Viet World Kitchen

Cantonese-Vietnamese Food

I often talk about the Chinese influences on Vietnamese cooking, but what about the other way around? Joel, who lives in Hong Kong, made me think about that. 

When I lived in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, Vietnamese cooking was virtually non-existent, save the poor refugees living in the camps at the time. An international port city and hub for business and trade, Hong Kong has always been open to new ideas. From the tiniest joint to the oldest dim sum house to Pizza Hut and high tea, Hong Kong offers tons to eat. In the past 15 years, Vietnamese has been added to the menu.

Vietnamese Cookbooks in Chinese

Joel gave the following low-down on a few Vietnamese cookbooks written by Chinese authors:

The first book is Enjoy Vietnamese Cooking by Wilson Kwok ( ISBN 962-14-2580-8 ) published by Wan Li Publishings in October 2003.  My impression is that it is much better than the HK cookbooks published in the 1980s and early 1990s.  Kwok did studies on cookery in the West in the 1980s and 90s and returned to Hong Kong to start the Entrecote French steakhouse.  His interests on Vietnamese cooking stemmed from his contact with Vietnamese immigrants when living in the West, and he cooked part time in some Vietnamese restaurants.  For a time he also ran the Paris 13th Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong.  The book's primary language in the anecdotes, cultural backgrounds, and history sections is Chinese but the recipes are also available in English.  In addition, all recipes all contain Vietnamese names as well as names in English and Chinese.

The recipes listed are a summary of Vietnamese restaurants available in Hong Kong, documenting the early-days 1970s Vietnamese Chinese restaurant dishes, 1980s Cantonese-ized Vietnamese dishes, and 1990s French-style nouvelle Vietnamese cooking.  The favourites which you listed like pho bo, banh cuon, cha gio are there.  The red beancurd fried chicken is rendered in Vietnamese as ga quay simply, and it is listed as steaming the marinaded chicken for 15 minutes, add honey, dark soy sauce, and vinegar mix to the skin, hang for 4+ hours until dry, and then fry using the method I mentioned.  They also have recipes like ca hap (steamed fish), thit de chien (fried goat), bo xao hat tieu den (beef with black peppercorns), tom xa (jumbo prawns with lemongrass), ga xe phay (chicken salad) yen nuoc dua (dried bird's nest in coconut milk) which are all popular dishes in HK's Vietnamese restaurants.

The second book is  Street Food in Vietnam by Michelle Lo ( ISBN 962-14-3325-1 ) published by Wan Li Publishings in January 2007.  Lo is Vietnamese Chinese who immigrated to Hong Kong at the late 1960s, and then to France.  She returned to Hong Kong in 1996 and is now a teacher at the Towngas Cooking Center in Hong Kong.  The whole book is bilingual and contains streetfood of Vietnam divided to Hanoi (North), Hue (Central), and Saigon (South) with almost every common Vietnamese street food you can think of is in the book (pho bo, banh mi ra-ku-bo, even the less commonly publicized recipes like banh beo, bun-bo-lao and banh-gio) alongside some actual photos of Vietnam's street food scene and intetesting notes of cooking in the three main regions. 

[Update on 11/1/07: You can find Chinese-Vietnamese cookbooks at a well stocked Chinese bookstore. I just returned from New York, where I picked up Michelle Lo's book on street food (pictured here).]

There are many connections between Chinese and Vietnamese cooking, which is why if you're in a Chinese market, you can get most of the ingredients for preparing Vietnamese food. Of course, the same goes for being in Viet market. They're often run by business-minded Chinese-Vietnamese!

 

My friend Terrence Khuu, a professional Vietnamese-American chef,  says that Viet Huong/Three Crab fish sauce is processed in Hong Kong. Lee Kum Kee and Koon Chun, both leading manufacturers of Asian condiments, turns out tons of hoisin and shrimp sauce for Vietnamese cooking. So we're buying lots of Chinese-made ingredients for Vietnamese fare. But the opposite is happening too!

Vietnamese restaurants in Hong Kong

• Geoexpat.com reviews of 6 restaurants
• Eat Drink Hong Kong listing

Fried Squid

The sunshine and soft breezes of summer beckoned Rory and me to drive to Carmel for lunch the other day. Carmel-by-the-Sea (the official name) is a picture-nearly-perfect town on the Monterey Bay. It's a major tourist attraction that attracts bus-loads of visitors. People come from all over the world to marvel at the dramatic seaside, pricey custom homes and lush landscaping. It's California and Europe blended together in one very wealthy enclave. Clint Eastwood was mayor for years.

Admittedly, we find the clean beauty of Carmel to be bit boring, but once or twice a year, we romantically look at each other and say, "Let's go to Carmel." We succumb to the charm that coats the little town like fondant on a wedding cake. We splurge on a luxuriously long meal. We eat lots of fried food, drink a bottle of wine and then sober up by walking around the town before we drive home.  (Watch the 90-minute parking if you go and move your car!)

This time around, among the things we ordered at an Italian restaurant was fried squid coated in semolina. The Monterey Bay, where Carmel is located, is known for its supply of fresh squid but it wasn't squid season. I should have known better. The squid was beautifully fried to a chewy, soft crisp but was tasteless. The vaguely tart-sweet tomato sauce was too heavy of an accompaniment to the delicate squid. We were dissatisfied. No Tabasco in sight. The lemon didn't do much to create the exciting highs and lows of Vietnamese fried squid.

Once home, I felt compelled to right the culinary wrong by frying up some squid myself. A while back, Candy in Indiana sent me her muc chien (pronounced "mook chee-an") recipe that she swears by, and I'd been meaning to try it out. She often makes this dish to wow her friends, a number of whom are Vietnamese-Americans. Candy sent a snapshot of her tasty creation that's on the right here.

Since it wasn't squid season locally, I thawed a package of frozen squid that I'd purchased at an Asian market as an experiment.  The squid came from Vietnam and was pricier (around $2.50) than other brands -- a good sign that reflects quality. Small squid tubes and tentacles too. Once thawed, there was a nice fresh briny fragrance that's often lacking in other frozen squid. (My husband discarded the blue label before I could snap a photo of it for you. Sorry.) The 14-ounce package had about 18 squid with their tentacles on a small Styrofoam tray in Cryovac; once thawed an drained, there was just 9 1/2 ounces.

Candy's recipe, which is based on one presented in Nicole Routhier's Foods of Vietnam (Stuart, Tabori and Chang, 1989), worked exceptionally well. The crisp squid (coated by cornstarch) had nice hints of fresh dill, garlic, and savoriness from nuoc mam. The nuoc cham dipping sauce, wiht its chiles, garlic, and lime, was the perfect match.

Squid frying tips

Keep the following in mind for this recipe:

• Hidden moisture is the culprit behind squid popping hot oil during frying. Do your best to remove excess moisture from the raw squid.
• If you're new to deep frying, get organized and the clean up won't be bad. Line the floor around the stove with newspaper to make things easier. Strain the oil through a paper towel-lined mesh strainer so you can reuse the oil.
• You fry twice here and frankly, you can fry trice (three times) if the squid isn't as crisp as you like.
• Have a buddy help out because this is fast frying. You can pause for a bit (I didn't try this but my guess is about 15 minutes) between the first and second frying.
• Have some ventilation going (the kitchen exhaust fan or a fan) to circulate the air, which will become filled with the smell of deep fried squid.
• If the tentacles get tangled, untangle them before coating. The crispy tentacles are my personal favorite when eating fried squid.

Muc Chien

Serves 4 as a snack

14 to 16 fresh, uncleaned squid with bodies about 4 or 5-inches long, or 8 to 10 ounces cleaned squid, with tentacles preferred (fresh or thawed)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill, feathery tops only
2 large cloves garlic, finely minced
2 teaspoons fish sauce
¼ generous teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
½ cup cornstarch or tapioca starch
Canola or corn oil for deep frying
1 recipe Nuoc Cham dipping sauce made with garlic and chiles, and/or 3 or 4 lime wedges

1. If using fresh, uncleaned squid, clean the squid and peel off the skin. Discard the head but reserve the tentacles, and make sure the guts are emptied by scraping on the squid tube with the spine of a knife.

If using pre-cleaned or thawed squid, check each one for any remaining quills in the squid tube. Regardless, put the cleaned squid in a colander, rinse under lots of running water (use some salt if the squid needs a bit of the briny sea), and drain.

Pat gently with paper towel to remove excess moisture. The squid should stick to the paper towel. Removing moisture lessens the drama during deep frying.

2. Cut the squid into rings. (If the squid tubes are small (about the size and length of your thumb or smaller, cut tube in half lengthwise.) If the cut squid still seems moist, repeat patting with paper towels. The less moisture there is, the better.

3. Put the squid (rings and tentacles) in a bowl or on a plate along with the dill, garlic, fish sauce and black pepper. Use your fingers to combine well. Set aside to marinate for 30 minutes.

4. Put the cornstarch on a dinner plate or shallow bowl and place near the stove. Have a plate lined with paper towel for draining the squid. Pour the oil into a wok or 5-quart Dutch oven to a depth of 2 inches and heat to 365 F. To reduce messy clean-up, I cover the floor space immediately around the stove with a few sheets of newspaper.

5. Add the squid to the cornstarch (or tapioca starch) and toss with your fingers to coat well. (Do this in batches if it seems unwieldy.) Pick up the squid and shake off excess cornstarch. Sometime it helps to put the squid into a mesh strainer and shake it around. Place on a clean dry plate or, if the oil is ready, gently drop the squid into the hot oil. Fry about 1/3 to ½ at a time.

Fry for about 45 seconds to seal the coating on the squid and turn it pale yellow. Use a skimmer to transfer to a paper-towel lined plate to drain. (Expect the oil to cloud up during frying.)

6. Then, increase the heat on the oil to about 375 F and refry. Again, do this in batches. Fry for 30 to 45 seconds until golden and crisp. Transfer to the paper-towel lined plate to drain. Serve hot with the Nuoc Cham and/or wedges of lime.

Vietnamese Food in the Midwest

People think of Asian cooking as existing on the West and East Coasts but that's not true. Asian people are everywhere and these days, you can get the basic ingredients to prepare Vietnamese food in many parts of the country. There's a lot going on in the Midwest, a part of the country that many foodie Americans poopoo but I think is fabulous. If people are preparing and enjoying Vietnamese food in America's heartland, then you know we've made it!

Candy, a resident of Bloomington, Indiana, has been cooking her way through my cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. When I asked her about getting ingredients, she responded, "Bloomington is a university town with a very diverse population. We don't have a lot of Vietnamese here which is why we go up to Indianapolis where there are several restaurants when I don't want to cook. It is about an hour away. We have several international markets with a strong Asian presence. We do have a lot of Koreans, Japanese, and Thai here. For a town this size to have three Korean restaurants and three Thai restaurants (one of which has received an award from the Thai government) is amazing. Plus one of the few Tibetan restaurants in the US. The Dalai Lama's brother was on faculty here and his children and wife have a few restaurants." Okay, major university towns do have advantages over smaller locations, but when in doubt, ask a Vietnamese person or the owners of your favorite Vietnamese restaurant for guidance!

I was honored and delighted when she emailed photographs of her progress, including a batch of tasty corn and coconut fritters (cha bap ran, above). Those YOWZA good fritters are fabulous this time of the year when corn is at its peak. She made several batches for an event and they were all eaten up. (My mom is known to make a gargantuan amount of these tasty, fragrant fritters too!)

Candy also contributed Vietnamese dishes to an Asian theme potluck. She wrote, "A couple of the photos are from the Asian themed Pot Luck my dining group had a few weeks ago. You can see your banana cake, cha gio (fried imperial rolls), corn fritters, shrimp toasts among things. It was a fun evening with 20 people all bringing their favorite dishes and some trying something new." Please note that the super easy banana cake toward the back of the photo makes terrific use of a hefty 1 1/2 pounds of super overripe bananas.

And, that Candy wrapped her cha gio rolls  in rice paper and not lumpia or spring roll skins. (Hurray!) She's more authentic than a lot of Vietnamese-American delis and cooks who've taken to encasing the filling with crispy skins made of wheat flour instead of chewy-tangy rice paper.

Another dish that has graced Candy's table is the splendid shrimp in spicy tamarind sauce (tom rang me, above, right).  It's a delectable southern Vietnamese dish that is testament to Vietnamese cooks' penchant for preparing seafood. I understand clearly when she writes that, "The shrimp in tamarind sauce I have made several times, the page has become quite spattered."   

This past weekend she make the cucumber and shrimp salad (goi dua chuot) and loved how crunchy the vegetables were. That's what you get when you do things the old fashioned way -- you have to make moisture-rich vegetables like cucumber release their liquid so that they're dry like sponges. Once you apply the dressing, the cucumber sucks up the seasonings and becomes imbued by the tart-savory-spicy hot flavors of lime, fish sauce, and chiles.

Candy's experience highlights how in 21st century America,  ethnic markets, mainstream supermarkets, and farmer's markets have many of the elements for cooking Vietnamese food. Plus, many 'normal' American ingredients can be combined to make dishes with Vietnamese flair. What goes into these foods are pretty run-of-the-mill kinds of ingredients like -- corn, regular and unsweetened coconut milk, salt, bananas, butter, and sugar. The popularity of Thai cooking has made fish sauce readily available too.

With that in mind, I'm rather famished. Thanks Candy, for sharing the pleasures of the Vietnamese table with us!