Dried anchovies substitutes

The closest all-round swap, and available in the same aisle.

Best for

nasi lemak sambal, sambal goreng, fried rice, vegetable stir-fries

Dried shrimp are salty, dried and concentrated in exactly the same way, so they slot into a sambal without any recipe changes. What differs is character: they taste sweet and cleanly of shellfish where anchovies taste fishy and salty with a faint bitterness. They also stay chewy rather than shattering, so you lose the specific brittle crunch of a fried ikan bilis. Toast or fry them for two minutes first, then chop them coarsely. For a sambal this is a very good result; for a garnish sprinkled over rice it is noticeably softer.

Covers salt and umami well and contributes no texture whatsoever.

Best for

sambal and cooked sauces, broths and soups, curries, stir-fry seasoning

Fish sauce is made from the same fish by the same principle, so the savoury flavour lands in the right place immediately, and it dissolves invisibly into a sauce. The gap is entirely textural: a nasi lemak sambal made with fish sauce tastes right and looks smooth, with none of the little crisp fish to bite into. It also brings a lot of salt, so reduce the recipe's salt. If you want both jobs covered, pair it with fried peanuts or fried shallots for the crunch.

Excellent in a broth, useless as a topping.

Best for

anchovy broth and Malay soups, noodle soup bases, clear vegetable soups

Both are dried fish used to build savoury broth, so this substitution is genuinely sound, but the technique changes. Anchovies want fifteen to twenty minutes of gentle simmering; bonito flakes want five minutes of steeping off the boil and then straining, because boiling them makes the broth bitter and sour. The resulting stock is cleaner, smokier and lighter, without the slightly oily, rounded body ikan bilis broth has. Add a splash of fish sauce if it tastes thin.

Same fish, entirely different preparation, so it dissolves rather than crunches.

Best for

cooked sambals, braises and stews, dressings, curry bases

Tinned anchovies are cured in salt and oil rather than dried, so they melt into a sauce and leave a deep savoury backbone. That is genuinely useful, and it is the swap to reach for if a sambal tastes flat. It is also oilier and more straightforwardly fishy than fermented or dried, and it reads Mediterranean rather than Southeast Asian. There is no texture at all, so add a handful of fried peanuts if the crunch mattered. Rinse the fillets if the dish is already salty.

The honest crunch-only answer: it replaces the texture and none of the savouriness.

Best for

nasi lemak garnish, topping for rice and noodles, gado gado and salads, sambal for texture

This is worth calling out plainly because it is what most people actually want. Roasted salted peanuts give you the salt and the crunch in almost exactly the right proportions, and fried shallots give the crunch plus a sweet toasted flavour. Neither gives you any of the marine umami, so combine them with two teaspoons of fish sauce stirred into the sambal and you have covered all three of the anchovies' jobs with things you can buy anywhere.

The vegan route, split across two ingredients because no single one does both jobs.

Best for

vegetarian and vegan Malay broths, vegan sambal, vegan nasi lemak

Kombu simmered gently, never boiled hard, for fifteen minutes gives a broth real savoury depth and a mineral, marine background, and a sheet of toasted nori crumbled in at the end pushes it further in that direction. For the crisp topping, chickpeas fried or roasted until they rattle, or small cubes of tempeh fried hard, give you a comparable brittle crunch and a salty savoury bite. Season both generously with salt, since you have removed the ingredient that was salting the dish.