Banh Mi (Vietnamese Hoagie)

 

What does one think of when they think about "fast food"? How about "street food"? Often times, we will think about hot dogs and burgers, which are good in their own rights, but for me, I think about Banh Mi, or Vietnamese hoagies. Banh Mi can be directly translated in English as "bread", how we got to skip the translations about all the good stuff that's inside the bread is beyond me, I guess we just got lazy.

Recently, I've decided to make "banh mi" after ordering it a couple of times a week from the local bakery. Their banh mi was good, but I felt like I could make it better suited for my taste, using the ingredients that I like, and I can have as much as I like as well. My version of Vietnamese style banh mi is a classic Vietnamese pork BBQ, with pickle diakon radish and carrots. 

Here are a list of things that you'll need:

• Bread (Vietnamese/French style baguette works best
• Cucumbers 
• Celantro
• Chili Peppers
• Green onion
• Diakon radish (cut into small strips)
• Carrots (cut into small strips)
• Pork
• Lemon grass (finely diced)
• Sugar
• Salt
• Soy sauce
• Black peppers
• Lime

 Don't let the long list of ingredients scare you, a lot if it has to do with prep work and not so much with actually cooking them. In fact, the only thing that you would have to pay great care to is the pork since you'll have to marinate it and make sure it's seasoned well.

Marinating and cooking the pork:

Add finely diced lemon grass, lime, soy sauce, sugar, salt, black pepper into a bowl and mix it up until everything is dissolved; make sure you taste it before adding the mixture to the pork. I usually just marinate the pork overnight, but 3-4 hours would also do the trick. Cook the marinated pork in the oven at 375 degree for about 40 mins (depends on how big the pork is).

Making the pickled vegetable:

This is pretty simple to make. In a large bowl, add sugar, salt, rice wine vinegar, and warm water; you'll want to mix everything together until all the sugar dissolved. The taste of your pickle mix should be 40% sweet and 60% sour. Add diakon radish and carrot and mix well.

Putting it all together: 

From here, just slice the pork and add all the veggies together to make a hoagie sandwich. You can add soy sauce and hot chili peppers if you like. Enjoy!