Flavor Boulevard

– QUYNHCHI, aka Little Mom – Translator: Mai

Most Vietnamese like chả, and I like chả even more than most people, because it tastes good, it’s good for you, and it’s good with everything. Chả appears subtly but unmistakably in noodle soups like bún bò, bún mộc, bún thang… Chả fares well with the lustrous steamed rolls of bánh cuốn, with bland white rice, topping sweet sticky rice, inside a crusty loaf of bánh mì… You can also eat chả by itself as a cold cut, then it tastes even better.

Why is chả good for you? Because of what comes into it and how people make it. Vegan chả aside, all chả are pure meat. Take chả lụa (silk sausage) for instance, the pork must be lean, the fresher it is from the slaughter house the higher quality the sausage has. Traditional chả makers don’t wash the pork with water but use instead a clean cloth to wipe off its excess moisture before the pasting process. These days the meat is most likely ground by machines(*), but a good log of chả used to be made from pounding and kneading the meat as one would do with sticky rice to make mochi. The pounding has its specific rhythm to success, which is a smooth, sticky, elastic mass of perfect consistency to be rolled up tight in banana leaves and boiled for hours. So if we come upon a warm log fresh out of the process, we’re guaranteed its cleanliness and pure content.

But chả lụa isn’t the only type of Vietnamese meat sausage around. Not all are made from pork, not all are served in its boiled final form, and not all contain just meat. Recently I got enticed by four types of chả from Đức Hương in Houston.

1. Chả heo chiên (fried pork chả):
Same content as chả lụa, with a textural twist. Fried chả is also in log shape, but the log is smaller than its boiled counterpart, and it has less pepper. The meat is slightly more chewy and the rim covered in the aroma of frying oil. Some of the chả lụa‘s loyal fans would detest chả chiên‘s inconsistency, but I think those bite-sized round slices that fit perfectly well in a crusty loaf of bánh mì or layer on top a scoop of hot sweet sticky rice would make quite a fair start for any busy day.

2. Chả bò chiên (fried beef chả):
Perhaps it’s because of the always-available, always-fresh-and-cheap Texas beef that a slice of beef sausage also shines a healthy golden brown hue. Although the texture errs on the hard side and the taste is a tad too spicy, the heartfelt aroma of beef entangling with a subtle fresh garlic zing makes chả bò chiên the best rice companion for the wintry months.

3. Chả cốm (rice flake chả):
Chả cốm is also made from pork, but like its name indicates, it contains a few handfuls of young rice flakes (cốm). The light green flakes scatter inside and on the surface of the pale beige meat log, their natural viscidity (from the heating of sticky rice) increases the meat’s chewiness and causes the appearance of gossamer strings woven into the meat when the log is sliced. Chả cốm is not as blatantly flavorful as chả bò, nonetheless a complete entity to be served by itself as a friendly witty representation of the rural Vietnam.

4. Chả gà chiên (fried chicken chả)
This turns out to be a pleasant surprise to me. The meat is neither too hard nor too soft but a bit crunchy, not fatty but savory, not strongly spiced but lingering at the tip of the tongue for quite some time. At first I actually wavered over buying the chicken sausage, but now I believe that this is the “phoenix sausage” in “peacock and phoenix sausages” (“nem công chả phượng”) that used to be offered to the monarchs and nobels of the old days. Wouldn’t you agree? 🙂

I can’t remember exactly how much each type costs, but the whole deal of four set me back by $20. That’s not expensive at all, considering the talent and the hard work poured into keeping alive a taste of that faraway home.

Address: Đức Hương Giò Chả in Bellaire, Houston
11369 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 950
Houston, TX 77072
(near the Vietnam War Memorial)
(281) 988-6155

(*): Note from Mai: double-ground meat is easier to obtain than kneaded meat, but would give the sausage a porous texture instead of a silky smooth one.

Not to be biased but I think cha lua (silk sausage, also known as lean pork sausage) is the best and most versatile sausage out there. Ok, of course I’m biased, but who isn’t when it comes to their motherland’s cuisine. So can we make cha lua? There are scores of recipes, from Ravenous Couple‘s  touch of familiarity to the indifferent instruction on VietnameseRecipes.com… There are also scores of recipes labeled as “cha lua” but are actually giò thủ (head cheese), industriously copied from one another, I’m not sure who started first, but yum-recipes.com, recipehound.com, keyingredient.com just to list a few, all share the same formula with 8 oz of meat from a small pig head.

For those with not much more than a skillet and a spatula in a kitchenette (hello, grad students!), it’s best just to buy a loaf from your nearest Vietnamese sandwich shop or Asian market.

Now what? Here’s a list of 13 dishes with cha lua to churn out at your castle (in no particular order), requiring no special cooking hoopla or obscure ingredients (unless silk sausage is considered an obscure ingredient).

1. CƠM ÂM PHỦ (Hades Rice):

Among the Huế creations, this one has kind of a freakish name. But the only thing, if any, that can freak you out would be how much shredding and slicing you need to do. The ingredients are flexible: some kind of meat (chicken, pork, beef, squid, elephant, etc.), cha lua, cucumber, omelet, some good nuoc mam with sugar, salt and chili pepper. The orange powder atop the rice is shrimp powder (tôm chấy), but it’s just makeup, not essential. For a detailed recipe, visit Kiki Rice.

There are two stories behind this intriguing name. In the more fairy tale-like version, a king one day decided to go around town by himself to see how his people lived. In the late evening, he got hungry and knocked on some door, asking for a meal. Living in the small straw house was a poor old lady, who did not recognize the king dressed in common clothes, nonetheless she kindly took everything she had in the kitchen to prepare a rice dish. Despite its simplicity and lack of spectacular ingredients, the hungry king thought it was quite good, and he was so touched by her hospitality that  he invited her to be his chef in the royal palace. Because the house was built on lowland, it was dark outside, there was no electricity and the poor lady wasn’t lighting candles everywhere, the king’s dinner had some underworld feel to it, so he called the dish Hades Rice. Moral of the story? The best way to a king’s kitchen is via his stomach.

In the more modern, unromantic version, there once was a small dining hut, where only one dish was served: rice with thinly sliced meat and vegetable. It was opened at night, mostly for poor workers, rickshaw pullers, and people on their way home from a late theatrical show. Again, because of the low light, the quiet and somewhat rusty, rugged ambience, the dining hut was known as Âm Phủ (Hades), and its only dish the Hades Rice.

So which story do you prefer?

2. CHA LUA KIMBAP

Cha lua makes a great substitution for crab stick in kimbap. It has the sleek, chewy texture, and it has flavors. I wrote a post on this feeble attempt a while back, if you’re interested in recipes.

3. XÔI MẶN or XÔI GẤC:

Xôi mặn (savory sticky rice) with Chinese sausage, chicken, pork floss (rousong) and of course, cha lua (recipe from Ravenous Couple). Xôi gấc is sticky rice colored with the gac fruit, fairly simple to make if you can find the fruit. I haven’t seen any in either Houston or San Jose, but maybe you can steal some from Ravenous Couple’s aunts’ garden, or just raid their kitchen.

Simply put, cha lua goes well with sticky rice, whether the sticky rice is sweet or savory, red or white, steamed and clumpy or boiled in shape (bánh chưng bánh tét).

4. Breakfast English muffin sandwich, with a slice of cha lua and a fried egg.

No need to toast it or butter it, the juicy silk sausage can savorize the sandwich all by itself. You can see how I try to minimize cooking.

5. BANH MI CHA LUA

There’s no need to describe the tasty harmonious symphony in a banh mi. It’s cheap ($2-3 from the sandwich shops), but it’d be fun to whack this out at home. Buy a few crisp baguettes, follow Wandering Chopsticks’ instruction for pickled carrot and daikon, and your imagination for the rest.

6. CHẢ KHO (braised silk sausage)

Two words: salty and sweet. The key is nuoc mam (fish sauce). Here’s my adaptation from Hang’s Fooood Experiment‘s recipe of tomato braised sausage: Start with 3 tablespoons of sugar and coconut water to make the caramel sauce, then add the sliced sausage, 3 teaspoons of nuoc mam, a little bit of water (just so you can stir), a pinch of pepper, and diced tomato if you feel like it. Simmer on low heat, stir when most of the liquid has evaporated and serve it dry; or you can add more water in the beginning to have a nice brown sauce over rice. Gastronomy has cha kho with porridge. Mmm… salty, sweet, and bland innocence.

7. CHA LUA FRESH ROLL (goi cuon): wrapped in rice paper (bánh tráng) with herbs and blanched shiitake, dipped in nuoc mam. Without shiitake, this is a Nha Trang style snack. I got the mushroom inspiration from the food column of VnExpress.net, where they suggest an appetizer with cha lua, shiitake, carrot, and green bean tied together with scallion, worth a try as well.

8. CHA LUA SOUR SOUP: tomato, sweet onion, egg, and diced cha lua. Also native to Nha Trang.

9. CHA LUA and CRAB SOUP:

Shredded chicken breast, diced cha lua, boiled quail eggs, crab meat, sweet corn, and diced onion cooked in boiling bone stock for 10 minutes. Pour in some corn starch (mixed with water) and crack an egg. Serve hot with a dash of cilantro and a big bowl, because it’s light and you’re hungry :-). (Recipe translated from bepgiadinh.com.vn)

10. PAPAYA, ORANGE, and CHA LUA SALAD:

The stuff: shredded green papaya (the type that goes in Wandering Chopsticks’ green papaya salad), diced orange, bean sprout, and sliced cha lua.

The sauce: nuoc mam, olive oil, vinegar, sugar, water combined in ratio 1:1:1:2:2 (tablespoon), throw in chopped garlic and chili paste for kicks.

Mix’em all up.

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And that was 10 amateur-friendly recipes. But Mai, you said 13! Yeah well call me a cheater. Here are three cha lua affairs that I utterly love but will never make at home because I’m afraid to screw them up. So here for the professionals who can never fail and the kitchen masochists who want to spend half of their day by the stove (just kidding, cooks are my heroes :-D):

11. BÁNH DẦY GIÒ: sticky rice bun with cha lua. The chewiest bun of all buns. The sticky rice is bland, the sausage is juicy and savory. You’d either hate it or love it. My dad hates it, I love it. I bought it and wrote about it. Ravenous Couple made it.

12. BÁNH CUỐN: another old timey, steamed rice roll stuffed with pork and mushroom. If one day I live far away from the Vietnamese community, this would be my most frequently missed favorite, so I have to blogged up on them as a way of savoring memories. Ravenous Couple don’t have to worry about that, because they can make their own.

13. BÚN MỘC

A soup laden with meat, yet the stock is so fresh and light. I feel at home at Tay Ho in Oakland, so I’ll keep going there for my soups. But maybe, just maybe, one day when the right planets align I will gain enough courage to make a pot. Guess whose instruction I will follow?

Seriously, is there anything that these guys haven’t made?

It’s just a white bun made from sticky rice, loosely wrapped in banana leaf so that it doesn’t attach indefinitely to your fingers, ready to sandwich a thick cut of cha lua. The purpose of the bun is purely a textural enjoyment, it has neither taste nor smell. All flavors come from the sausage. Eating the bun alone would be like chewing an incredibly huge piece of gum, the only difference is you can swallow the bun. Come to think of it, we can make a bunch of bite size sticky rice “gum” for American school kids, they can chew until they’re bored, and swallow it, no unfortunate mess under the desks and your shoes. Cool, innit?

Because of either its simplicity or its antiqueness, the bánh dầy is not quite a favorable snack among the young Vietnamese these days. Or perhaps because it is a treat from the North? Southerners have a sweet tooth and are attracted to fatty, rich, flavor-compact concoctions. Bánh dầy is none of that. When I was in Saigon I knew of bánh dầy through three sources: the extremely common tale of bánh chưng bánh dầy, the book “Hanoi 36 streets” by Thạch Lam, and the tiny buns filled with bean paste (bánh dầy đậu) Little Mother got for me from Ngọc Sáng bakery in District 1. Another case of cross cultural similarity: compare the banh day dau with the Japanese daifuku: the sticky rice coat is exactly like mochi, the mung bean filling is salty while daifuku’s filling is sweetened.

For something the size of a can bottom, banh day makes a dense snack (just like its pyramid shape cousin, banh it). We got both at Giò Chả Đức Hương in Houston, but banh day is not always there. The reason might be the good amount of work in making those simple looking buns. An authentic banh day is supposed to be made by pounding cooked sticky rice to a goo, although the packages of sticky rice flour in stores would do the job. I’m not sure which method  Đức Hương used. I also wrongfully microwaved it once, the result was a plain thick blob that could possibly rival superglue. Yep, banh day is supposed to be eaten at room temperature (not for folks who want a warm meal).

Address: Đức Hương Giò Chả (Houston)
11369 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 950
Houston, TX 77072

Given how often my family comes here, I feel obliged to give this store a proper post. About every other week or so, my parents make the hour-long drive to get a loaf or two of cha lua (silk sausage) and maybe a few Vietnamese between-a-snack-and-a-meal goodies. The affable owner lady knows our usual grabs, and we know her trustworthy provision. Whether it’s wrapped in banana leaves, aluminum foil, or cling wrap, Giò Chả Đức Hương has the best of its kind in Bellaire.

The shelves of nem (fermented pounded pork sausage), bánh tét (sticky rice log), and bánh ít (sticky rice pyramid). These small bánh tét are sold all year round, they are only about 4 inches long, usually with vegan filling (mung bean paste or banana). They make an appropriate snack for a teenager, but usually a little too much for me. Unwrapped below, left-right-down: bánh giò – bánh ít – bánh tét:

Bánh giò always reside on the front counter, next to loads of chả (sausages). There are chả chiên (fried), chả lụa (lean pork), chả Huế (spicy), chả bò (beef), chả gà nấm hương (chicken and shiitake), and boxes of chà bông (also known as  ruốc in the North, pork floss in English, and similar to rousong in Chinese).

A few more pictures of bánh tét just to do partial justice of how many kinds they have there:

Black bean mixed with sticky rice, disrupting the usual smooth glutinous texture by nutty bites.

Sticky rice mixed with pandan leaf extract for flavor and color. A sweet touch.

Plain white sticky rice, usual fatty pork and mung bean paste filling. The classic.

Address: Đức Hương Giò Chả in Bellaire, Houston
11369 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 950
Houston, TX 77072
(near the Vietnam War Memorial)
(281) 988-6155

This sausage store sets their price a knuckle higher than the Asian markets, but the care, the freshness, and the family touch are unbeatable.

3 cups of rice, 3/4 lbs cha lua, 1.25 cucumbers, 3 avocados. Made 10 fat rolls of kimbap. We used long grained rice because we didn’t want to bother buying short grains, giving the rice a little more water than what the cooker says, and it’s sticky, but gotta roll quickly or the rice would dry out, perhaps in hindsight short grain would do the job better? Seasoning the rice calls for sugar, salt, and vinegar, but ubercmuc detests the taste of vinegar, hence water substituted. Inadvertently, my rolls deviate from Maangchi’s by a great distance.

Cha lua (also labelled giò lụa) was bought at a local Vietnamese shop in Little Saigon, hot and fresh from the steamer. Don’t buy those frozen things at the Asian supermarkets, who knows how long they’ve been there. I cut up the cha lua and boiled the slices to lessen the nuoc-mam flavor (which is only a wisp to begin with). It is a much better meaty core than crab stick.

We weren’t sure if we got nori or kim, the sheets are green instead of black, salty, and have a noticable taste of the sea. A 27cm x 27cm sushi mat was well sufficient. We have yet to master the art of slicing a roll of rice, stuffing, and seaweed without breaking them apart, but I found that a cling-wrapped, refrigerated roll, microwaved for 2 minutes, then cut with a wet knife, turned out to be much more beautiful than those cut fresh or cold. Microwaved kimbap also tastes as good as new, at least to a foreign mouth.

Today it snows…
… in Texas. Yep, College Station… It was 70°F yesterday, and this morning I went outside at 10:30, seeing shrubs, lawns, cars, and the roof of the All Faiths Chapel covered in white. But I didn’t have my camera with me then. And it is snowing outside my window right now, for hours, but little Kodak can’t capture this momentous event through 2mm thick and dirty glass, so that I have no hope of disproving people who laugh at Texas for not having snow. Not that it will be long. AccuWeather says Sunday may reach record high of 82°F set in 1921. Aw… you mean I can wear my gloves only one day a year?

That’s what you get for living in the South your whole life (so far). Have some snow white food instead. (Presented to you by Eistube with limited commercials, production of Gio Cha Duc Huong, Houston, TX.) I have faith in sausages. I’ll try haggis when I find a place in America that has it. Meaty, seasoned, high in calorie, compact, preservable, easy for cooking, efficient, what more can you expect from a food? It is tofu for meat-eaters. I’ve never come across a type of sausage that makes me cringe and run away. But if you think about it, it comes from the black sheep of the meat production line, it’s bits and scraps stuffed in an intestine. Is there any kind of sausage with a cleaner background? Yes. There is. At least one that I know of. This is the purest form of sausage in my list, and possibly in the world.

Just lean pork (no fatty allowed, sorry) and a little fish extract (nuoc mam).

“…The pork has to be pounded until it becomes pasty; it cannot be chopped or ground as the meat would still be fibrous, dry, and crumbly…” (Wikipedia – Cha lua)

No intestine. No skin. No liver or kidney. No congealed blood. Usually people eat it right after they got it out of the banana leaf wrap. But my mom, having her own way of doing things, boils it. That lessens the flavor of nuoc mam and keeps the cha lua 1-2 weeks longer.

Did you know sausage is lighter than water? It floats.
And it’s still snowing outside…