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Fish and seafood from Lower Myanmar

Damin ngapidamin ngapi

Damin ngapi is a Burmese fish paste made from the mixed small fish caught in a bamboo trap called a damin. The fish are half-dried, pounded with salt in a mortar and stored to ripen. Large makers heap the paste in a shed and push perforated bamboo tubes into it to drain off the liquid.

Fully documentedFish and seafood3.5 days

Recipe

Amounts from a sourceThe salt figure is Khin's (1948) for Burmese fish paste in general, as quoted by Ishige and Ruddle. The farm household they describe adjusts the salt by tasting.
Small fish from paddy fields and channelsA year's supply for the householdFish a few centimetres long are used whole; larger ones are scaled and gutted, and the largest headed[ishige1987]
Salt30–40 % of the fish weightThe farm household in the source salts by taste, not by weight[ishige1987]
Starterspontaneous

Total time across the recorded steps: 3.5 days

Start
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What changes: Starting material: mixed small fish trapped as the paddy fields drain

Step 1 of 6
Trap small fish in the paddies at the end of the rains
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
T. muriaticus

Lower Burmese farmers set traps in late October and November, when the flooded fields drain back to the rivers. Output: mixed small paddy fish.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Damin ngapi is a Burmese fish paste made from the mixed small fish caught in a bamboo trap called a damin. The fish are half-dried, pounded with salt in a mortar and stored to ripen. Large makers heap the paste in a shed and push perforated bamboo tubes into it to drain off the liquid. Made in 6 steps over 3.5 days. The longest step, pound with salt, dry and pound again, takes 3.5 days (Ishige N. and Ruddle K. 1987). Salt is 30–40 % (Ishige N. and Ruddle K. 1987). Tetragenococcus muriaticus, the main lactic isolate from yegyo ngapi, a paste made the same way from large fish does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step3.5 daysReported[ishige1987]Pound with salt, dry and pound again
Salt30–40 %Reported[ishige1987]Pound with salt, dry and pound again

What makes this one different

Damin ngapi is made from whatever small fish the damin trap catches, half-dried before it is pounded with salt. Yegyo ngapi is made the same way from large fresh fish such as snakehead.

Yield
The finished paste weighs 40–50 % of the fresh fish (Khin 1948, via Ishige and Ruddle).
Household use
The farm household plans 5 viss per adult per year, about 22.4 g a day.

Related ferments

Safety

A study of yegyo ngapi, a related Myanmar salted fish, found DNA similar to Clostridium botulinum. No botulism has been reported from that region, but the authors call for closer food-safety surveillance (Kobayashi et al. 2016).

Hazards the sources name: DNA sequences similar to Clostridium botulinum (yegyo ngapi).

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

The large-scale heap-and-bamboo-tube method is described in the second edition (1896) of Shway Yoe's (J.G. Scott's) The Burman, which names damin nga-pee as a pounded fish paste of shrimps and small fish that was heaped under a shed and drained through hollow bamboos into jars; Ishige and Ruddle (1987) cite the same book.

  1. [ishige1987] Ishige N. and Ruddle K. 1987, Gyoshō in Southeast Asia, a study of fermented aquatic products (5), Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 12(2), pp. 276–278 (Burma section), Minpaku repositorypaper
  2. [scott1896] Shway Yoe (J.G. Scott) 1896, The Burman, His Life and Notions, 2nd ed., London, Macmillan, chapter XXVIII "Nga-pee" (pp. 278–283), Cornell University copy on the Internet Archivebook
  3. [kobayashi2016] Kobayashi T., Taguchi C., Kida K., Matsuda H. et al. 2016, Diversity of the bacterial community in Myanmar traditional salted fish yegyo ngapi, World Journal of Microbiology and Biotechnology 32(10):166 (abstract)paper