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!

Vietnamese Soul Food part II (ca kho to)

I don’t normally have a lot of time to blog what I’m cooking right after I cook it, since I’m either too tire or stuffing my face, so I find it helpful to break up my blogs into different postings and write them on a different day.  I tend to write all my stuff on Word, then copy and paste them onto here; I’m paranoid that way. So if you see a ton of postings on one day, that’s the reason behind that, I’m really not that diligent.

Anyways, this post is neither about this nor that, this is about caramelized fish, and when it’s done right, it’s a beautiful thing. Now, before you picture some yucky fish sticks on a candy-apple-like contraption, rest assure that it’s nothing like that (I think).  I learned this dish from my mother (like all the other Vietnamese dishes that I cooked), but could never make it as well as she did. She got too many years of experience on me. Nevertheless, I will try my best to show you how I went about making caramelized fish.

Conceptually, this is an extremely easy dish to make. All you’ll need is a fish that can stand up to very slow cooking over a long period of time (I suggest catfish because it’s a little tougher than other fishes), sugar, salt, black pepper, and green onions; it’s the “I’ll try my best not to burn the sugar”… that’s the bitch part.

Before you start cooking: 

• Cut your fish into even slices and place into a decent side bowl for marinating
• Add the following to the bowl: about 4-5 spoon of sugar (depends on how many fish you have, I’m using 1 large catfish), 1-2 spoon of salt, black pepper, diced garlic, chopped green onions, and a little bit of water to dissolve everything. You’ll want to marinate this for about 2 hours.

Cooking Directions:

• On a medium to large pan, add a little bit of water (no oil is needed please, it doesn’t go well with water) over medium-low heat.

• Add all the components from the marinated fish bowl to the pan and wait for the sauce to reduce while cooking your fish. 

• On a separate pot, make a simple sirup (3-1 ratio of sugar to water) by mixing sugar and water together over heat until it becomes a “syrup”. The trick here is that you want to cook this syrup until it become reddish-brown (very important!) so that the sugar will dissolve completely, leaving just the unsweetened syrup. If you cook it too long, it will become bitter; not long enough, it’ll still be sweet. You can add a little bit of warm water to the mixture if your syrup is too thick.

• Ok. Now that we have our syrup and our fish is still being cooked over medium-low heat, add the syrup to the fish pan and simmer over low heat. You don’t have to mess with it much after this point, just let it cook evenly on both sides while the sauce reduce.

The final product should taste sweet, slightly salty, and spicy; your fish should look like it’s been caramelized in the rich-thick sauce (reddish color). This cooking method may seem complicated at first, but after a few tries, it’ll be worth the effort. It took me 2 tries just to get it right. It’s also good to know that this might not be the best dish to make when you’re really hungry, since the total cooking time is around 1 and a half hour.

To serve: sprinkle some chopped green onions on top and you’re ready to eat.

Vietnamese Soul Food part I (canh chua)

I always found it interesting how the definition of “Soul Food” could have a different resonance to different people, depending on who they are, and where they grew up. For me, I tend to enjoy the combination of something soupy and savory, regardless of weather or time of day. Lucky for me, Vietnamese cuisines feature a wide variety of “soul” foods.

A couple of nights ago, I’ve decided to make Vietnamese “sweet and sour” soup (or canh chua in Vietnamese) to pair with caramelized catfish (ca kho to) to be served with rice. To me, this is the equivalent to fried chicken and mash potatoes; this is what I grew up eating, this is also considered as a very traditional Vietnamese meal. Like all great dishes, its origins typically came from necessity and what’s readily available to a given region. In most of Asia, fish and vegetables were considered cheap and in abundance, while meat and dairy products were expensive and often exported to the more “privileged” crowd. It’s funny how things are flipped here with seafood prices marked up so high.

I’ll show you how to make sweet and sour soup now, and save the caramelized fish for next time. To make the soup, here are some things that you’ll need:

• Tamarind (you can get the paste or the powder; this is the sour component)
• 2-3 fresh chili pepper (chopped finely)
• 1 pineapple (chopped into cubes)
• 3 small cups of okra
• 2 handful of bean sprouts
• Thai Basil
• Rice paddy herbs
• Fish sauce (to taste)
• 2-3 roma tomatoes (chopped into even cubes)
• Sugar (to taste)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 onion
• 2-3 catfish cut into even cubes (head is optional, but not really good eats in this case)
• Freshly chopped celery (optional)

Directions:

1. Finely chop garlic and onions and place them into a large pot with pre-heated oil. I’ve found that everything that’s good starts with garlic and onion (except for desert, that would be weird).
2. Add the catfish and sear all sides until golden brown and remove from pot. Pre-cooking the fish this way will eliminate the fishy smell in the soup, and will allow the fish to hold better in the cooking process; skipping this step will be very bad.
3. Add water to the pot. I usually filled the pot almost half way with water at this stage. You’ll find that the soup has a brownish color to it, this is what you want since you’re extracting the flavors from the garlic and onions at the bottom of the pot.
4. Add the tomatoes and cook until they’re soft.
5. Add the pineapple and okras and cook for about 5-7 mins.
6. Add the fish, bean sprouts, chilly peppers, and celery.
7. Season with sugar, fish sauce, and tamarind to taste. You want to add a little of each elements at first since fish sauce is really salty and tamarind is really sour. What you’re trying to achieve here is a balance between the sweet and sour, with a hint of saltiness. I like mine more on the sour side, but that’s just me.

To serve: Place the soup into a large bowl and add chopped basil, chili peppers, chopped rice paddy herbs on top.  This is great with plain rice and you can place a side of fish sauce with some chili pepper (I like it spicy) on the side to dip your veggies from the soup.

Cooking time should be no more than 30 mins so that all your ingredients are fresh and crunchy. A good note to add is that this is not really a good dish to re-heat more than 2x, since you’ll loose that initial freshness.