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Archive for the ‘Comfort food’

December, 3 pm – Zut!

December 07, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: American, California - The Bay Area, Comfort food

Sometimes you just have to cast away all manners and enjoy a day in town like a tourist. After a few cups at Teance, Kristen and I were famished. As student I’ve gone lunch-less almost daily without problems, but drinking oolong without lunch is definitely the quickest way to wake up the hungry beast in you. We planned on gorging down pancakes at Bette’s across the street but we missed it by 6 minutes (why on earth do they close at 2:30 on a Friday?), so we dashed back to the other side of the street to Zut with exclamation mark and chose an appetizer and two entrees before the waitress could ask what kind of drinks we wanted. This, in our book, was record fast. However, despite our effort, the food didn’t come out fast enough. On a normal day, we would say the appetizer indeed got out in a really reasonable time, but one thumb-sized stuffed squid plus our extreme tea-induced hunger plus the lack of bread commonly served at Western restaurants really brought out the best of us: we stared longingly in the direction of the staff and the kitchen. The waitress caught our eyes.

Chorizo-stuffed squid ($9) – too expensive, the spinach is good, the sauce is good, tender squid, but the pepperiness of chorizo offsets the savoriness for me.

The first time she came back: “Do you need something?” Glances exchanged. “No…” *innocent smile* Longing stare continued… The second time she came back: “Would you like some bread with olive oi..” “Yes PLEASE!” *big wide grin* Four slices. Don’t know if they’re good because they’re good or because we were hungry, but they were gone after 2 minutes. More longing stare… This time our waitress intentionally avoided eye contact. We understand, but would we give up? No. Young as we were (we think), we were desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. We waved at another waiter, said, somewhat alarmed at our own temerity: “Could we have some more bread?”

Sausage and egg pizza ($15) – pizza’s okay, runny egg yolk on soggy pizza is waste of brain power

Zut! burger with white cheddar ($14) – the beef patty needs salt, the pickles are fresh, good crunchy fries

We were more fortunate than Oliver Twist because the waiter was much nicer than Mr. Bumble, as evident by the 6 slices following our request. Unfortunately, they arrived at the same time as the burger and the pizza, so instead of devouring them, we devoured the burger and the pizza. To discover that neither had enough salt.

Pear cardamom bread pudding ($8) – couldn’t taste either pear or cardamom. There were some kind of grapes which Kristen thought were fresh grapes and I thought were raisins. Ice cream would have been 56 times better than crème chantilly, but the airy crust on top saved the day.

So that solved the mystery: there’s a thing of salt on every table (not a salt shaker, mind you, but a sort of porcelain cup shape-wise akin to the thing that contains the tea candle, no lid). Without the bread we had no idea why it was there. Anyways they have good fries and good pickles. Dessert menus brought out, the waitress no longer avoided eye contact. Pear cardamom bread pudding looked good. So did grapefruit sorbet. We were really full at this point (Kristen finished only half of her pizza) so we said bread pudding please. Then we thought hey a palate cleanser would be nice because we needed to wash the fries off our palates… what next was only inevitable: “Can we have the grapefruit sorbet before the bread pudding please?” The sorbet dissolved the fullness (maybe it was just an illusion, but it lasted long enough for us to finish the bread pudding). How wonderful is the power of cold citrus things.

Grapefruit sorbet ($8) – with ginger snap. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

On a normal day Zut (exclamation mark or not) wouldn’t make the cut because we’re not into risottos and paninis, and we like our foods well seasoned, but that pink sorbet made our soul glint, an instrumental version of Memory was playing, the dangling lights on the trees were getting brighter as the sun got lower. The holidays drew nearer. We stood outside for a good five minutes just watching the lights. Silly girls. 🙂

Address: Zut! on Fourth 1820 4th Street Berkeley, CA 94710 510-644-0444 www.zutonfourth.com

This little piggy went to Kang Tong Pork

September 03, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: California - The Bay Area, Comfort food, Korean


Mom posed a question and I can’t conjure up any adequate answer for her: why does Korean fried chicken only appear in holes in the wall?

Not just a simple hole-in-the-wall thing in a busy strip mall, it has to either stand alone in an empty lot or sit at a shady street corner with iron folding doors and a few rowdy-looking guys smoking outside. Granted that those guys look Korean and the signs are in Korean, which confirms the authenticity of the place, and these are Korean drinking establishments after all. But does it have to be so shady? I want to walk down the street and eat fried chicken late at night sometimes…

The fried chicken bits with green onions at Kang Tong Degi (강통 돼지, which should be pronounced |Kang Tong Twe Jee|) might be good enough to risk it though. Frankly there’s less chicken on that plate than fried batter and green onion, but since when did fried chicken become so refreshing? A squeeze of lemon makes all the difference.

Thanks to Kristen’s mom, we three shared 8 dishes that covered tofu, seafood, chicken, pork and beef, one of them was a portion for two; the guy’s look of concern was funny, he even asked if we were sure. (We had plenty of leftovers of course. Nothing beats eating with moms. ;-)) Although “twe jee” (돼지) means pig or pork, this shack has good but not the best pork dishes. Kwen chan thah, their haemul soondubu (해물 순두부, soft tofu soup with seafood) and haemul pajeon (해물 파전, seafood onion pancake) are top of the game.

The wallpaper and the table arrangement are just too cute.

Address: Kang Tong Degi (강통 돼지)
3702 Telegraph Ave.
Oakland, CA 94609
(510) 658-2998

Soft tofu soup with shrimp, squid and clam. It looks fierce but tastes just slightly spiky. It was a good warm-up.

Banchan (side dishes). The only place I’ve seen that serves little crunchy shrimps. Yum yum.

Kimchi fried rice. In a moment of joy I dropped my camera head first onto the sunny-side-up, breaking the yolk and clouding my lens. Hence the dreamy look.

Cook with Yuri Vaughn

August 20, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: Comfort food, Japanese, Opinions


She’s the person behind the mochi at Teance. She pounds the cooked sticky rice instead of using mochiko, chops up whole yomogi for the actual grassy freshness, grow her own wild blueberries because they’re denser in flavor than the bigger highbush cultivars at the stores, and makes fancy mochi fillings with seldom fewer than 4 ingredients. Every time I nibble one of her soft little piece of art, each costs a whopping 4 dollars, I wonder what she doesn’t make at home from scratch and how much more work it takes.

Turns out, Yuri doesn’t make katsuobushi from scratch, that is, she doesn’t behead, gut, fillet, smoke and sun-dry the bonito fish herself, instead she buys the wood-block-looking karebushi and shaves it to top her okomiyaki, which goes without saying is made with grated nagaimo and dashi instead of premixed flour like when I did it.


We made Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, which doesn’t have egg in the batter, but we later added egg to brown the pancake more. Yuri told me to choose the fluffier cabbage instead of those with the leaves tightly packed together, and she added a squeeze of lemon juice on the finished pancake to brighten it up, exactly the little things that I can learn only from a home kitchen.


After two okonomiyaki, we had genmaicha with pickle cucumber and shiromiso, both homemade of course. Then a plain koshihikari senbei (rice cracker), as the sun set generous rays from the window.

Com tam at a tiny joint in Oakland Chinatown

August 14, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: California - The Bay Area, Comfort food, One shot, Opinions, Vietnamese

A guy waved a bottle in front of me. “Nesquik?”, he asked. I shook my head no thanks. Five seconds after he walked away, I realized my stupidity. I missed a free bottle of Nesquik! I don’t remember drinking Nesquik for the past 15 years, or ever, but I know what it tastes like, and I like chocolate. Why did I say no?!

Because I live in Berkeley. One thing Berkeley trains you very well for is saying no. Each time you walk pass a homeless man or woman, whether he or she asks for spare change or curses you off or shouts “nice dress”, you silently say no. Each time an activist steps up to you and says “Hi how’s it going? Would you have a minute to talk about …?” and you can barely tell what it’s about because he or she squeezes those two sentences in the hundredth of a second you lift your foot, you say no, usually with a smile because you feel bad. So you prepare this automatic respond when a stranger sticks something under your nose: No thank you. And you end up missing the free Nesquik.

But Berkeley also makes you nicer. And it’s not because the hippies convince you about world peace or anything. First it’s because you travel by bus. The bus always comes late, and not everyone sitting next to you has showered in the past 30 days, so you learn patience. Second, it’s because, as the saying goes, “it’s Berkeley, you can do anything“, and people, including you, wouldn’t bat an eye, so you learn acceptance. Then there’s the protests (boy do Berkeley students love protests, although those never yield any result beside some kid ending up behind a police car). I could list a dozen other reasons. But mostly, it’s because you see everybody from every corner of the world. My first encounters with the Serbian, Iranian, Bosnian, Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, Eritrean, Ethiopian people, and the smell of marijuana all happened in Berkeley. And those encounters (except the marijuana) quickly became friendships.

So I used to get a little uneasy, and I’m ashamed to admit this because I know it’s mean, when I saw Chinese people selling Vietnamese food. Here’s what I think: they don’t make it right, so they shouldn’t call it Vietnamese food. (I’m disturbed when Vietnamese people sell bad Vietnamese food too, because that’s disrespecting your own people.) And I avoided Vietnamese restaurants owned by Chinese. But when I strolled all over Oakland Chinatown last week, there were some occasional raindrops, the sky was grey, it was getting cold, and I just visited the Japanese Buddhist Church for the O-bon festival. All of those things put me in an exceptionally good mood. Although I set out to find Vietnamese snacks, it quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to find any, so when I walked by a window sign of “banh mi, bun bo Hue, banh canh” and a list of other Vietnamese staples, I caved.

Five minutes later, I ordered a cơm tấm (broken rice) with grilled pork “for here”. The lady pointed me to Table 2 (Let’s refer to her as Lady 2 from now on, many ladies worked at this joint). I put down my bags.

Then she exchanged a couple of words including “xiè xiè” to a couple sitting at Table 4. Yep. It’s Chinese people selling Vietnamese food.

Well, that’s okay, I diverted my gaze to the TV, Lady 2 also made herself a bowl of noodle soup and watched a Vietnamese movie while eating. It was hard to hear the TV because the following things happened during the course of my dinner: a customer dashed out into the street while Lady 2 shouting after him in Vietnamese to tell him to run slower, Table 4 chatted loudly in Chinese upon his return, Vietnamese customers coming in to buy banh mi and cha lua to go (the only dine-in people were Chinese and me), and as I scooped up the few last spoons of rice, a fight broke out outside, which caused Lady 2 and everyone else rushing to the street. I had to stop Lady 2 to pay, her eyes still directed a yearning gaze door-ward.


When I told my mom about the fight, she suggested against going back to such place, who knows when the fight will take place in the restaurant. I see her point, but I think I’d risk it. The com tam, and that includes the grilled pork, the broken rice, the nuoc mam and the pickled carrots and daikons floating in it, was beyond perfect. 🙂

Price: $6.75
Address: Ba-Lê Deli, Coffee, Restaurant
812 Franklin St (between 8th and 9th St.)
Oakland, CA
(510) 465-3522

One Bite: Tteok bokki at Crunch

August 09, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: California - The Bay Area, Comfort food, Korean, One shot, savory snacks, sticky rice concoctions


Thick sweet & spicy sauce. Soft chewy sticks of sticky rice. This is one heckuva tteok bokki. I can see myself going here for a tteok bokki takeout on movie weekends, and it’s only $7.

Address: Crunch
2144 Center St
Berkeley, CA 94704
(Downtown Berkeley)
(510) 704-1101

This place used to be a sushi joint. I ate there once. I’m glad it has changed into something much better.
Also, Crunch gave me a humongous plate of kimchi pork fried rice that was just three spoons above my limit and not enough to take home. What should I do? Cut down or increase my limit?

Beef bibimbap ($8)- julienned cucumber, carrots, bean sprouts, egg, lettuce and sauteed beef to be mixed with rice

Kimchi fried rice with pork ($8).

Rice Paper Kimchi Roll – a cross between ssam bab and fresh spring roll

July 29, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: Comfort food, Korean, RECIPES, Vietnamese

How can you bring kimchi to lunch at work without the smell of fermented cabbage?

I like the garlic smell of my homemade kimchi, but I’m not sure if I want my office to smell like it. Besides, I’m not a fan of bringing multiple containers to work. I don’t even want people to see me with a fork at my desk, and it’s even worse with an empty but dirty container. The ideal lunch is some kind of finger food, preferably balanced.

One afternoon, I decided to make ssam bab, a kind of roll with napa cabbage kimchi outside and stir-fried rice inside that I first saw in Kimchi Family and never in real life. You can find kimbab (rice roll in kim – seaweed) for very reasonable price in the Asian Ghetto just south of campus, but no Korean restaurants in the Bay dish out ssam bab. The only problem: I cut the napa cabbage leaves in half when I made kimchi, so now the leaves are not big enough to wrap up the rice, and things fall apart. Well, if I can’t make it the Korean way, I’m making it the Vietnamese way.

I use rice paper to wrap the ssam bab. The result: a cross between ssam bab and fresh spring roll. The perfect triple-layer balance: rice-kimchi-rice. The rice paper blocks the kimchi smell from diffusing across the room, keeps the roll intact thanks to its elasticity, and makes a clean, grease-less, non-sticky wrapper. The kimchi gives the roll a sour, spicy, garlicky edge so we don’t need a dipping sauce. Texture-wise, a bite takes us from chewy rice paper to juicy but crisp kimchi to the soft rice mixed with crunchy fried anchovy. Three of these rolls fill me up, but I chomp another just because.

Korean ssam bab: sauté pork and kimchi, mix with hot steamed rice, roll in a leaf of pickled napa cabbage, tie the roll with a leaf of cooked green onion.

Rice Paper Kimchi Roll

(make 20 rolls)
– 1 clove garlic, thinly sliced and browned
– 6 eggs, scrambled with garlic, and salt and sugar to taste
– 2 cups rice, cooked
– 10 quail eggs, halved
– 20 sheets rice paper
– 1 cup fried anchovy (myeolchi bokkeum)
– 20 pieces napa cabbage kimchi, the best size is 1.5 inches x 3.5 inches

Mix the scrambled eggs with the cooked rice.
Wet a sheet of rice paper in warm water until it’s soft, spread the rice paper on a plate or a chopping board.
On the rice paper, layer a piece of kimchi, some egg rice (about 1 tablespoon), a few row of fried anchovies, half a quail egg.
Fold the rice paper up along the kimchi piece to cover the filling, then fold the ends over.
Roll. The edge of the rice paper will stick naturally to the roll if the rice paper is moistened enough.

The rolls will stay good in the fridge for 4 days. Cover 3 rolls with a moist paper towel and microwave on high for 1 minute to regain freshness.

Mom’s cooking #4 – Beef porridge

July 18, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: Comfort food, RECIPES, Vietnamese

Guest post by Mom, loosely translated by me

There are mornings, even on weekends, when I wake up feeling like a stone (Mai: she means it figuratively, the supermodel BMI runs in our family 😉) and still have to get out of bed because of the mountain of work waiting. Not work at work, but work around the house. Laundry, cleaning the bathrooms, tidying the bedrooms, grocery, and especially cooking even when I have no appetite. When those mornings happen, I think of something easy to make and easy to eat. Naturally, porridge comes to mind. My daughter doesn’t like porridge, but when she’s not home I can prepare it for her dad and me for lunch and maybe dinner, too. I like porridge: mung bean porridge, fish porridge, chicken porridge, pork porridge… and beef porridge for today.

Beef Porridge (serving 3)
– 1 cup cooked rice
– 2 lb pork bone
– 1 lb ground beef
– 8 oz champignon mushroom
– 1/2 sweet onion, minced
– 1 tbs minced garlic
– salt and sugar to taste (e.g., 1/2 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar)
– a pinch of ground black pepper
– green onion and coriander
– 3 eggs

Simmer the pork bones to make stock, remove all the white floating foam. Use cooked rice instead of uncooked rice so that the porridge is soft but the grains don’t disintegrate, and the bottom layer doesn’t get sticky and burnt.
Season the beef with garlic, onion, salt, sugar and black pepper. Scoop spoonfuls of meat into the boiling stock. When the stock boils again, add rice. Simmer on low heat for 30 minutes. Do NOT stir. Once the porridge becomes really mushy, add mushroom. In a bowl, whisk up the eggs with chopsticks and dribble it into the boiling stock. Re-season if necessary before turning off the heat.
Garnish with green onion and coriander. Serve hot.

Beef porridge is easy to make (Mai: in my book anything with more than 3 ingredients ain’t no breezy game), not elaborate but healthy for the old and young, strong and sick. I feel lighter after I eat a bowl. How can our mind weigh down anymore when our body is elevated by something so hearty and warm?

Kitchen hour: quasi-Osaka Okonomiyaki

July 13, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: Comfort food, Japanese, RECIPES, savory snacks


When I walked down that aisle, I beamed with pride. In my hand, a bag of okonomiyaki flour, a bag of katsuobushi, bottles of sauces and aonori. Kristen took care of the cabbage and meats. Pancake day. Osaka style. At least that was the plan.

We didn’t plan on being authentic. We couldn’t. An American-born Taiwanese and a Vietnamese who haven’t lived in Japan at all are not gonna make an “authentic okonomiyaki” on first try. That’s why we chose premixed okonomiyaki flour instead of grating a nagaimo, bottled mayonnaise instead of whipping up eggs and oil ourselves. But just the thought of making our own okonomiyaki in whatever shape we want and however we want it, not having to go anywhere and regretting over soggy, over-salted mashes called okonomiyaki, generated the we-can-own-this attitude that guaranteed pride no matter what the outcome. It’s a sort of defiance after too many letdowns. Instead of mixing flour with water, we boiled roasted corn and mixed flour with corn tea.

Apart from that and the avoidance of green onion (I’d add green onion if I’m making pajeon – green onion pancake, but not okonomiyaki), and impatience – pouring more corn tea than I should, then the batter was too thin and I added some more flour and the batter went too thick, eventually I got double what I intended for, which also helped because we had a lot of cabbage – we followed the Best Okonomiyaki recipe pretty closely until the next-to-last step. Once I made too big a pancake, so when I flipped it, only half got flipped. I got omelet instead of okonomiyaki, but shape doesn’t matter, right? Ah, there was also a time when I forgot to layer the bacon on top of the pancake before flipping it, so the bacon was added to the bottom instead of the top, but that’s just a matter of perspective. 😉


Quasi-Osaka Okonomiyaki (serving 2)
[adapted from Best Okonomiyaki recipe]

1 cup okonomiyaki flour (100 g)
2/3 cup corn tea
2 eggs
1/5 head of cabbage, sliced into 2-mm-thick strips
9 strips of fresh bacon, cut into 3-inch-long (8 cm) pieces or however you like
100g raw shrimp, peeled and diced
Kewpie mayonnaise
Okonomiyaki sauce
Aonori (seaweed flake)
Katsuobushi (bonito flakes)


Boil the roasted corn kernels to make corn tea (옥수수 차 oksusu cha). I just take a handful and throw in a pot of water, you should rather go heavy than light on the kernel, it makes the tea sweeter. Let the tea cool.


Chop the cabbage. Time to show your prowess of chopping without looking, which I can’t do. You’d end up with a LOT of cabbage. Make cabbage salad with kimchi.


Mix flour with corn tea.


Add cabbage, diced shrimp and eggs into the flour. Mix like you never mix before.


Plop some of the mix onto a hot, lightly oiled skillet and spread it into whatever shape, canonically a disk. Four inches across will make it easiest to flip and big enough to be a meal.


Layer bacon strips on top. Let it sit for 3-4 minutes on medium-high heat.


Flip. And DO NOT PRESS it down. You want the air in there for crunch. Let it cook for another 2-3 minutes.


Spatula it out onto a plate. Sprinkle copious amount of aonori and katsuobushi (which we forgot to do! But we used tempura shrimp to make up for that later). Squeeze mayonnaise and okonomi-sauce into your desired pattern. Or make a heart-shaped pancake, like Kristen.

Here, a lesser writer would put something cliche like “this is the best okonomiyaki I’ve ever gulfed down”.

This is the best okonomiyaki I’ve ever gulfed down.


If you bought extra shrimp, make shrimp tempura. We decided this on a wimp and protected ourselves from flying oil with plastic bags. Recommended for entertainment. 😉


With leftover batter after deep frying the shrimps, make fried dough. Drizzle syrup and eat them as dessert. Can you see the shrimp imposter? 😉

Future prospects: grating nagaimo, making our own sauce, other styles of okonomiyaki.

Cheap eats at Koreana

July 05, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: California - The Bay Area, Comfort food, Korean, savory snacks


Put me next to a pig foot and I turn into a total nut case. But boy, these chunkies, sweet, salty, chewy, just a little spicy… I cleaned the bones until they were white.


A feeble attempt at including some starch to our lunch: ground beef and pork coins covered in batter and fried.

Dessert: ho tteok (호떡) – chewy sweet pancake with some kind of syrup or melted brown sugar filling, and the best part? They’re not too sweet!

Ready-to-go lunch for two: ~$15
Address: Koreana Plaza
2370 Telegraph Avenue
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 986-1234

Chat with Mr. James Luu and a peek inside Banh Cuon Tay Ho 18

June 07, 2012 By: Mai Truong Category: Comfort food, Houston, Northern Vietnamese

Ever wonder why Banh Cuon Tay Ho has the best steamed roll of all places? Thin like a veil, never too chewy or oily, the flour never tastes sour, and the mixed fish sauce never has the bitter hint of lime. Their secrets are mysteries to me. By chance, the Lưu family who operates Tay Ho 18 in Houston stumbled on my blog post of 4 years ago and invited me to the opening week after the relocation early April, which would feature a new item: crawfish banh cuon. I couldn’t come then due to a minor distraction called school, but a month later the place is stilled packed to the rim like an Apple store the day of a new iPhone release. I managed to snatch Mr. James Lưu aside for a brief chat during lunch rush, wonder if his staff liked me or hated me for it.

Leaving Vietnam in ’79, getting attacked by pirates, rescued ashore but later tricked and stranded by the natives in the Malaysian jungle, rescued by an American helicpopter after a month in the jungle, immigrated to the US as an orphan (Mr. Lưu was then 16 years old, any child refugee under 18 without parent supervision was categorized as an orphan in US immigration rules), living with foster parents in New York until the age of 18, moving out to California to be independent, studying and later working as a legal administrator for many years, Mr. Lưu’s life journey had all the drama to constitute a movie. In 2007, the Lưu family moved from Southern California to Houston, and after surveying the restaurant scene, Mr. Lưu set up his steamed roll business as part of the Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ franchise.

Last time I came, the restaurant stood inside the Hong Kong Market (HKM) complex, but according to Mr. Lưu, because the main patronage was customers of the market, the number peaked at lunch time and on the weekends but stayed flaccid otherwise, they closed at 7 pm, parking was difficult (the HKM parking lot is always crowded), and “it didn’t really feel like a restaurant”. At the end of the 3-year contract, he moved out next to Kim Son this spring, and business takes off.


The new crawfish banh cuon, accompanied by a special terracotta butter sauce with a zing, receives warm attention, but the Number 1 special combo, bánh cuốn đặc biệt, remains the most popular choice among the patrons because it has a bit of everything: some porky rolls (bánh cuốn nhân thịt), some flat rolls with shrimp flakes (bánh cuốn tôm chấy), some old-styled Thanh Trì sheet noodle (bánh ướt) to eat with the sausage, a hefty shrimp-and-sweet-potato deep-fried. But just between you and me, I told Mr. Lưu that I’m loyal to Number 7 – bánh cuốn nhân thịt, that has everything Number 1 has except the banh uot, and he laughed in agreement.


FB: Your menu spans all popular dishes of the 3 regions, with rice, bun, and noodle soups. Why don’t you limit it to only the rolls, the way specialty eating establishments in Vietnam limit to one or two dishes and their names become practically synonymous with the dish? After all, Tây Hồ is known for bánh cuốn like Ánh Hồng for 7-course beef or 46A Đinh Công Tráng St. for sizzling crepes…
Mr. Lưu: It’s precisely because we’re known for banh cuon that we have to have other dishes too. If we had only banh cuon, it’d be sold out by 2, then we’d have to apologize to the later customers and people would ask how come a banh cuon place doesn’t have banh cuon. Besides, everyone in a family would like something different and we’d want to accomodate that.
FB: So you make your batter fresh everyday? You don’t have some in storage in case of sold-outs?
Mr. Lưu: Yes and no. The batter is made daily and processed for a few days before it’s ready, so it’s not like we can make it on the spot.
FB: Is that the secret to your quality? Can you reveal a little more? *puppy eyes of Puss-in-Boots*
Mr. Lưu: Well, I can’t tell you the exact proportion, but the water for the mixed flour is changed daily in a fermentation period. Tay Ho standard requires the batter to be used between 3-7 days after the first mix.
FB: So that’s why the rolls taste a bit sour at some places, they left their batter sit too long?
Mr. Lưu: Yes, longer than 7 days would result in a sour batter. But shorter than 3 days and your rolls would fall apart, you need the fermentation to give the sheet its elasticity. Actually here we only use 5- to 6-day-old batter to render the right chew.
FB: What about the fish sauce?
Mr. Lưu: Can’t tell you that. *grin* The two deciding factors in a plate of steamed rolls are the fish sauce and the batter, and I make them both myself everyday. There’s a lot to balance between taste and cost, the quality of pure fish sauce you put in, the kind of water to mix. You want it to taste sweet and fresh, and you don’t want the bitterness from the lime. We also avoid using MSG.
FB: So I just have to buy your fish sauce then *grin*
Mr. Lưu: *grin* Yes, we do have mixed fish sauce for sale, and it stays good for a month in the fridge.

Between fragments of our conversation, Mr. Lưu was also waving at customers, directing his staff, printing the checks and exchanging handshakes with the regulars. The lunch rush was a spectacular sight. I thanked him for the meal and the conversation; had I lived closer, I’d relive my middle school dream: a plate of porky steamed rolls everyday for breakfast.

Address: Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ 18
10613 Bellaire Blvd. #A168
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 495-8346