Also included is a helpful introduction to the basics of preparing Vietnamese cuisine and a thorough appendix on our traditional ingredients. Scattered throughout the book are bits of information giving you glimpses of Little Saigon and the Vietnamese culture—how traditions have evolved for Vietnamese Americans, how celebrations are held, how we shop, how we eat, and much more.
I hope this cookbook will help you create your own authentic Vietnamese dishes and learn about Little Saigon in the process. You’ll find that Vietnamese culture and the people of Little Saigon are just as complex, deep, and full of life as the food and flavors you will learn to create. Little Saigon awaits your visit. It’s always seventy-five degrees in Orange County, and there’s always a steaming bowl of pho waiting for you.
Demystifying Vietnamese Food
A PRIMER ON INGREDIENTS, TECHNIQUES, AND EQUIPMENT
One of the great myths of Vietnamese cuisine asserts that it is impossible to make at home. And that there are so many unfamiliar names and ingredients, even a Vietnamese person would have problems with all of them. For some Americans the mere mention of Vietnamese food conjures up images of kitchen disaster. There are too many nuances to capture; how can anyone master this complex and mysterious cuisine?
But in fact, Vietnamese cuisine is usually quite simple. What makes it so lively are the assertive flavors of just a few often-used ingredients like ginger, lemongrass, scallions, chile, garlic, black pepper, fermented fish sauce, and an abundance of fresh herbs such as cilantro, Thai basil, and mint. Cooking techniques are basic, like sauteing, grilling, steaming, and light frying. What may seem complicated is in reality a simple, quick dish to prepare. The time-consuming dishes simply require patience for a hands-off, slow-cooking simmer, not hours spent searching for and preparing ingredients.
WHAT WE EAT
Food is an important part of the Vietnamese culture. It represents the time for families to be together after a busy day, and it is the principal component of celebrations and festivals. The women of the house are generally responsible for the meals, though men are expected to lend a hand, or to cook if the wife or daughter is indisposed. The quality of a woman’s cooking is a reflection of her character and whether she was raised properly.
The Vietnamese pride themselves in cuisine that uses only the freshest ingredients—a principle applicable to everything from produce to seafood. Fresh herbs and vegetables play a pivotal role in the dining experience. From the citrusy, cumin-flavored rice paddy herb to the licorice and cinnamon tastes of the perilla leaf, herbs wrap a second layer of flavor around the food they adorn. Fresh produce is also important to help achieve the contrast of textures that Vietnamese cuisine is known for. Crunchy, crispy, al dente textures derived from vegetables and fruits make all the difference to otherwise simple dishes. The ubiquitous salad platter consists of sliced or julienned cucumbers, green or red leaf lettuce, bean sprouts, sprigs of mint, coriander, Thai basil, and whatever else the local garden yields.
Condiments are a defining part of Vietnamese cuisine. Dipping sauce is the most common, but some dishes call for a ginger fish sauce, peanut sauce, or a simple ginger-soy sauce combination. Condiments add a distinct, second layer to the food, creating an entirely new dimension with their pungent, umami flavor. Vietnamese food is pure, direct, and honest. But it’s the condiments that add the final touch of complexity with each bite. The tastes can be so arresting that your mouth wants to hold on and study them for a while. This feeling is what Vietnamese people are most proud of in showcasing their cuisine.
Garnishes are important for taste as well as presentation. It is common to garnish a dish with some fresh herbs like mint, cilantro, or parsley, or to top off a dish with crushed peanuts, chopped scallion rings, or fried shallots or garlic. These final touches add a layer of fragrance, flavor, or texture. Whole Thai bird chiles are also added as a garnish for the sake of appearance; most people, however, can manage only a few bites of one chile at a meal.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the Vietnamese, who live in a third-world. Asian country, do not count carbs, or calories for that matter. If we did, 70 percent of our diet would be eliminated. Rice is the number one staple of the Vietnamese. Steamed white rice is served at every meal. When rice isn’t available, many people will use rice vermicelli as a substitute. Rice noodles, crepes, flour, and any other rice derivation are all part of our everyday consumption. Enter any Asian supermarket and you’ll find rice sold only in large, plastic-weave bags in five-pound increments.
With direct access to the bounty of the ocean and the Mekong River system, the Vietnamese have more than thirty varieties of fish. As a result, seafood is much more abundant in our cuisine than chicken, pork, and beef. Seafood is usually grilled or steamed, but once in a while is deep-fried. Meat is served sparingly, partly because it is expensive. All meats and seafood are cooked in light, flavorful marinades, which always include fish sauce or oyster sauce. Grilled pieces of seafood and meats are wrapped in herbs, rice paper, or vegetable leaves and dipped into various sauces alongside the salad platter.
HOW WE EAT
Meals are almost always served family-style, with serving bowls in the center of the table. Diners need only chopsticks, a china rice bowl, and clean hands. With our chopsticks, we pick up bite-size portions of food, one at a time, from one of the main family dishes and place it into our rice bowl. While tipping the bowl toward our mouth, we use the chopsticks to shovel the rice and meat or vegetable in.
The Vietnamese are passionate eaters. We truly enjoy what we eat and are unrepentant about being loud eaters. It may not be proper based on Western etiquette, but people eating loudly with their mouths slightly open, allowing aromas to circulate and enrich each bite, has never bothered me. Our food is audibly juicy. We slurp our noodles and broth and crunch into lettuce, herbs, and pickled vegetables. We gnaw on bones and we pick tiny fish bones out of our mouths with our hands, discarding the bones into little napkins that we leave beside our rice bowls. It’s all part of enjoying every bite.
THE FIFTH TASTE: UMAMI
Most of us know the four primary tastes—salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. But food technologists have long been touting Asian cuisines, specifically Vietnamese, for their ability to showcase the fifth basic taste—umami. The term umami was coined in the early twentieth century by a Japanese chemist who went on to invent monosodium glutamate (MSG) to enhance flavors in foods. There are those who think using MSG is the only way to increase the umami taste of a food, but that’s not true.
My brother, Kim, a biochemist, describes umami simply as a breakdown of proteins. Proteins are bound together by amino acids, such as glutamate, one of the twenty most common natural amino acids. When proteins are broken down by curing, fermenting, or aging, the amino acids break down, and foods take on an entirely different flavor. Some foods created through such a process are fish sauce, soy sauce, and Parmesan cheese, and all of them have a rich umami taste. Some other foods are naturally umami-rich because of the amino acids they contain; these include ripe tomatoes, cabbage, soybeans, sweet potatoes, fish, and mushrooms.
But umami is not just about specific dishes or foods; it’s about how the foods are put together. Here are some examples of how umami works to enhance flavors in Vietnamese foods:
• By adding dried mushrooms or shrimp to a pineapple dish.
• By adding fish sauce to an ordinary vegetable broth.
• By pouring a dressing made with fish sauce, lime, sugar, and chile over a cabbage salad.
• By combining tomatoes with beef in bo luc lac.
• By eating pickled shallots and garlic with grilled meats.
• By adding fermented shrimp paste to a fresh shrimp dish.
• By sprinkling dried, cured shrimp over plain rice noodle dishes or salads.
• By sauteing plain vegetables or tofu with oyster sauce.
A typical Vietnamese breakfast consists of noodle soups like pho, hu tieu, and mi, or rice congee called
chao. Simple snacks are eaten as well, such as sweetened coconut milk wrapped around steamed mung beans, or savory treats wrapped in sticky rice and banana leaves. Vietnamese baguettes are eaten with a coffee or as a snack. The Vietnamese are big snackers, and from breakfast onward, fruit, nuts, che, and easy-to-grab items from a deli like banh mi thit (sandwiches) or egg rolls fill the time between meals. So do beverages, including fruit drinks, fruit shakes, teas, and soybean milk. Cafe sua da, a favorite Vietnamese coffee beverage made strong, sweet, and icy cold, is consumed mostly in the morning.
For lunch, noodle soups can still be eaten, as well as a number of other items like banh mi thit or herb noodle salads (bun) with a grilled meat or seafood topping. Turmeric rice flour crepes (banh xeo) or potato starch (banh khoai) crepes are popular, in addition to stir-fries and noodle sautes with vegetables and a little bit of meat.
The evening meal is the most important one of the day, the time when the family comes together. Generally it consists of steamed rice, a salad platter, one or two or three main dishes that include some meat and at least one seafood dish, and canh (usually a vegetable consomme that serves as the diner’s beverage). The Vietnamese will sometimes serve tea before or after a meal, but no beverages are consumed during. Dessert almost always consists of fruit.
There is no prelude into the Vietnamese main meal with an appetizer course. Sometimes fried spring rolls or other hand-rolled items like goi cuon, the popular Vietnamese fresh spring rolls, will be served before a large festive meal. At a lazy Susan banquet, sometimes there is a plate of cold items, but that is generally served with a number of other dishes at the same time. You will find, however, that there are a number of Vietnamese recipes in this book that can easily become appetizers.
COOKING TOOLS
Relax. When it comes to cooking Vietnamese food, you don’t need to know your way around a kitchen perfectly. But you do need to be comfortable with chopping and tasting and knowing what you like. Don’t be alarmed if you taste your dishes and they don’t seem salty or sweet enough. Simply adjust the spicing to your own liking. Vietnamese cooking is truly about tasting as you go—adding more salt, sugar, vegetables, herbs. This is how the art of Vietnamese cooking has been passed down from generation to generation, kitchen to kitchen.
Water is everywhere in the Vietnamese kitchen. Colanders are filled with various herbs, and lettuce and vegetables are strewn all around the sink. Vietnamese cooks are obsessed with cleaning food and rinsing it again and again. We rinse and wash produce a few times over; we make sure that seafoods and meats are completely scrubbed and cleaned. Vietnamese cooking doesn’t require guts, just a whole lot of prep work.
Here are the tools you need; many of them you already have in your kitchen:
Chopsticks: Learn to use them. They are necessary for eating, but they’re great for cooking with as well. There are no fast and easy rules to chopstick use; just imagine them as tweezers and keep practicing. I feel that I can toss faster and more evenly when using chopsticks for stir-fries and sautés than I can with a spatula or wooden spoon.
Clay pot: A great cooking tool and a great investment. In a covered clay pot, food can cook in minimal liquid, retaining the essential nutrients and vitamins. The ridges in the pot allow the steam and liquid to fully encircle and cook the food evenly. Clay pots are outstanding for cooking tougher cuts of meat because they help the meat stay moist and juicy. A medium-size or large unglazed clay pot is best because it can soak up considerably more water, slowing the cooking process for braising meats. Serve the food in the pot directly at the dining table, regardless of the pot’s condition. Your diners will know they’re having the very best of comfort foods.
Colanders: You’ll need quite a few. Most will be for rinsing vegetables and herbs, but they are also necessary for draining cooked noodles, and for acting as holding bowls when you are preparing dishes that require numerous amounts of herbs and vegetables.
Cutting boards: Have two: one for meat and another for vegetables.
Food processor: This makes life a whole lot easier when you need to blend spices, but it’s not always necessary if you have extra time for prep work.
Grill pan/barbecue: Many of our marinated meats and seafood are best when grilled. A simple grill pan on the stove is a great substitute when the barbecue is too much of a hassle. A grill pan also lets you retain the juices produced during the grilling process.
Knives: Julienning, chopping, coring, shredding, and such are the most time-consuming processes of prep work, so find knives that you enjoy and keep them sharp. The Asian chef knife—a cleaver with a nice thin blade—is a popular tool. My grandma uses a giant cleaver for everything.
Mandoline: Vietnamese salads (goi) and garnishes require the fine shredding and chopping of fresh vegetables. A mandoline, which resembles a cheese grater, lets you turn vegetables into paper-thin slices and tiny shreds. Prices of mandolines range widely. It is more important to find one you are comfortable with than to spend hundreds on an expensive one. An inexpensive plastic mandoline may be adequate if you don’t use it often.
Mixing bowls: You need plenty to blend marinades and fish sauce condiments, as well as for simply holding vegetables and herbs.
Mortar and pestle: Great—but not fast—for crushing seeds and forming pastes as part of important rubs and marinades. If time is of the essence, a food processor can be used, but you won’t get as fine a consistency.
Rice cooker: Many Vietnamese families have been using the same rice cookers for decades. I think my own is eight years old. As long as you master the art of getting the proper amount of water for perfect jasmine rice (and this will depend on each rice cooker), you’ll be fine.
Saucepans: Necessary for making canh (consommé), for braising (if you don’t have a clay pot), and for preparing desserts such as che. You will need medium and large sizes.
Skillet: It doesn’t matter if you use a nonstick skillet or not; most Vietnamese dishes contain a little bit of oil, or the food is cooked in its own juices or a marinade.
Steamer: I bought a large, Chinese-style steamer at a great price at one of the Asian supermarkets, and it can fit a whole fish. Or you can create a makeshift steamer by placing a low rack or trivet in the center of a 12-inch skillet. Pour hot water into the skillet to just under the rack, and bring it to a boil. Place fish on an oiled, heat-resistant dish over the rack. Cover the skillet and steam for about five minutes and your fish will be ready to serve.
Stockpot: A large pot for making stock and soups. You will need an enormous one to contain all the ingredients and bones for making pho and hu tieu stocks.
Vegetable peeler: This device not only quickly peels vegetables, but also creates paper-thin shreds of root vegetables if you do not have a mandoline. It is quite advanced to someone of my grandma’s generation. She can peel vegetables like carrots and taro root with—you guessed it—a cleaver.
HEAVENLY FERMENTED FISH
Fish sauce is to the Vietnamese kitchen as olive oil is to the Italian. No self-respecting Vietnamese would serve a meal without it. Combined with different ingredients, fish sauce creates many varieties of condiments essential to Vietnamese cuisine. The most popular condiment is nuoc cham (dipping sauce), made from a blend of fish sauce, lime juice, chile peppers, and sugar, and served with almost every Vietnamese dish.
The Vietnamese take the process of making fish sauce extremely seriously and view it as an art form, recognizing the importance of the quality of the fish, the salt that’s used, the weather and temperature conditions, and the type of wood in the barrels used for storage. This is how fish sauce is made: Fish, generally small anchovies called ca com, are farmed from the ocean or at fish farms. They are laid out to dry over fine mesh. They are heavily salted on top. The salt dries out the fish, starting the initial fermentation process. The salt extracts liquid from the fish; this liquid drains down through the mesh into a wooden vat. The fish liquid from the vat is placed in barrels and allowed to sit longer for th
e breakdown of molecules to continue. The darker the fish sauce, the more fermented and the more potent.
There are more than sixty varieties of fish sauce. In Vietnamese opinion, our fish sauce is the best quality of all, surpassing Thai and Filipino sauces, simply because of Vietnam’s proximity to the water and the variety of fish in the country. When shopping, look first for Vietnamese, and then for the name of the Vietnamese island of Phuc Quoc. This little island southwest of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is paradise for fish sauce lovers. A gorgeous, tropical island, it includes a large resort built by investors. The investors, however, neglected to consider that the smell of rotting fish is not a romantic fragrance, and the resort has seen very few visitors.
The Little Saigon Cookbook: Vietnamese Cuisine and Culture in Southern California's Little Saigon Page 2