam prik kapi. Learning to read those differences is part of the pleasure, much as learning to choose and use fish sauce teaches you that not all bottles labelled the same are remotely alike.

How to toast it

The single most important technique is toasting. Raw belacan added straight to a dish tastes crude; toasted first, it blooms. The traditional method is to wrap a piece in foil and dry-fry it in a pan, turning until it darkens, crumbles easily and fills the kitchen with a nutty, savoury aroma. Some cooks toast it directly over a low flame on the back of a spoon. Either way, ventilate the kitchen and trust the process.

Reading the smell

The aroma will shift as it cooks, from harsh and marine to deep and roasted. When it smells toasted rather than raw, it is ready. This is the same sensory attention that good cooking asks of you everywhere, the kind of nose-led judgement you develop when you learn to choose and use dried spices and toast them to wake up their oils.

Where it earns its keep

Once toasted, belacan becomes the cornerstone of a rempah, the pounded spice paste at the heart of so much regional cooking. Ground with shallots, garlic, chillies, galangal and lemongrass, it forms the base for countless curries and sambals. It is essential to a proper sambal belacan, that fiery relish of pounded chilli and lime that lifts a plate of rice or grilled fish out of the ordinary.

Beyond the sambal, a small amount stirred into stir-fried greens, especially kangkong or long beans, adds a savoury depth that plain garlic cannot match. It seasons the broth of a good laksa and the paste of a rich curry. If you have ever wondered what gives the best mee siam and spicy noodles their haunting, layered savour, part of the answer is almost always a well-judged spoonful of shrimp paste working quietly in the background.

A single toasted block, kept well wrapped, can season a season’s worth of cooking. Few pantry ingredients offer so much return for so little.

Buying and keeping it

Buy the firmest, driest block you can find from a shop with good turnover; the better products come from makers who still dry their shrimp under the sun. Once opened, wrap it tightly in cling film and then foil, and keep it in a sealed jar so its assertive aroma does not colonise the rest of your fridge. Stored well, it will last for many months, growing more mellow rather than less useful.

A jar of belacan sits comfortably alongside the other quiet workhorses of a serious kitchen, the anchovies and the miso and the aged vinegars, and rewards the same curiosity. It belongs, in other words, in the well-considered pantry we keep returning to across our dining and drinks writing, where the least glamorous ingredients so often do the most work.

Cooking with confidence

The mistake most beginners make is timidity, adding a nervous scrape and wondering why the dish tastes of nothing. Belacan is meant to be used with conviction. A proper rempah for a curry might call for a piece the size of your thumb, pounded in with the other aromatics and then fried patiently until the raw edge cooks off and the whole paste turns fragrant and glossy. That frying stage is not optional; it is where the harshness is tamed and the depth is built.

Start with a dish that showcases it, a simple sambal or a plate of belacan greens, and taste as you go so you learn how it behaves. Once you have felt the difference a spoonful makes, you will start reaching for it instinctively, adding a little to broths and marinades and stir-fries wherever a savoury lift is wanted. That instinct is the whole reward.

A confidence worth building

The wider you range across the region’s cooking, the more indispensable it becomes. Spend an afternoon with a field guide to Southeast Asian spice and you will keep meeting belacan, folded into paste after paste, the unshowy note that ties the aromatics together. Master it and a whole cuisine opens up.

A seasoning steeped in history

Shrimp paste is not a modern convenience but one of the oldest preserved foods in the region, its origins reaching back centuries to the coastal communities who needed a way to keep the ocean’s smallest bounty from spoiling in the heat. Salting and fermenting the tiny shrimp turned a perishable catch into a seasoning that would last for months, and in doing so created a flavour that came to define the cooking of an entire part of the world.

That long lineage is part of why belacan tastes of somewhere rather than nowhere. Every region’s version carries the mark of its own waters, its own shrimp and its own drying traditions, so that a Penang belacan and a Thai kapi are recognisably cousins yet unmistakably distinct. To cook with it is to join a very old conversation, one carried on in kitchens across the region for as long as anyone can remember.

So brave the smell. Toast a piece, fold it into your next sambal or stir-fry, and taste what generations of cooks have known: that the most transformative ingredient in the cupboard is often the one that smells the worst. Belacan asks for a little courage and repays it many times over. It belongs in your pantry, and once it earns its place there, it rarely leaves.