Flavor Boulevard

Quite possibly the cheesiest name of a store I’ve ever seen: Bánh Canh Quê Anh & Quê Em – “bánh canh [from] your hometown and my hometown” (it doesn’t sound cheesy translated into English, but trust me, it’s like Twilight’s Edward Cullen in noodle soup form). Which is actually fitting, since banh canh is commoner’s grub, not a bourgeois lunch. You won’t find a classy madame dressing up just to go out for banh canh. The poor thing will never be elevated to the level of pho. I love it.

I grew up eating it before I was born (literally). Backstory can be told in person, but despite eating so many bowls, I never knew that there was so many types of banh canh. Que Anh & Que Em offered 30 types (see menu at the bottom), 14 of which are no more traditional than the Spider Roll, but the other 16 are attached to geographical regions in Vietnam, and thus, in this case, more meritable.

Banh canh is a thick, chewy, slippery rice noodle (with tapioca starch). It’s similar enough to udon in appearance and texture (as the shop aptly translates it to “Vietnamese udon”), but also entirely different (udon is made from wheat).

Close-up of my order: banh canh Tra Vinh – pork, pig trotter, quail eggs, pig blood in a clear, light broth. The classic when people think of banh canh. I can do without pig blood, which I transferred to Dad’s bowl, and the quail eggs (fresh quail eggs are great, but these taste like the canned version). In fact, the noodle and the broth alone are sufficient.

From left: Dad’s and Mom’s orders: banh canh 3 mien (“banh canh of all three regions”) and banh canh hoang gia (“royal banh canh”). Both names are only meant to illicit interest, the same way “Pho Dac Biet” is really not all that special. The broth of both bowls is thickened, yellow (with turmeric?) and taste richly of seafood, as both are loaded with crab meat and shrimps.

Desserts, of course. che long nhan hat sen – longan and lotus seed che… (I got the same thing at Danh’s Garden too, it’s gently sweet, fruity, and hard to get tired of.)

… and che khuc bach – lychee, some chewy tapioca thing, some chewy milky jello thing, and some nuts. A popular che in Vietnam these days.  Here’s a video to make che khuc bach, which the author loosely calls “almond panna cotta lychee dessert”.

I miss Vietnamese food. It’s been only three days since I left for the mountain on another observing run. Every time I’m in the mountain I’m reminded of what a privileged life I have. I miss being a stone’s throw away from darling nigiri, banh mi, mordin, etc. There’s no Asian restaurant in Big Pine, the nearest congregation of human from the observatory. Then again, it’s already a huge privilege to stay at CARMA, with a private bedroom and bathroom, eating juicy fresh apples and having nutritious meals hot and ready twice a day…

Address: Banh Canh Que Anh & Que Em
11210 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 133
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 416-5316

A couple of millimeters thin, chewy, savory, bánh bèo, the waterfern-shaped appetizer, is as familiar to the Vietnamese dining tables as crab cakes to Americans. But not everyone makes it at home because it takes more time than its worth: make the rice flour batter, steam the banh, make the toppings, mix the fish sauce. In fact, I’ve had homemade bánh bèo only once, and it was at my friend’s family restaurant. That said, there are skilled and dedicated grandmas who insist on making everything from scratch for the best bánh bèo. One of them is Mrs. Tự, and Little Mom happened to see one episode of her cooking show on TV last week.

So below are some tips on bánh bèo from Mrs Tự, collected from the show Nghệ Thuật Nấu Ăn Bà Tự (The Cooking Arts of Mrs Tự) on Global TV Houston.

1. Texture:
The thinner bánh bèo is the better bánh bèo. Of course, resilience is a must, it should not be as chewy as a mochi, but it should have enough strength to hold itself together as the eater picks it up with chopsticks. How to make a thin but resilient bánh bèo? Heat the bánh bèo plates (or molds)* in the steamer before pouring in the batter and steaming the bánh. I suspect that this preheating helps cook the batter evenly in all directions, instead of having the bottom cold and cooking it with steam from only the top surface during the first few moments.

2. Toppings:
Bánh bèo of the South has savory mung bean paste for topping, and bánh bèo Huế usually has pan-dried shrimp (tôm chấy), which blogger Tran Ngoc Kha translated as cotton shrimp for its fluffy texture. Fresh shrimp** (with head, legs, shell, everything) goes without saying: while peeling off the shell, you can keep the gạch, a substance located in the head of the shrimp that becomes reddish orange when cooked, to sweeten and fatten the toppings***. How to make the shrimps dry and fluffy? Microwave the peeled shrimps so that the meat is red, plump, and has a spring to it. Then pound the shrimps to break up the bodies, but not to a paste. And fry it on high heat with constant shuffling.

But bánh bèo can also be topped with pork rind. To make the pork rind, Mrs. Tự would slice the skin off the pork belly, boil it, cut into thin strips, refrigerate them, and finally deep fry them. The refrigerating step prevents the fat from shooting everywhere while frying. How to tell when the skin is refrigerated long enough? If you bend the strip and it gives a loud, clean snap, it’s done.

Then there is also topping made with bean paste, meat and tapioca, seen on bánh bèo in Quảng Nam Đà Nẵng. The better tapioca flour (bột năng) is not the white powder straight from the bag, but that which is pan-dried to really rid of moisture. How to know when the flour is dry enough? Mrs. Tự puts either a pandan leaf or a piece of a banana leaf into the wok as she constantly stirs the flour, the heat from the flour vaporizes the moisture in the leaf, when the leaf dries up and becomes crunchy, the flour is done.

(*) Bánh bèo should be made in mini shallow cups (like sauce cups) made of porcelain. The molds are convenient but render a metallic taste, the bánh bèo would be too thick and oily because the molds have to be greased before steaming.
(**) Some places serve up bánh bèo tôm chấy with packaged dried shrimp (tôm khô). Never go there.
(***) Crabs have more gạch than shrimps, so gạch cua (gạch from crabs) is more well-known in Vietnamese cooking. In Japanese, gạch cua is indeed kanimiso, the brownish grey substance that is a mix of the crab’s internal organs (brain, liver, pancreas, intestine, eggs, etc.). Good stuff. 🙂

It’s the 29th of the 12th month in the lunar calendar. The last day of the Year of the Cat. The last day before Tet officially starts. But the preparation for Tet is also Tet. Having a good time is also Tet. Being home is also Tet. 🙂 One of the best parts of being home is not just getting to eat a lot. It’s getting to eat a lot of food that I would never have known otherwise. This time, Little Mom introduced me to the Central Vietnamese fun of a rice cracker roll.

When I first heard the name, I thought I heard it wrong: how can you make a roll out of a stiff, crunchy, airy rice cracker (which we call a bánh tráng nướng in the South, or bánh đa in the North)? Simple. You dip it into water. Just like you would with the normal dry rice papers to make gỏi cuốn or chả giò.

Except in this case, you get an extra thick roll with some crunch and air in the bite, and the nuttiness of thousands of sesame seeds ingrained in every bánh đa. The filling is simple, too: boiled pork and fresh greens. Then dip it into the ever-flavorful mixed fish sauce. Mmmmm… Delicious Lunar New Year!

P.S.: Toasting a rice cracker on open fire is cool but not exactly easy to do (for example, I only have an electric stove). So we toast them in the microwave, 1 minute each side for even crunchiness. 😉 It’ll pop like firecrackers in the mouth. 😀

Something occurred to me within the last month: I probably should learn to pair drinks with food, but I hardly drink anything beside water and soymilk. Now I would *love* to learn about the different kinds of water, but living in the city makes it a bit difficult, and soymilk can’t be paired with everything like wine (yet). Coffee, alcoholic beverage, juice? Didn’t quite catch on. So what does that leave me? Tea. A quest takes form: Mai is going to learn tea.

And Mai will cook with tea, too. Because boiling water to drink tea takes some work, I might as well make it worth a meal. How much influence the ochazuke at Mifune had on me, I’m not sure, but during the two minutes of wringling my brain out for some easy way to use tea in food, the first thing that came to mind was cooking rice with tea. Now that’s the difference between my tea rice and the ochazuke: my tea rice is rice cooked with tea, and the ochazuke is rice eaten with tea, like a soup.

As with everything, there’s the easy way and the hard way to make tea rice.
The hard way: use loose leaf tea
– Pros: the tea quality (fragrance, taste, intensity)
– Cons:
—— If make tea first, then use tea instead of water to cook rice: extra step of cooking = time cost
—— If put tea leaves and rice altogether and cook: you’d have to either eat the tea leaves with the rice (the textures don’t match), or pick it out by hand. This obstacle can be remedied with a small mesh bag, though, if I had one.
The easy way: use tea bags. The pros and cons are just the opposite of the hard way.

If you know me, my very under-equipped kitchen, and my minimalist attitude with time, you know what I chose to do: I let the tea bags float in the water and the rice cooker do its job.

Unlike my other whimsical cooking experiments, tea rice is something I’ve actually made more than one time. I feel so matured. After all those times, I’ve learned that:
1. Green tea gives the rice the tea fragrance, and black tea gives it the tea taste, but neither gives enough of both. White tea is out of the question, unless you’re really proud of your tea sensitivity.
2. One tea bag per cup of water is sufficient. (But how many cups of water per cup of rice is a different matter: it depends on the rice.)
3. Tea rice soaks up the moisture more than normal white rice. You know how the lid of the rice cooker usually has a lot of water droplets on its underside when you open the cooker? When you cook with tea, the lid is almost dry.

As per Little Mom’s suggestion, I combined green and black tea into my latest batch. Three cups of rice, four cups of water, 3 black tea bags, 2 green tea bags. It came out healthily browned, smelling herbal, and tasting clean. Tea rice has an enticing bitter hint and a sweet aftertaste, which is likely the rice’s natural sweetness enhanced by the tea’s lasting subtlety.

But tea rice needs companions, too, something savory enough to make it exciting but plain enough to not overpower its flavors. A thought came, and I nearly cried for missing a Halloween post. So, in the spirit of early November, which is late Halloween, I present to you Black Tea Hades Rice (cơm âm phủ trà đen):

Hades Rice belongs to Huế cuisine, featuring julienned meat, omelet, and vegetables. Such delicate texture of the accompaniments make this style best spotlight the tea rice.

Fried egg, fresh celery, Asian pear, white baechu kimchi (dongchimi style), and boiled brisket were what I could whip out from the fridge, but the silk sausage would be nice to have. Drizzle some sweet garlic soy sauce on top, and the rice just sings. 🙂

This is my contribution to Delicious Vietnam of November, hosted by Sandy of Ginger and Scotch. Can’t wait to see what’s on the table at this 19th round. 🙂
*Delicious Vietnam is a monthly blogging event created by Anh of A Food Lover’s Journey and Hong & Kim from Ravenous Couple.

I lost my memory card. If you’re a food blogger too you’d know how devastated I felt: the first advice to a food blogger these days is “good pictures”. Well, the pictures I took at Hương Giang are amazing, they just no longer exist. But, pictures or not, as my professor Lawrence Hall would say in his British tongue, “you can’t stop me,” or in this case, I can’t stop myself from blogging about the restaurant.

Is their food that good? Hương Giang takes a shy, small square in the parking lot at the corner of Bellaire and Boone. If you drive westward on Bellaire Blvd, you’ll see its sign on the left before you reach Hong Kong Market. It’s really a tucked-away place for scoffers, the outlook unimpressive, the sign blue and white like a tired worker shirt. The inside is similar to any average pho joints you’ve seen, wiped clean and plastic cheap. I knew my mom wouldn’t come here if not for blogging’s sake, but in this city it’d be hard to get a menu more Huế than this one.

There are pictures in the menu and printouts taped to the wall to tell you what the specials are. For us it’s a matter of getting what we’ve heard of but not had: gỏi mít tôm thịt, bánh ít ram, cơm hến, and bún suông.

Gỏi mít tôm thịt is jackfruit salad with boiled shrimp and pork, and like other Vietnamese gỏi, it’s served cold with rice cracker (bánh tráng nướng) for shoveling and scooping. The airy blandness of a coal-toasted sesame rice paper elevates the lime juice, the pepper, the cilantro in a gỏi. The kitchen makes a slight mistake by bringing out a plate of gỏi mít hến instead, where the boiled pork and shrimp are replaced by handfuls of tiny basket clams (hến). These freshwater bivalves are connected to Huế like McDonald’s to Americanization. As small as a finger nail, each hến constitutes a second of chewing. As a stir-fried bunch mixed with young jackfruit flesh, the collection feels grainy and humble like a fisherman’s kitchen by the riverside. The color, too, is earthy: blackish-lined ivory hến,  pale brown jackfruit, and a bit of green cilantro.

Cơm hến offers more or less the same atmosphere as the salad, except the rice amplifies the grainy texture in place of the jackfruit’s fleshy blend, no rice cracker presents to break the unanimity, and the hến‘s natural sweetness here isn’t damped by any lime juice. When there isn’t just a few, but at least a hundred of these quiet lives in a bowl of cơm hến, you can’t help but feel the responsibility to treasure each spoonful. It’s the least you can do for the dignity of those tiny freshwater basket clams.

If cơm hến were hamburger, then bánh ít ram would be mac ‘n cheese. It’s not super well known, but anyone who knows Hue food knows this sticky (rice) business. I first learned of bánh ít ram from noodlepie, Ravenous Couple call them fried mochi dumpling (and you really can’t get a better looking picture of bánh ít ram than what the couple styled on their site). Each ping-pong-sized dumpling carries a marvelously inviting look: a plump, shiny round ball on a golden base, cut in half and there snuggle rosy bits of shrimp and char siu pork. Each bite is a step into a river: first soft, then sinking, then hitting the crusty bottom. With or without the mixed fish sauce, savory bánh ít ram, also called bánh ram ít by the natives, is a fair partnership between the steamed bánh ít and the deep fried bánh ram, with each component designed to excite the other. So why is it not as popular as bánh bèo? Because it’s hard to go down the second time. One bánh ít ram is good, two are too many. Ten on a plate, like what we get at Hương Giang, becomes a bloody battlefield.

Thankfully we are a team of three, and we rotates plates to share both the good and the challenging. And thankfully we get bún suông. This noodle soup draws a fine but successful line between being too meaty and being too thin, as it contains both. Ample cuts of chả cá (fish cake, similar to eomuk), chả lụa (silk sausage), and juicy shrimps weave among the angel hair rice vermicelli, all soaked in a slim sweet broth. Bún suông at Hương Giang tastes pure like bún mộc, quite a contrast from the definitions I’ve found online, whose broth is as thick as a deep South accent of the cooks said to invent the noodle soup.

If there are indeed two types of bún suông, the southern style and the Hương Giang style, then I’d choose the latter any day. If the southern style is really the only traditional style, then I’d go to Hương Giang just for their bún suông. You know you can trust a chef who has created something so delicate, so heart-warming, so balanced, and so very Huế.

Address: Hue Huong Giang (near Hong Kong Market)
11113 Bellaire Boulevard
Houston, TX 77072-2607
(832) 328-1308

Money matter:
gỏi mít hến (6.25) + bánh ít ram (6.50) + bún suông (6.50) + cơm hến (8.50)
= $27.25 a big lunch for three

I have discovered another great soup. My fingers trembled with anticipation over the sweet aroma, the shining aurulent broth, those fragile fatty bubbles that form a thin film on the surface, the promising dapple of fried shallot,… and the pictures got all blurry. So just squint your eyes and pretend for the moment that you’re hunching over a bowl of piping hot succulence and the steam makes your eyes hazy. Can you smell that sweet aroma? No? Grab a chair at Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #9 in North Oakland, ask for a bowl of bún mộc, and find out for yourself.

Before diving thy chopsticks into the noodle soup, let us start with the name. It can be spelled either bún mọc or bún mộc, the hat on the “o” changes the word’s meaning and thus the name’s origin, but nobody is certain which one is correct. “Mộc” means “simple”, the broth is simply boiling water savorized by salt, pepper, nuoc mam, pork, shiitake, and wood ear mushroom.  “Mộc” also means pork paste (twice-ground or pounded pork, seasoned, known as “giò sống” in Vietnamese), which is the central ingredient in the original soup but not in the rendition at Tay Ho #9. I like gio song, but sliced meatballs and cha lua (silk sausage) make a trustworthy substitution. The cook here also threw in some shredded chicken breast as a reassurance of familiar fixings. Now if you drop the hat on the “o”, “Mọc” is the nickname of the former village Nhân Mục, a part of west Hanoi today. This village can very well be the hometown of the meat-laden rice noodle soup, hence the noodle soup’s name. However the spelling goes, all we southerners know is bun moc comes from the north and is less than popular in Saigon. Most Vietnamese immigrants in the Star Flag States are southerners, so bun moc is even harder to find on the menus here. But as long as there’s a kitchen somewhere churning out these mouth-warming, bellicious bowls, there will be my pair of chopsticks eager for a hearty winter fling.

In the mood for something a little more adventurous?

If bun moc might seem on the mild side, you know, ground pork and white meat, and healthy mushroom for crying out loud, then bun bo Hue would spice up the buds. Bun bo Hue is synonymous with chili paste and satay, there’s just no way out of the heat. There’s no way out of the brutal assortment either, beef chunks, gelatinous cubes of congealed pork blood, some hasty slanted cuts of pig trotter. The blood cube doesn’t taste bloody though, it’s rather bland (naturally, it’s cooked and unseasoned) and only for textural purposes. I’ve sampled this beef noodle soup at Kim Son and Bun Bo Hue Co Do, but third time is indeed a charm, I enjoyed it at Tay Ho. Either that or the hostess’s friendliness, a rare delight to diners in Vietnamese restaurants, which alone makes me want to go back to this place.

1 bún bò Huế + 1 bún mọc + 1 large bánh cuốn to-go for lunch the next day: $22.67

Address: Tây Hồ Restaurant – Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #9
344B 12th Street
Oakland, CA 94607
(510) 836-6388

More on Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ: Tây Hồ #8 in San Jose and Tây Hồ #18 in Bellaire, Houston.

Also check out Bánh Cuốn Hoa II in Houston, they have nice duck noodle soup (bún măng vịt).

Almost every Sunday we make a trip to Bellaire to get the usual supply of patechaud, cha lua, banh gio, and the like. Almost every Sunday the question’s asked: where will we eat today? Well, there are two choices: the all-too-familiar Kim Son, and the more adventurous find which can be anything Little Mother saw in the local Vietnamese newspaper ads. We’ve had our handfuls of adventurous finds, all are good, but as usual smaller places don’t have a big selection, the menus are either common banh mi and pho, or grandiose names we don’t particularly care for. Mother is also easily shy away by the appearance of a restaurant: if the setting doesn’t look good, the food won’t taste good. So back we headed to Kim Son today…

We opted for the popular choice of a lunch buffet. We got there early enough, meaning at 11, when it’s just opened and there was banh canh. 15 minutes later and it was all gone. Out of banh canh noodle they said. The soup is not left unattended like the rest of the food trays known and visited by many. No, that would have reduced the availability to 5 minutes. It’s hidden in the right corner of the diner, in something can appropriately be called a kitchen box, with fellow roasted ducks and another noodle soup of the day. You go over there, order, stand around watching the cook slap a bunch of noodle, shrimp and pork, and pour a couple ladles of steaming broth into your bowl, you go back to your seat and start slurping. It’s really slurping, even chopsticks have a hard time holding the noodles in place long enough, don’t even try spoon and fork. They’re quick, short, round, and annoyingly feeble. It’s too easy to break them, but it’s hard to put them in your mouth before you flick a drop of broth to somewhere it shouldn’t be. The taste is worth the sloppy embarrassment, though. Banh canh and hu tiu are somewhat similar, the final touch in each bowl is a dollop of mo hanh (chives stir fried in lard and fried shallots). It adds savoriness, enhances the mix of meaty and sweet. A very hearty soup. I even drank the broth. The small bowl is a perfect belly hit.

Not to be healthy I packed a few frog legs and fried shrimp-pasted toasts down my throat afterwards. Great baguette. Frog legs would have been great too if not for the irritatingly overloaded hot pepper. When something’s hot, it’s just hot. Hot overpowers everything. Can’t taste another daggum flavor, if there were any. Dunno about you but I find that boring. The meat is kinda dry (I would be too if I were covered in hot pepper) and sinewy. But they do look sporty, don’t they? 🙂

The other soup of the day was bun bo Hue, which we’ve had, and I’ve blogged, here. Looks good, eh? Spicy, too. It’d be good to have intermittent sips of water, given you have a full glass. Kim Son is usually crowded after 11:30, at which time there are too few waiters for too many tables, and it’s expected that you fend for yourself. Yes, that means no refill. Vietnamese scoffers are used to drinking only after the meal anyway. They believe that drinking during eating would result to feeling full immaturely, or making your belly bigger. Maybe that’s why my jeans feel tight…

It was a warm, cloudy day. Few cars were on the road and every store was closed. So were restaurants, but not Vietnamese restaurants. We drove all the way down FM 1960 to Veteran Memorial, and pulled in the parking lot of Phở Danh (with the helpful hand signal of a Vietnamese gentleman, who just happened to stand there for no reason and apparently noticed my clumsy parking skill). But we went next door for Bún Bò Huế Cố Đô, since my mom spotted it out and we were in adventurous mood. There were as few people inside as cars on the road today. Everyone in the neighborhood seems to go to Phở Danh, cuz it’s bigger and more noticeable. We weren’t deterred. So how is Cố Đô?

My dad got the house specialty: bún bò Huế (Hue beef noodle). Rice noodle, beef, beef broth, (sounds like phở so far, isn’t it?), congealed blood, cha lua, a thick side cut of pig leg (not foot), and some good spicy hot pepper. I suppose it wasn’t spicy enough for my dad, so he put in some satay, which makes the broth colorfully pretty. And the whole side of greens (that has more than green):

Bean sprouts, a slice of lemon, plants whose English names I have no idea, and a purplish bundle of thinly sliced young banana flower. The meat was tender and generous, but I’m not so sure if this bowl has everything an authentic Hue beef noodle soup would have. For some reason I had never gotten the crave for it, I must have had it at some point and just can’t remember. It certainly looks good, perhaps a little busy. The noodle is thicker and rounder than the noodle in pho, so bún bò is more filling. The pig leg meat is just all too common pork with a bit of thick skin, pig foot is better and more interesting for the teeth. According to my dad, the soup didn’t quite live up to his expectation, except for being tenderly meaty. But the rest of the crew was actually quite pleased with the other dishes we got:

Hủ tíu mì

Hủ tíu Nam Vang.

Address: Bún Bò Huế Cố Đô
13480 Veterans Memorial Suite P3
Houston, TX
(281) 537-6760