You’ll need:
-240g crab meat, coarsely chopped
-1 tsp salt (or 1 tsp nước mắm)
-1 tsp sugar
-Sprinkling of pepper (optional)
-2 garlic cloves, chopped or crushed
-2 shallots, sliced

-1 egg
-50g batter mix (mine says bột bánh cóng. Sometimes sold as tempura mix or batter mix in Asian markets, and basically some combination of rice and wheat flour and thickeners such as cornflour or tapioca starch. A quick googling using my newly-found Vietnamese-fu tells me that you can get the batter mix by mixing four fifths rice flour and one fifth wheat flour, so that’d work out as 40g rice flour, 10g wheat flour and 1 tsp of cornstarch [1])
-3 tblsp water

Dipping sauce: your choice of sriracha sauce, or some other dip. I used Mai Pham’s sweet soy sauce because I had leftovers in the fridge. Basically, mix all the ingredients listed below, let it rest for 10 minutes, and serve at room temperature.
-3 tblsp sweet soy sauce
-2 tblsp water
-1 tblsp minced ginger
-1 tsp ground chili paste (tương ớt tỏi)
-2-3 Thai bird chilies, cut into thin rings

For the fritters:

Fry the garlic and the shallots together for about 30s, until fragrant. Mix the crab, the salt, sugar, pepper and garlic/shallots together, and leave together for a bit. Taste a bit, and adjust salt/sugar if needed.

Meanwhile, mix the egg, the batter mix and the water: the result should be a thickish dough. Add the crab mixture, and stir until well coated.

Heat up about 3 tblsp. oil in a wok or frying pan.

Take a tablespoon (NOT the round, deep ones you use for measuring, but the actual soup spoons that you use for eating. It’s important to have something elongated and shallow), and scoop out from the mixture. Dump this in the wok. It’ll be a bit messy at first, but then the heat will kick in, and the mixture will congeal together as it cooks. Repeat until the pan is full. Turn over after a few minutes, when the bottom part is golden. Fry on the other side.

Drain on paper towels, and put the next batch in.

The proper way to serve this is as a snack with the dipping sauce; however, you can also eat this with rice and some fried vegetables (we used peppers).

Bánh chuối nướng literally means grilled banana cake (see how my vocabulary is improving? ), and it looks something like this:

Have I got your attention now?

(recipe under the cut)

By and large, Vietnamese cuisine doesn’t do desserts, at least not in the Western sense: a plate of fresh fruit is always suitable for serving at the end of meals, no matter how lavish they might be. Vietnam doesn’t really do pies, baked chocolate cakes, pièces montées, or the full range of pastries you can find in, say, France.

However, there are a few desserts, which tend to be very small doses of concentrated sugary goodnesss. This is one of them, and it’s dead simple to make. All you need is a few bananas, some sliced sandwich bread, and coconut cream, et voilà, you’re done!

The recipe is from Anh’s A Food Lover’s Journey: since I basically copied it from Anh’s blog, I invite you to check it out at that address.

Just a few notes on the process from me: bananas, especially ripe ones, are a pain in the %%% neck to slice lengthwise, so don’t worry if they end up a bit mashed in the process. You want thin slices, though.

If you’ve ever wondered about the difference between coconut cream and coconut milk: both are made by mixing the liquid that’s actually inside the coconut (coconut water) with the pulped flesh of the coconut. Depending on how much flesh vs. water you got, you either have milk or cream: cream has a very high content in pulp flesh and thus a creamier consistency. So the 200mL are definitely coconut cream (milk would see you not put enough coconut in the mixture).

Anh took the crust away on her bread; I found that with white bread, the crust was basically so soft that I could leave it on and this did not detract the pudding from settling in. I didn’t have any brown sugar, so I put in 80g of caster sugar, dissolved it in warm coconut milk, and did fine.

The baking pan: I wouldn’t line it with baking paper, honestly. With me, the baking paper got soaked through by the coconut cream, which made it all but impossible to separate it from the cooked pudding. A standard (porcelain or metal) pan plus a good knife should work fine.

The process of putting the cake together is very much lasagna-like: layer of banana, layer of bread dipped in sweet coconut, layer of banana, … I sprinkled some sugar on top of the last (banana) layer in addition to 2-3 tablespoons of neutral oil, which enabled the thing to caramelise in the oven. The cooking time for me was closer to 1h00 at 180°C, and then 15 extra minutes at 200°C: the insides were still not congealed together at the one-hour mark, and the top hadn’t yet got that caramelised sheen.

And here is the beast, fresh out of the oven!

(and promise, there will be a post that isn’t about eating or baking yummy stuff soon)

Yes, it looks gooey (that would be the cornstarch plus a liberal appliance of high heat), but it’s so very yummy. The flavours of the lemongrass, ginger and vinegar all combine for an explosion of taste right where it matters. My sis’s favourite dish when she was younger. Not my favourite dish (I tend more towards the shrimp and crab end of the spectrum), but it’s still such good comfort food.

(recipe from Bach Ngo’s Classic Cuisine of Vietnam)

Serves 4
You’ll need:
-300g chicken
-1 stalk lemongrass
-2 tablespoons fish sauce
-2 tablespoons shredded ginger
-2 tablespoons rice vinegar
-6 tablespoons water
-1 teaspoon cornstarch
-1/2 teaspoon sugar
-3 cloves garlic
-1 large onion
-Sprinkling of black pepper

-Mix the ginger and the vinegar. Set aside.
-Prepare the lemongrass stalk: discard any dried outer leaves, discard the upper two-thirds of the stalk, and slice the remainder paper-thin. Slice the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Put the chicken in a bowl along with 1 tablespoon of the fish sauce, and sprinkle black pepper. Mix, and set aside.
-Mix the cornstarch, sugar, water and remaining fish sauce, and set aside.
-Chop the garlic, and slice the onion into wedges.
-In a large-bottom casserole dish on medium fire, put in oil, and fry the garlic for ~30s, until fragrant. Add the onion, and cook until soft. Add the chicken, and fry for 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Cover, and cook for an additional 5 minutes. Then stir in the ginger-vinegar mixture and the cornstarch-fish sauce-sugar one. Mix well. Cover again, and cook for 5 minutes. Then uncover, set heat until the sauce boils, and finish off by congealing the sauce (basically, make the cornstarch boil and thicken).
-Serve with rice.

I found this recipe in Bach Ngo’s The Classic Cuisine of Vietnam (a book which, incidentally, I heartily recommend). It’s an awesome way of melding lemongrass and sesame, two very yummy ingredients. I suspect, from comparing the name and the final result, that I’ve missed something (a bánh ướt is a wet rice paper wrap, kind of like bánh cuốn, whereas the original recipe wraps the meat in dried bánh trắng rice papers–like the ones for spring rolls. But I might have missed something there, quite possibly by misinterpreting the book…), but what the heck, it’s still awesome to eat! The book offers to roll it up in rice papers, but since the batch I made was so large, the H and I ended up exploring variations: we served it with bún, and also with rice and salad and herbs.

And our beef with rice and salad (yes, the brownish patch of blurriness in the uppper left-hand patch of the picture is the H, who was too hungry to wait until I’d finished the pictures)

(more behind the cut, to spare you the pictures and lengthy text)

Serves 4-6.

You’ll need:
-1 pound beef (sirloin or a similarly tender part of the beast)
-1 tablespoon sesame oil
-1 tablespoon fish sauce
-2 stalks lemon grass
-2 shallots, or the white part of 3 scallions
-2-3 garlic cloves
-1 teaspoon brown sugar
-1 tablespoon sesame seed

For the wraps:
-Salad
-Mint and coriander (I suspect rau răm or red perilla would go better with this than European mint, actually)
-Rice paper (bánh trắng)

For the dipping sauce:
-Nước lèo (see here for a recipe)

Slice the beef thinly. Discard the outer stalks of the lemongrass (the large ones with the leaves. I have never bought lemongrass in France that actually had those, so I just rinse mine, but it could be that elsewhere you have those leaves). Discard the upper two-thirds of the lemongrass, and slice into very thin pieces.

Using a mortar and pestle (or food processor), pound the shallots, sugar and garlic together until you get a thick paste (I’ve found it helps to slice the shallots first, and to leave the pieces to dry in a warm place on kitchen paper for about 30 min, otherwise it ends up way too mushy). Add the sliced lemongrass, the sesame oil, the fish sauce, and the sesame seeds.

Put the beef in, and leave to marinate for 30 minutes or more. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 220°C.

Line an ovenproof dish with foil, and put in the beef and marinade so that the pieces are touching (but not in a very thick layer, otherwise this will not cook). Put in the oven, and bake for 30 minutes, or until the beef is cooked. If you have a broiler/grill function in your oven, you can grill the meat (but cook for ~15-20 minutes instead of 30, and flip the meat on its side halfway through the cooking process to avoid burnt beef!).

Leave to cool before serving (if serving with bún or rice papers).

-To serve with rice papers: soften the rice paper in water, wrap some beef pieces, some salad, some coriander and some mint. Roll like you would an envelope: sides first, and then a tight upwards roll so that you end up with a cylinder (plenty of videos on the web on how to roll rice papers).
-To serve with bún: put the bún in boiling water for around 2 minutes, drain, rinse under cold water. Leave to cool. Then in a bowl, put salad, bún, and herbs, top with the beef, and add a sprinkling of the sauce.
-To serve with rice: I should think it’s pretty self-explanatory

Bonus picture: here are the shrimps skewers we made this weekend (not posting the recipe because though they look good, the cooking process clearly needs to be streamlined before it’s anything like efficient).

OK, it’s hard to explain the appeal of this, so I’ll start with a picture of the finished dish rather than a close-up of the meat:

(rolls, courtesy of Flickr and stu_spivack).

Now that I have you salivating…

Bì cuốn is a perennial favourite of mine, but (at least in France), it’s not easily found in Vietnamese restaurants; and the recipes for this are few and far between. I ended up translating mine from a Vietnamese cooking website [1]. Bì means “pork skin”, and cuốn, of course, refers to anything that is rolled. And that’s what you get: cooked, shredded pork with pork rinds to give it a nice crunchiness, all wrapped up in a fabulous salad-rich roll, and dipped in nước mắm. Doesn’t it sound awesome?

So, onwards to the recipe!

(adapted from Nghệ Thuật Nấu Ăn)

You’ll need:

For the bì:
-500g pork meat (I used pork butt, but it’s fairly flexible)
-50-75g shredded, cooked pork rind (see note in the text RE quantities of this)
-2 cloves garlic, chopped
-3 tblsp sugar
-2 tblsp roasted rice (thính)
-1.5 tblsp salt
-coconut milk (optional)

For the rolls:
-rice paper
-1 green salad
-1 bunch herbs (perilla, coriander, …)
-Sliced cucumber (optional)

For the dipping sauce:
-0.5 volume lime juice
-1 volume nước mắm or fish sauce
-1 volume sugar
-2 volumes water
-bit of chilies and garlic (for 6mL of lime juice, I put in a teaspoon of chilli garlic sauce and one crushed garlic clove. But I like garlic. You might want to skip the clove)

Đô chua, the Vietnamese everyday pickles, go particularly well with this, if you have time to chop up carrots and soak them in vinegar.

This feeds a lot of people–off-hand, I’d say about 3-4 people with 5-6 rolls each. The H and I have been eating it for 3 days straight; the salad ran out before the bì…

So, before we start, a word of caution about the pork rind. Here in France, they only sell it dried; I believe in the US you have a choice of frozen or dried. The weight is for COOKED RECONSTITUTED pork rind. Don’t do what I did and use 100g dried pork rind, or let’s just say the meat is going to be kind of lost in the midst of the pork rind, and it’s not going to taste like much. The picture above with the rolls has a good idea of what it should look like; I think 50g-75g of rind to 500g of meat should do the trick. (as mentioned before, I used 100g dried rind–emphatically not a good idea. As we say, live and learn…).

That said…

Soak the pork rind in hot water for an hour.

Cut up the pork and cook it in boiling water or boiling coconut milk (you can use coconut milk for a slightly deeper taste, but honestly it’s going to end up a bit drowned under the other ingredients). Wait until the meat is done.

Prepare the roasted rice: on a dry pan on moderate heat, cook the 2 tablespoons of rice until they turn a deep brown and smell good. Take them off the heat, and grind them into powder (with a mortar and pestle, or with a spice mill. You might be able to buy thính in a SE Asian market; but here in France, finding it pre-cooked is mission impossible).

You can re-use the pan and the hot stove for the next part, which is frying the chopped garlic until it’s fragrant, and setting it aside.

Fish out the pork rind when it’s soft and white, and set it to dry.

Meanwhile, you can mix the dipping sauce by combining the sugar and warm water, and then the lime and fish sauce and garlic/chillies. Let it rest in the fridge for a bit.

Take the pork, and shred it with your trusty kitchen knife. Basically, cut up smallish (2-3mm) pieces. Take the rind, and also chop it up into smallish pieces (trust me, an indispensable step. Cooked pork rind as it is sold in Asian market can have rather long yarns of rind…). Mix everything–garlic, roasted rice, pork rind, pork, sugar and salt– in a large salad bowl. Et voilà, you have bì!

It should look like this, but with far less rind. Yes, those are pictures from the batch which had the excess rind problem…

You now get the right to wait a little, as bì (like revenge) is a dish best served cold. Seriously, all the Vietnamese rolls are best thought of as giant salads, so cold meat is generally preferred.

To serve, put the bì, the dipping sauce, the herbs and the rice papers on the table, along with a bowl of warm water. Dip the rice paper in warm water until slightly supple, put a salad on top of the paper; some meat, 1-2 slices of cucumber, a bit of coriander, and shape the roll. I usually fold both sides of the wet rice paper towards the center to make a sort of proto-enveloppe, and then roll the paper upwards very tightly. Youtube has plenty of nice demonstration videos if you want; and, if all else fails, you will have ugly-looking but still very much yummy rolls, so not much to lose…
The goal is to look somewhat like the picture of the rolls: the meat in the center, the salad wrapped around it. Tricky proposition, but doable (even the H, who is not the world’s foremost roller, managed it) Then, you know, proceed as usual: dip into sauce, bite into roll, dip into sauce again, and so on and so forth until you feel full of yummy food

There you go! If anyone does know the precise weight ratio between dried pork rind and not-dried-anymore pork rind, I’d be overjoyed to confirm my quantities (I did the one batch which had the proportions problem, and I think those quantities should do the trick; but I’m planning to do the next batch by eye rather than by weight).

In other news… We had a friend over for dinner, and cooked a delicious duck magret. If anyone is interested, here is the recipe. It actually feeds four people rather than three.
-2 duck magrets (100g meat/person, or thereabouts)
-2 tablespoons liquid honey
-2 tablespoons sesame oil

Mix honey and sesame oil to form a thickish marinade (if too thick, add a little hot water to dissolve the honey). Marinate for about 30 minutes. Then fish the meat out, set it in a frying pan over medium heat for 3-4 minutes on each side, until the pan is full of grease. Pour out the grease, deglaze the pan with a little hot water, and put the meat back in, as well as the marinade. Wait a few minutes for the sauce to thicken.

Grill 2 tablespoons sesame seeds in a dry pan over high heat (careful, they burn fast).

Slice the meat in small, artistic amounts, and serve with the sesame seeds and a little of the sauce. Goes wonderfully with homemade mashed potatoes [1].

(generic pic off Flickr which looks like our magret–I was hardly going to stop while serving the food and take pictures–friend would have looked at us very oddly)

(the less experiences cooks can also tell me who their favourite character in Obsidian and Blood is )

So… rice. I was 20, I think, when I realised that the way I’d learnt to cook rice didn’t correspond to what the majority of French people expected. The French way of cooking rice is a bit like cooking pasta: boil water with salt, put rice in water, drain in a colander.

Which is pretty close to a heresy in my book (and in a looot of other people’s books if they’re not French), so as I promised: here’s the way I cook rice. As usual, making no particular claims; just what I learnt (and adjusted).

Picking your rice: what I always get is jasmine rice, the new crop if it’s that time of the year (though be aware the new crop isn’t as dry as the older ones, which means you might need slightly less water. We’ll come back to that later). You can cook jasmine rice on a stove with a basic nonstick pan; some varieties, such as Japanese rice and glutinous rice, can’t be handled that way (you need to steam it in a special container, or to have a rice cooker).
Whatever you pick, get starchy rice, and not the varieties that come with the starch all but removed like Uncle Ben’s or the stuff that’s on Western supermarket shelves. Arborio is also unsuitable for this; and I’ve had variable luck with Basmati, which sometimes has a tendency to burn the bottom of the pan; I suspect the rice needs way more water than the jasmine, but I could be wrong about this…

Storage: store rice in a cool dry place, away from light. You don’t want beasties getting into it; otherwise it’ll keep almost forever, but will lose its fragrance as time passes (I once ate rice that was 3-4 years old. Not bad, but kind of funky–like everything was off with it). My maternal grandmother mixes 9/10 jasmine rice, 1/10 glutinous rice; which gives a nicer texture once it’s cooked.

Rinsing rice: you need to rinse the rice before you cook it, to get rid of the excess starch. Rinsing is probably a misnomer, because it’s more a case of washing. Basically, take the amount of rice you want, put it in a casserole dish or a bowl, put some water, swirl the rice around a bit until the water gets opaque. Dump the water, put more water, rinse again, and so on for a few rounds. Most of the time I stop at 4, but that’s because I’m lazy. (I was always told 7 times was the right number). A lot of cookbooks will advise you to rinse the rice until the water runs clear. That’s an exaggeration: the water never gets clear. (rice is mostly starch, and the water gets clouded with starch. If it didn’t, it would be because you’d removed the starch altogether…). You HAVE to rinse the rice, otherwise the flavour will be lost in the starch excess. Especially jasmine rice, which has a delicate aroma that is easily crushed.

The rice in its bowl after a couple of washings. Look, you can almost see the grains!

Quantities? I’m not crazy about the imperial system, but rice is definitely a staple you measure by volume, and not by weight. I use 300mL of uncooked rice for a 2-person meal, which is 1.5 rice cooker cup (note that a rice cooker cup is around 200mL, unlike an imperial measuring cup).

Adding water: now that the rice has been washed, put it into your pan. A nice, thick bottom is a good idea, in order to spread the heat evenly; and a nonstick pan is also a good idea, because there’s still starch in your rice, and the grains are going to cling like limpets to the bottom of the pan. Then measure out 1.25 times the volume of rice in water: if you put 1 cup rice, add 1.25 cup water, and so on. (I tend to adjust a bit depending on how old–and dry–the rice has got).

Steam cooking: cook on high heat (the water should be boiling) until the “eyes” form. The rice is still wet, but lots of little holes are beginning to form as the steam lifts from the grains.

The “eyes”. Aren’t they pretty?

Final cooking: when the “eyes” form, turn the heat to the lowest setting you have. Cover, and leave to cook for about 20 minutes. Don’t lift the lid during that time, or the steam will escape: I was always told this would ruin the rice. I suspect what really happens is that the water goes away, and the rice burns on the bottom. Plus, dry rice just doesn’t taste very good.

A word of warning: I’ve not tried any of that on a gas stove (me and gas don’t get along), so you might need to adjust a bit. Also, from my mom’s experience, cooking rice on an induction stove is a little trickier. I suspect it’s because the temperature of the pan adjusts more or less instantly when you turn off the heat, and the final cooking stage is much more difficult when you can’t count on the residual heat from the pan itself. If anyone wants to chip in with induction stove experience, feel free!

And if you have any questions/comments/disagreements, please do post them.

You will need:
-two nests (half a packet) egg noodles
-1 teaspoon ground ginger
-1 tablespoon chili-garlic sauce
-1 tablespoon fish sauce, OR a solid pinch of salt, OR 1 tablespoon oyster sauce (slightly different effects depending on what you use for salt content).
-1 tablespoon sesame oil
-1 garlic clove, chopped (or to taste)
-handful of spring onions, green and white part separately, chopped into little pieces

1. Cook the noodles in boiling water. There’s a trick to that if you don’t want an unholy tangled mess, which, first, take the nests from the wrapper and comb through them to untangle (do NOT dump into the boiling water tangled, or it will only get worse). Second, after you dump the noodles into boiling water, stir regularly, until the boiling starts again. Should be 2 minutes. Don’t leave more than that, or they get over-soggy. Then rinse the noodles under running water until most of the starch has gone away (it’s hard to describe; but mostly the noodles don’t feel quite so sticky). Keep untangling as you can. Personally, I’ve never quite managed to keep them separate, but that probably reflects more on my general cooking skills than anything else. If you’re not going to use the noodles straight away, leave them in cold water until needed.

2. Put a wok/frying pan with oil on high heat. Add the chopped garlic, the white part of the green onions, and fry for about 30s, until fragrant. Drain the noodles, and put them in the work. Swirl and keep untangling. Work in the chili-garlic sauce, the fish sauce/salt, and the ground ginger, making sure to mix well so all noodles get equal amounts of spices. Do this until the moisture is all but gone and the noodles are starting to brown. Then add in the spring onions, work in the sesame oil, and take off the heat.

Serve with a dish with a strong taste, as they’re still somewhat bland (it’s a bit my equivalent of white rice for egg noodles).

Also, having been hit by real life (again), this blog is going to remain in sort of in zombie mode for one further week. I could say I’m getting lots of fascinating ideas for blog posts, but mostly all I want now is some chocolate, a hot tea and a silly movie.

PS: btw, how many readers of this blog would be interested in a post on basic rice handling and cooking? I’ve never done it because it seems so obvious and I’ve been doing this my entire life, but it seems wrong to post so many Asian recipes and never tackle this at all… (hint: it is NOT about boiling a lot of water with a pinch of salt, flinging the rice in it, and cooking until the grains are perfectly separate).

Tomato sauce: was cooking ravioli, and quickly throwing together a tomato sauce from 210g of tomato paste. Which, of course, tastes horrible. I followed H’s advice and put in a tablespoon of sugar, but it still didn’t work. Mmm, time to get creative… I had a jar of dried tomato paste in the fridge, so I threw a heaped teaspoon of that in the mix; taste the thing, still wasn’t satisfied. It lacked… umami, for want of a better word? I swear I reached for the bottle of nước mắm, but the thought of having a fishy-tasting tomato sauce stopped me at the last minute. Fortunately, I had fermented soy paste in the fridge–you can see where this is going, right? Threw in a little more sugar in addition to the teaspoon of soy paste, and pronounced myself satisfied. I then very carefully asked the H what he thought of the tomato sauce before admitting what I’d put into it… (he liked it, but his enthusiasm wavered a bit when I explained the composition process).

Bò bún: it helps if you think of bò bún (and other bún dishes) as a giant salad–yes, there’s meat in it, and warm rice vermicelli, but it’s not really a hot dish (and please please don’t microwave it, as I’ve seen a number of takeaway places do. It tastes horrible, and the soy’s gone all limp). So, accordingly, I made my bò bún with honey-dipped beef & shallot for the meat, and salad, soy and the remnants of a cucumber for the veggies. Mmmm… (also, it’s not real bò bún in my book unless the rice vermicelli are swimming in a ton of nước mắm–think of it as vinaigrette, except that it’s not a dribble you put on the salad, but several tablespoons…)