Flavor Boulevard

Category: Southern Vietnamese

  • Sandwich shop goodies 10 – Bánh chuối nướng (Vietnamese banana bread pudding)


      Every now and then I feel blessed to grow up in the tropics. It doesn’t let you wear scarves and gloves, but it has bananas. Many types of bananas. There are at least 10 common cultivars in Vietnam, most are for eating fresh as a fruit, some for eating raw as a veggie with wraps, and one is particularly favorable to be cooked in desserts. And desserts with bananas are just about the most addictive thing out there.

      Take this banana bread pudding for instance. I intended to cut one little slice each day to savor it for over a week, but next thing I knew I was gorging half the slab after dinner. The bread is part chewy, part spongy, mostly firm, juiced up by a semisweet layer of sliced banana on top. It needs no sauce, no ice cream, no chocolate. It is good both at room temperature and right out of the fridge.

      The description simply can’t capture how delicious this thing is. And it’s not even a well made banana bread pudding, you know, the type of treat that grandmother would make at home or the recipe that a vendor has perfected over ten years of peddling dessert banh’s.

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    • There can’t be more tender pork

        The revamped Bánh Cuốn Tây Hồ #8 dishes out some seriously tender thịt kho (fatty pork slow cooked in nuoc mam and sugar).

        You know how they say this beef and that melt in your mouth? Well, I haven’t had any beef like that to testify if it’s just figurative talks, but last week I had this pork that really did melt in my mouth.

        There is no need for either knife or teeth. The porcelain soup spoon cuts through three layers of skin, fat and meat as it would with a flan. The skin, which is half an inch thick and might have been chewy once, is not even as tough as jello. There is perhaps too much fat in this pork: a runny white bunch flimsily holding onto the meat (which should have been trimmed off) and bubbles floating in the sauce.

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      • Sandwich Shop Goodies 2 – Bánh bía (Suzhou mooncake)


          In the middle of bright yellow paste lies a crimson orange ball. The egg yolk. Salted and dried up to the size of a cherry. Or should we say it is the moon, at its fullest on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month each year.

          Roughly 650 years ago, it was a bright moon for the Ming Dynasty, but not so bright for the Yuan Dynasty. The Mongolian rulers’ defeats started from a full moon day of August 1368, when the capital Dadu (present day Beijing) was captured by Zhu Yuanzhang and his Han Chinese insurrection armies. Zhu Yuanzhang then rose to the throne as the first king of the Ming dynasty, and he made sure that the Mid-Autumn Festival, which coincides with the end of the harvesting season, was celebrated throughout the country. As the story goes, such revolutionary victory could not have happened without them little mooncakes.

          They were secret means of distributing messages among the resisting forces. Words were printed on each mooncake as a simple puzzle. Each mooncake in a package of four was then cut into four pieces, and the sixteen parts were arranged in a particular way to form the entire message. Afterwards, the cakes were eaten and the trace erased. I don’t know what they would do if a hungry kid got hold of a piece.

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        • Banh tet, sweet and savory

            banh_tet_thit_Huong_Lan_sandwichBánh chưng and bánh tét to the Vietnamese Tết are like turkey and ham to the American Thanksgiving. The holiday feast just wouldn’t feel right without them. Although I have blogged about these sticky rice squares and logs before, the lunar new year has come back, and so are they. Sticky rice can be uberfilling in large quantity, and like all festive food, it’s not recommended that you feast on these dense beasts day after day, as satisfaction would turn into tiresomeness. But once a year, or maybe twice, a couple slices of banh tet sound so much more interesting than cereal, rice, even noodle soup.

            Banh chung and banh tet have rather similar ingredients, especially when they’re made by Vietnamese Southerners. Both are wrapped in leaves (although slightly different kinds of leaves), and boiled for hours in water that is sometimes spiced with lemongrass. After cooking, a heavy weight is put on banh chung to drain the water, while banh tet are rolled around to perfect the cylindrical shape. I remember we used to hang pairs of banh tet in my grandfather’s kitchen, taking one down everyday during the week of Tet to whip out a nice settling meal with thịt kho trứng (pork and egg stew), dưa giá (pickled bean sprout),  and spring rolls. There are the savory kind with meat and mung bean paste, and the vegan kind for those who want to practice self-control on the first day of Tet. In Houston, my mom usually gets the savory kind from Giò Chả Đức Hương, where we also get our cha lua supply, and the vegan kind from Linh Son pagoda. I branched out this year and tried a meaty log from Huong Lan Sandwiches 4 in Milpitas.

            banh_tet_thit_dau_xanh

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          • Roasted quail at Thảo Tiên

              roasted_quail_chim-cut-roti
              It must have been at least 4 months since we last went to Thao Tien, and I’ve been telling myself to blog about this place ever since, but for some reason every record of our visit had mysteriously disappeared. Did I not take picture? What happened to the receipt? I have no idea. But the amazing taste of roasted quails haunts me in my sleep. We just had to go back to take pictures again, and it’s only appropriate to complete this last hour of the Ox year with the best of birdies.

              Thao Tien actually specializes in hủ tíu, a noodle soup with slightly sweet broth, chewy noodle, fried shallot, usually accompanied by pork and shrimp (I blogged about it before at Bún Bò Huế Cố Đô). With the southern Vietnamese theme, the house not only has their waiters dress in áo bà ba but also extends its menu to include the less commonly seen savories like chim cút rô-ti (roasted quail) and cá kèo kho tiêu (a kind of freshwater fish – the “elongate mudskipper“, if you absolutely must know – simmered in fish sauce and caramel sauce much like cá kho tộ, but with a lot of black pepper for kicks). Among the daily specials, Mudpie was excited about the ca keo kho tieu, but unfortunately it was only served for dinner that day. Still, the quails are up for grab anytime, and expensive as they were ($7.95 for 2 birds), we drove 50 miles here just for them.

              The birds, split and stretched, were just as long as my hand from nail to wrist. Their plump breasts and legs rival those of a frog, no fat, just honest meat and thin crispy skin. The marinade seeped through every strand of muscle in that  vibrant little body. Lemon and salt pepper mix came with them, but was unnecessary, the birds needed no aid to taste good. The moment we grabbed them, our fingers got busy tearing them apart, and our eyes focused on getting every scrap off the bones. Table manners we lost, vicious  beasts we became. And the aftermath:

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            • Claypot fish is now upscale

                ca_kho_to_claypot_fish
                You know how some dishes just instantly come up when you think of certain places? Those are the dishes that always get served when you go on tours to the region they’re associated with, like barbecue in Texas, crawfish in Louisiana, crab in Maryland, clam in the little island Nantucket of Massachusetts. Well, in the deep south Mekong delta of Vietnam, where there are more rivers and canals than Venice, freshwater fish multiply like crazy and the countryside inhabitants make fish dishes like crazy. But for some reason, the name “Mekong Delta” is always linked with “cá kho tộ” (fish simmered in claypot). Why?

                The fish (usually catfish) is cut up into thick sections across the body, skin and bone intact (scales off, though), simmered in fish sauce and caramel sauce until it turns beautifully brown inside and out. The mixed sauce is thick and savory, it’s sweet, it’s salty, it can spike up your senses if you add a fillip of chili pepper. Some might argue that fish can taste good by themselves, but this sauce alone would make every mouth water. I’d take the sauce and the sauce-soaked skin anytime over the flesh.

                Then again, I had never thought about eating it when I was in Vietnam. Footless animals don’t appeal to me, footless animals with stinky needle bones ready to get stuck in my esophagus appeal to me even less. Footless animals with stinky needle bones were also too abundant, too cheap, and too easy to get when I was there, that boredom won over appreciation of taste. Pick any little food shack for workers on the streets of Saigon, any family-owned eatery by the side of the highway, any book about Southern Vietnamese cuisine, you’re bound to find two things: cá kho tộ and canh chua. It became trite. Little did I know that one day I’d only find it  again in an expensive restaurant in Berkeley.

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              • Rice noodle day in Banh Hoi Chau Doc, Bellaire

                  Vietnamese places usually don’t appear on the web, why? Because they already paid for ads on Vietnamese newspapers and radio station. Of course the ads are in Vietnamese. There are a little over 30,000 Vietnamese in Houston. It’s amazing how such a small community can sustain its numerous restaurants, with customers primarily themselves. I think I’ve said the word “Vietnamese” enough times for the month. But let me say it one more. Vietnamese must really like to eat out.

                  So we found a new address in one of the newspapers. We arrived past lunch time, so it felt as if we rented out the whole place. The hostesses seem to be enjoying their leisurely afternoon snack as well, they sat at a nearby table watching TV with us. A flat screen on the wall with documentary films about Vietnam.

                  Anyway, let’s start with an appetizer.

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                • Multitaste soup – canh chua ca at Kim Son


                    They never blink. They never wag their tails. They never mutter a sound. I can never tell what they are thinking or feeling when I look at them. I like them deep-fried, or pan-charred with salt, lemongrass, and pepper, but that’s mostly because of the seasoning mix they’re fried with. By themselves, they are cold-blooded creatures with a distinctive smell, tiny bones resembling oversized needles, very little fat, and worst of all, flaky meat. They’re quite abundant in Vietnam, both alive and cooked. I even like the dipping sauce made out of them. I just don’t like them. Something about their meat freaks me out, or perhaps it’s the childhood memory of having a bone of them stuck in my throat that damages my feeling for those footless fellas. I would have never done it, but my mom, craving for some motherland’s taste, ordered canh chua cá (fish sour-soup) when we went to Kim Son the other day. How could she… fish and soup? Well, it turned out to be the best dish on the table.

                    Canh is soup. Usually the vegetables in canh are leafy greens, and because canh came about before the French and potatoes arrived in Vietnam, there is no canh with potato. There are, however, canh with taro corm, cassava, sweet potato, and other kinds of starchy roots. A special kind of canh most suitable for summer weather is canh chua (sour), because the mix taste of sour, pepper-spicy and sweet is just cool. The sourness comes from tamarind (fruit and young leaves), starfruit, pineapple, tomato, or lá dang, a kind of sour leaf. Is there sour soup in Western cuisines?

                    Usually I am indifferent to canh chua at my best mood, because usually canh chua is inseparable from our footless flaky friend. The combination canh chua and fish is adored across the delta, in various menus, and has followed the southern Vietnamese immigrants overseas. It is so southern and so countryside that almost certainly the delta farmers would invite you a bowl of canh chua when you visit them during lunch time. There is also canh chua with shrimp and pineapple, and somewhere in her memory, my mom knows that there is canh chua with chicken, however rare. Fatty meat (pork, duck, beef, etc.) is not allowed. The broth must be clear. The fish must be from fresh water: catfish, snakeheads, climbing gouramis, “pangasius krempfi” (ca bong lau),… Canh chua can’t be cooked with seawater fish because they’re too fishy to be overpowered by the sour benefactors. Ok, what else is there for background check… a bowl of canh chua often has many kinds of vegetables beside the citric star of the act, these add-ons include bean sprout, the stems of night-scented lily (I learn so many new names blogging!), okra,… Native villagers use almost every edible plants they can find in gardens and ponds, so there is hardly any fixed recipe for canh chua. That’s the beauty of it, food is not supposed to be fixed.

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                  • Sleeky banh soup


                      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? 🙂

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                    • Hot soups for the cold winter at Bún bò Huế Cố Đô

                        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: (more…)