Saute

This recipe is my re-creation of a dish prepared by Le Thang, the chef and owner of the now-defunct Dong Ba restaurant in Little Saigon in Westminster, California. The modest eatery, named after the famous outdoor market in Hue, showcased the rustic dishes of central Vietnam, and although the mì Quang noodle soup and bánh bèo chén (rice pancakes steamed in small bowls) were superb, the minced pork was my favorite. Conceptually, this dish is similar to the recipe for Caramelized Minced Pork (page 131), but it takes on a distinctive central Vietnamese character from the bold use of lemongrass, chile, garlic, and shrimp sauce. Indeed, the generous amount of lemongrass acts as more of a main ingredient than a seasoning, while the chopped shrimp, roasted peanuts, and toasted sesame seeds add layers of flavor and texture. The result is salty, sweet, spicy, rich, and dangerously addictive. Enjoy this dish with plenty of rice, adding some cucumber to each bite for a cool and crunchy contrast.

Seventy-five years of French domination left many influences in the Viet kitchen. Because I grew up eating these stuffed tomatoes on a regular basis, it never crossed my mind that they were adapted from a traditional French idea. It should have: farci means “stuffed” in French and tô-mát is a Vietnamese transliteration of the French tomate. My edition of Larousse Gastronomique offers nine recipes for stuffing tomatoes. Here’s a tenth, flavored with a shot of fish sauce, of course. As a hybrid dish, these savory, slightly tangy tomatoes can be enjoyed with chopsticks as part of a traditional Viet dinner or with knife and fork as part of a Western-style meal. For the best results, select firm, slightly underripe tomatoes that will hold their shape nicely after cooking.

Simple to prepare, this traditional dish is meant to be eaten in small quantities with lots of rice. The pork cooks slowly in a skillet with salty-sweet seasonings until it starts rendering a little fat and turns reddish brown. The caramelized, crispy results recall the delicious bits that stick to the bottom of the pan when you sear meat. The final addition of scallion lends a touch of color. You can also eat this minced pork with com nam (page 241), cooked rice shaped by hand into compact balls or logs. When I was a child, my father used a wet dish towel to knead hot rice into thick logs, which he then let cool before slicing. My siblings and I would pick up a piece with our fingers, firmly press it against some of the minced pork, and eat it out of hand.

Shrimp can be paired with strong flavors—in this case, a tangy and sweet tamarind sauce with a touch of heat—and still retain their briny character. The tartness of the tropical pod comes through in the sauce, but it is balanced by the other seasonings, just as it is in a well-prepared Indian tamarind chutney. These shrimp are at home with a bowl of rice for soaking up the sauce, but they also make an interesting cross-cultural hand roll tucked into a warm corn tortilla and eaten like a taco. As long as you have frozen cubes of tamarind liquid on hand, this recipe is quick to prepare.

Rice that has been slowly toasted and then ground is mixed into smooth meat pastes for added texture and depth or sprinkled onto foods as a garnish. It can be purchased, usually packed in small plastic bags, but it is more fragrant and flavorful when freshly made. Some cooks like to grind the rice in an old-fashioned hand-cranked coffee or spice grinder. I prefer the speed of an electric coffee grinder that I reserve exclusively for grinding spices.

Cut into strips, these sunny yellow sheets add splashes of color and flavor to foods. When thin and delicate like a crepe, they are perfect for mixing into rice and garnishing bun thang noodle soup (page 217). When thick and fluffy, they punctuate boldly flavored foods, such as Beef and Jicama Hand Rolls (page 30) and Headcheese (page 170). Regardless of thickness, egg sheets are made the same way, in a nonstick skillet and flipped over to cook both sides. Here, I have given you directions for preparing thin sheets, which are a little trickier to make. I have included instructions for thick sheets in the Note that follows.

This simple garnish is great way to finish dishes with a little richness and some bright green color. Small steamed rice pancakes (page 268), sticky rice with roast chicken (page 246), and trout hand rolls (page 110) are only a few of the dishes that benefit from scallion oil.

Although they are nothing more than egg and the classic Vietnamese combination of pork, onion, and mushrooms, these omelets are rich, savory, chewy, and a bit crispy at the edge, and they taste remarkably good. Enjoy them hot from the pan, at room temperature, or even cold. The wedges are usually served with rice, though I have also stuffed them into baguette sandwiches (page 34).

This is my riff on the classic Vietnamese pairing of chicken and fresh straw mushrooms. Because only canned straw mushrooms are available here, I have used fresh oyster mushrooms, a good stand-in with a subtlety that complements the snow peas. If oyster mushrooms aren’t available, use fresh shiitakes, removing their stems and slicing the caps into 1/4-inch-thick pieces. For a light meal, serve this quick stir-fry with Napa Cabbage and Shrimp Soup (page 58), a simple stir-fried vegetable like thinly sliced summer squash, and, of course, rice.

The ingredients of this intensely flavored chicken dish resemble those of a curry, but here they are stir-fried, rather than simmered together in a sauce, to retain their individuality. You’ll taste the sweetness of coconut milk and shallots, the heat of chiles (fresh and dried in the curry powder), and the citrus of lemongrass, plus the bell pepper adds color and softness. My mom makes a similar dish using whole skinless drumsticks. She cooks them first on the stove top with very little water so the meat absorbs all the flavors. Then she finishes the drumsticks in the oven, so the outside is dry while the inside stays moist. Her dish, which she regularly prepared for our family when I was growing up, inspired this quicker approach.

Anyone who has tried to cook Chinese fried rice knows how challenging it can be to do it well. While the Vietnamese repertoire has a number of fried rice dishes, it also includes an easier alternative called com tron, freshly cooked rice tossed with a handful of ingredients. In this recipe, you can use whatever meats or seafood you have on hand, such as Char Siu Pork (page 142), any Vietnamese sausage (see chapter 6), roast chicken, grilled pork, or shrimp, along with bell pepper, egg strips, and scallion to create a beautiful mixture of colors, shapes, and textures.

When it is dungeness crab season (November through May on the West Coast), one of my favorite ways to capture the essence of Cancer magister is to make these golden noodles. Cellophane noodles absorb whatever flavors they are combined with, in this case the sweet brininess of crabmeat and tomalley. This dish is best when it is made with a live crab that you cook yourself. If you are too squeamish to cook crab at home, buy a precooked crab the day it is cooked. But don’t have the crab cracked, as you want all the delicious juices to stay inside. See page 322 for directions on cooking and cleaning the crab and picking the crabmeat.

One summer when I was child, a family friend regularly gave us grocery bags full of Chinese chives (he) from her garden. The grassy foot-long chives are easy to grow from seed, and this woman must have had a bumper crop that year. We put the bounty to good use in this delicious noodle dish. No matter how many times it appeared on the dinner table, I never tired of the soft chives, hints of garlic, bits of shrimp and pork, and tart lime finish. Chinese chives are significantly larger than Western chives, and their flat leaves have a delicate garlic, rather than onion, flavor. In Chinese and Southeast Asian markets, they are typically sold in one-pound bundles. Vietnamese cooks treat them like a green vegetable, often cooking them with noodles. Here, their flat shape mixes perfectly with bánh pho. For a light meal, serve the noodles as the main course, pairing it with one of the special-event salads in chapter 1.

When preparing this Chinese classic, Vietnamese cooks, like their northern neighbors, often rely on canned creamed corn, once considered an exotic foreign import in Asia. The velvety sweet-savory result fuses East and West. Here in the States, fresh corn is plentiful, and making this soup with kernels cut from the cob yields bright flavors that aren’t cloying. Neither cornstarch nor egg is needed to create a creamy texture. The natural starch in the corn provides it. Some cooks add a variety of embellishments to the soup, but I prefer to keep it simple, using only sliced shiitake mushrooms for their flavor, texture, and visual appeal. Make sure you use the sweetest corn possible, whether from your local market or farm stand, fresh or frozen.

When my family lived in Vietnam, these noodles were considered special because Western noodles (called nui, the Viet phonetic equivalent of the French nouilles) and butter were expensive imports. Once we arrived in the United States, we indulged in them to the point that they were no longer dear. In fact, I forgot about them for years, only to rediscover their garlicky, buttery, nutty goodness at a Vietnamese French restaurant in Westminster, California. Nowadays, I prepare these noodles not just because they are a comfort food from my youth, but also because they are good. The unusually savory quality of the dish is due to Maggi Seasoning, a soy sauce–like condiment and Vietnamese staple that was most likely introduced to Vietnam by the French. It is fine to use dried pasta for this recipe, though fresh fettuccine or even flat Chinese egg noodles yield a superior dish.

The Vietnamese repertoire also includes panfried Chinese egg noodles, which are cooked just like rice noodles and crowned with a delicious stir-fry. Full of varied flavors, textures, and color, this stir-fry pairs exceptionally well with the egg noodles. I use fresh noodles about 1/8 inch thick. Their texture is superior to dried noodles, and they offer more body than thin ones.

Viet cooks prepare this chao in several ways, and I prefer the easy northern approach of sauteing seasoned chicken and adding it to the hot soup. Traditionally, a chicken would be boned, its carcass cooked with the rice to make the soup, and the boneless meat sauteed and added later on. This old-fashioned approach saves fuel costs and time, but the residue from the bones ends up suspended in the soup. I prefer to use stock, either homemade or a blend of purchased broth and water. The final sprinkle of chopped Vietnamese coriander (rau ram) and sliced scallion adds contrasting color and flavor.

This classic Vietnamese noodle dish features a lightly crispy bed of panfried rice noodles topped with a slightly tangy, saucy stir-fry of beef and vegetables. It is among my favorites. For this preparation, I usually start with dried noodles the size of pappardelle (or wide egg noodles), mostly as a matter of convenience because soft , room-temperature fresh rice noodles are hard to come by. If you should find good fresh rice noodles, use them the day you buy them. You will need to buy a pound for this recipe, and you don’t have to boil them. They are already cooked and coated with oil, so just toss them with salt and panfry.

My mom often prepared this southern noodle bowl for weekend lunches. It is remarkably easy to make, and with the exception of the beef topping, all of the ingredients are at room temperature and can be readied ahead of time. Noodle dishes like this one are popular at Vietnamese American restaurants, where the topping options usually include grilled pork, grilled pork and shrimp, or grilled chicken. The stir-fried beef version is homey fare that rarely appears on menus. I have provided directions for four other versions of this rice noodle bowl at the end of the recipe, for anyone who wants to replicate his or her favorite restaurant dish.

If you have ever been a guest at a Vietnamese eight-course fish feast (a variant of Saigon’s famed seven-course beef dinner), you will have tasted a fish goi made with marinated raw fish, which you scooped up with a shrimp chip or the like. In our family, we have long enjoyed this lightly cooked version, created by my aunt Bac Hang. She makes the salad with the teeny, tiny silverfish (not to be confused with the insect) sold at Chinese and Vietnamese markets. Piled high on a plate, the mound of white fish accented by orange carrot slivers, red onion, and chopped fresh herbs is beautiful. The silverfish are sold thawed in the seafood case, or in bricklike blocks in the frozen section (the latter look like freeze frames of a school of swimming fish). You will pay a little more for thawed silverfish because the excess water—and its weight—has been drained away. I usually buy the frozen package for long-term keeping. Silverfish have little flavor on their own, but they readily absorb the flavors of other ingredients, resulting in a delicious salad.