Ground Pork

Here is the Vietnamese version of the familiar Chinese egg drop soup. At its heart is a base of onion and tomato, which is cooked down to concentrate flavors and impart a lovely color. The pork adds richness, and so do the eggs, which also contribute a creamy finish to round out the tangy notes. This soup was a weekly standard at our family dinner table, and my mom would sometimes substitute tofu cubes for the pork to vary the flavor. When I have extra time, I mince the pork by hand for an authentic touch. For instructions on how to do it, see page 69.

In my mom’s saigon kitchen, the food processor, a modern luxury appliance, was reserved for making giò, while the old-fashioned hand-crank meat grinder was used for delicious liver pâtés like this one. We regularly enjoyed it, tucked into bánh mì or simply smeared on a baguette slice. In the traditional Viet interpretation of French paté, pork or beef liver, pork meat, and fatback are seasoned with lots of garlic and sometimes Cognac and Chinese five-spice powder (a substitute for French quatre épices). Some cooks add tapioca starch or flour as a binder, and, when available, they line the mold with caul fat for encasing the meat mixture. The paté is then steamed, steamed and baked, or baked in a water bath, the method usually depending on whether or not the cook has an oven. When my mother came to the States and switched from pork to chicken for making giò, she began saving the left over livers for this light, elegant pâté. She also started making the pâté in a food processor. If you want a more intense liver flavor, use half pork and half chicken liver, or make an all-pork version, cutting the liver into 1-inch cubes before processing. Don’t skimp on fat, or the results will be dry and tough. Meat today tends to be lean, and this recipe needs the fat to achieve the right taste and texture. You will end up with a large pâté—the better to impress others with your efforts.

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.

Cha gio, which originated in Saigon are among Vietnam’s national dishes. They are often misleadingly translated as spring rolls, because they seem like a riff on the Chinese spring roll, or as imperial rolls, a translation of pâté imperial, their French moniker. But these rolls are not reserved for royalty, nor are they exclusively eaten during the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year). And their filling, wrapper, and accompaniments are uniquely Vietnamese. Out of culinary pride, I encourage people to call these rolls cha gio, their southern Viet name. The rolls are made in varying sizes. Cooks with great manual dexterity create thumb-sized rolls. Lacking such skill and patience, I make stubby cigar-sized ones and cut them up before serving. Larger ones also involve less labor when frying up enough for a special lunch or dinner. Some Vietnamese American cooks use Filipino lumpia or Chinese spring roll wrappers, which are made of wheat flour and fry up crisp, but an authentic flavor is lost. For the best results, use rice paper made of all rice flour or of rice and tapioca flours.

Presented on a platter just moments out of the steamer, a whole steamed fish reflects the cook’s care and attention to obtaining the freshest ingredients possible. Ideally, the fish was plucked live from a tank at the market. Barring that, it met its end shortly before the cook selected it from a bed of ice. This recipe, with its mixture of pork, ginger, onion, mushrooms, and cellophane noodles, is one of the classic Viet ways to steam fish, with the various flavors and textures melding beautifully during cooking. The flavorings are light, so select a mild-tasting white-fleshed fish to complement them. I like striped bass, which is readily available and has delicate flesh, as well as bones that aren’t troublesome; a whole trout weighing about 1 1/2 pounds is another good option. The dish is perfect for entertaining because most of the work may be done hours in advance. Add White Tree Fungus in Clear Broth (page 76), a simply seasoned stir-fried vegetable, and rice for an elegant meal.

Named for the ssssseh-ao sound that the batter makes when it hits the hot skillet, these turmeric yellow rice crepes are irresistible. Fragrant with a touch of coconut milk, they are filled with pork, shrimp, and vegetables and eaten with lettuce, herbs, and a mildly garlicky dipping sauce. Most Viet cooks make sizzling crepes with a rice flour batter, but the results fall short of the nearly translucent ones made by pros in Vietnam. To reproduce the traditional version, which captures the alluring toastiness of rice, I soak and grind raw rice for the batter. It is not as daunting as it sounds. You just need a powerful blender to emulsify the batter to a wonderful silkiness. Adding left over cooked rice and mung bean, a technique I found buried in a book on Viet foodways, gives the crepes a wonderful chewy crispiness. Make your crepes as large as you like. These instructions are for moderately sized eight-inch ones. In Saigon, the same crepes are typically as big as twelve inches, but in the central region, they are as small as tacos. At my house, we serve and eat these crepes as fast as we can make them.

The featured ingredient in this homey egg dish is mam nem, a thick, taupe sauce made of salted and fermented fish that is pungent and earthy like a delicious stinky cheese but mellows when combined with other ingredients. This southern Vietnamese seasoning is usually labeled fish sauce, but is different than light, clear regular fish sauce, or nuoc mam. Before using it, shake the small, long-necked bottle vigorously to blend the solids and liquid. In this recipe, the cellophane noodles absorb the savory depth of the sauce and plump up during steaming to give the egg mixture its firm texture. At Vietnamese restaurants in the United States, a small piece of this steamed egg is often included as a side item on rice plates. At my house, I prefer to serve it as a main dish, accompanied by rice, a quick soup (canh), and stir-fried water spinach (page 178).

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).

These nearly translucent, soft steamed rice crepes are served plain with slices of gio lua (sausage), or they are filled and shaped into small rolls, as they are here. Finished with cilantro, shallots, thit rouc bông (cotton pork), and a little sauce, these rolls were one of my father’s favorite foods to prepare for our family when I was growing up. In Vietnam, making bánh cuon was usually left to professional cooks who had mastered the technique of steaming a thin rice batter on fabric stretched over a pot of boiling water. In the 1970s, Vietnamese expatriates devised an easier method of making the crepes in a nonstick skillet. For the batter, they blended cake flour (very fine, soft Thai rice flour was not readily available then) with tapioca starch and cornstarch. While that approach works fine, I prefer to use Thai rice flour in place of the cake flour because it yields a more delicate result that is closer to the original version. The tapioca starch and cornstarch help the batter set up nicely and contribute to achieving the tender yet chewy texture of the traditional crepes.

In the winter months, when khúc, a green that looks like edible chrysanthemum leaves but tastes like spinach, is in season, cooks in northern Vietnam pound the leaves and use the juice to color the dough for these dumplings, which are filled with buttery mung bean and caramelized shallot. Sticky rice appears twice in the recipe, as the flour in the dough and as pearly grains covering the dumplings, making them look like snowballs. My mother remembers these jade green dumplings as the perfect antidote to the north’s cold, dreary winters. Well-positioned street vendors would lure customers with steamers full of piping-hot bánh khúc, which were piled on top of one another in the tray and had to be carefully pried apart before the exchange of money and food could occur. This is her recipe, which substitutes spinach for the khúc. For convenience, I use prewashed baby spinach leaves and purée them in a food processor. Measure the spinach carefully to ensure the dough won’t be too soft or mushy. Regular oil and ground pork stand in for the traditional filling enrichment of freshly rendered pork fat and hand-chopped pork belly. To yield nice round dumplings, I stray from tradition and steam them in a single layer, rather than piling them up.

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.

Of all the Vietnamese tofu dishes, this recipe and the deep-fried tofu on page 191 are the ones I ate most often as a child. To this day, my mom still panfries double batches of stuffed tofu so that she and my dad can reheat individual servings in the toaster oven over the course of several days. For this recipe, use tofu sold in large, bricklike blocks, rather than smaller cakes, as it is easier to cut the big blocks to size. Regular tofu is a little difficult to stuff but produces a delicate, silky interior. The exterior doesn’t hold its crispiness but is delicious nonetheless. Medium-firm tofu is easier to stuff and holds its crispiness for a long time, but the interior is chewy and less delicate. Firm tofu is too hard and silken tofu is much too soft, When tomatoes are out of season, substitute a 14 1/2-ounce can of whole tomatoes, drained and chopped, and use 1/4 cup of the canning liquid in place of the water. Or, skip the tomato sauce altogether and instead dip the tofu in Simple Dipping Sauce (page 309) or a combination of soy sauce and fresh chiles.

The easy availability of butter in America was a boon for my mother, who saw endless possibilities for perfecting French pâtés chaud, large puff pastry rounds filled with an aromatic meat mixture. She regularly made the rich pastries from scratch, and they were standard breakfast fare for my siblings and me growing up. As adults, we have scaled back our consumption, making the pastries smaller and serving them as finger food on special occasions. Shaping tiny round pastries is laborious, so we form logs and cut them into diamonds. Unlike my mom, I don’t have the patience or time to make my own puff pastry. Instead, I rely on a local bakery for frozen sheets of all-butter puff pastry or use the frozen puff pastry sold at supermarkets. The latter are usually sold two sheets to a box, with each sheet weighing about 1/2 pound and measuring about ten inches square.

When I was a child, my mom often kept me busy making wontons, putting three or four packages of the skins and a big bowl of pork-and-shrimp filling in front of me. (That’s 150 to 200 wontons!) She served the fried wontons to family and guests alike, who delighted in dipping the crispy morsels into our homemade sweet-and-sour sauce, a lighter version of the Chinese classic flavored with fish sauce instead of soy sauce.

My beautiful wife, Stephanie, may live in New York, but when it comes time for breakfast, she is still a Texas girl through and through. She can put away a plate of biscuits, sausage, and cream gravy like nobody’s business. This dish was created in her honor. I highly recommend making your own sausage patties; it’s so easy to do, and it puts you in total control of what you are eating. Think fresh herbs and garlic as opposed to the nitrates and excessive sodium you’ll find in many supermarket sausages. A healthy dose of black pepper punches up the flavor of the silky cream gravy.

When I visited Tokyo and Kyoto with my friend Devra a couple years back, I didn’t want to leave. I would say it was the beautiful aesthetic, the attention to design and style, the amazingly efficient trains, but really, of course, it was the food. I was especially excited when I learned how much the Japanese revere the sweet potato, one of my all-time favorite foods. In season (fall and winter), street vendors hawk stone-roasted ones—paler-fleshed and sweeter than ours. Famous cookbook author Harumi Kurihara showed me how she loves to mash miso into roasted sweet potatoes, so when I returned home, I knew that even the orange-fleshed varieties here would take beautifully to Japanese flavors. For a kick of bitterness that nicely offsets the earthy miso, use broccoli rabe instead of the broccolini.

You can find ground bean sauce, a gloopy paste of fermented soybeans, salt, sugar, and sesame oil, in Asian grocery stores or order a jar online.