Viet World Kitchen

Saigon Food Souvenirs

Whenever I visit Vietnam, I start out light with just one slightly full suitcase and invariably, come home with an extra bag crammed with items that I figure are  hard to find abroad. (Or maybe I was just impulse buying?!)  On this last trip, I was able to ask my sister Tasha to fill one of her extra suitcases (she's a well schooled, prepared traveler) with my junk. She flew home after Saigon whereas I went on to other Asian countries.

Though I've been home for weeks, it wasn't till last week that my sister handed over my Saigon souvenir stash. Along with a bunch of the latest cookbooks, there were items like these:

From top left to right:

• Black peppercorns from Phu Quoc island are a little sweet compared to the Tellicherry peppercorns. The Phu Quoc island peppercorns are slightly reddish in color and quite lovely. Keep them in your freezer. White ones are available too. Buy ones that are legit, not merely bleached black peppercorns, which are cheaper but not as good as the real thing. Ask to taste one when you buy.
• Banh trang re are lacy, net-like wrappers that you can use for deep-fried cha gio rolls. They soak up a ton of oil but are very crisp. There's no need to soak them first. I got a 6-pack and refrigerate them for up to 6 months.
• Giant chopsticks used for fluffing up rice. These were found at the Phu Nhuan wet market and you'd mistaken them for spatulas. They're about 1 1/4 inches wide at the top. The handmade pair cost 7,000 VN dong, or about 55 cents! I splurged and got a pair for my mom, who is a hard woman to shop for but she was delighted by the gift.
• Banh trang bo bia dau xanh are a new item to me. I believe they're like Chinese spring roll wrappers or lumpia wrappers. They're made with wheat flour and tapioca flour and according to the packaging do not require water to get them rolling. They're for "rolling the fried meat roll" per the packaging. In Vietnamese it says that they're for cha gio xop (fried imperial rolls); xop means porous, so that doesn't quite make sense to me. Anyone familiar with these wrappers?
• Dried bamboo shoot is what those funky brown things are. The vendor at Cho Lon market told me to buy the premium kind (about $8 USD a kilo) because they're not stinky and don't require days of soaking. Now I have 2 kilos (4.4 pounds) in my pantry. That's lots of bamboo.
  

A few bottles of Cholimex hot sauce got broken in the luggage and Tasha had to throw them out. Too bad you can't bring fish sauce back. If they sold high quality nuoc mam in the duty free shops at the airport, I'd snap them up!

When you're traveling, what kinds of food souvenirs do you look for?

To securely package things up, I always bring a supply of plastic zip-top bags and bubble wrap. Any tips from you?

Pho in a Box

Here's a new one -- a pho kit sold at Tan Son Nhat airport. It all comes in a box and makes 2 bowls. The box contains:

Dried noodles - rice, salt, sugar, MSG
Stewed beef pack - pre-cooked beef with palm oil, ginger, shallot and salt
Soup base pack - salt, sugar, MSG, disodium 5-guanylate, disodium 5-isoninate, caramel
Vegetable pack - green onion, eryngium (culantro)
Chile sauce pack - chile, modified cornstarch, salt, sugar, citric acid

Directions: Put content into bowl and add 600 ml of boiling water. Ready to serve between 3-5 minutes.

The cost is 6 USD. "Who buys it?" I asked the young saleswomen. Many Japanese visitors, they just love pho. Is it sold outside of the airport? Not to the young women's knowledge.

Vietnamese Food in Hong Kong

Many of us traveling to Vietnam touch down in Hong Kong and never leave the airport. This time, I decided to stay for a few days to check out what is arguably the Manhattan of Asia. In the early 1990s I was a student here on a fellowship and haven't visited since then.

What a difference 18 years makes. Compared to back then, today's Hong Kong is super duper modern (LCD screens on skyscrapers galore), extremely clean (it's easy to find a nice restroom), people are healthy, and overall happy (waitstaff at restaurants are actually friendly and kind).

There are Viet restaurants in all the happening places in town. A while back Hong Kong-native Joel Hung sent me info about them and finally I saw them with my own eyes.

• Golden Bull in the high-end Ocean Terminal and Times Square shopping center is very very luxe (sleek, modern, cold) but the food didn't look appealing. Also, there was no Vietnamese language menu so I didn't go for it.
• Viet Hung Vien in Kowloon (on Soy Street) was so packed with hipsters inside and outside  waiting that I ate the random skewered food snacks sold a few doors down.
• Nha Trang in tony Central on Wellington was ultra modern and cool, with an English/Viet menu. The rare and cooked beef pho (pho tai chin) came out nice and hot but oddly had no flavor. There was no cilantro, the scallion was left in 4-inch lengths, the onion sliced kinda thick, bean sprouts were already in the bowl, and they put the Thai basil -- stem and leaf atop the bowl; it was hard to pick out and rip off the leaves. I added ALL the Thai chiles and squirted tons of lime in but there was no oomph. For the first time in my life, I didn't finish a bowl of pho (39 HKD/5USD) and left to get a bowl of shrimp wonton noodle soup (15 HKD/2USD) nearby. Other diners didn't look inspired by the food, though they were smartly dressed . . .

Vietnamese food is popular in Hong Kong as a new and emerging cuisine, just like it is in the States. These restaurants offer something different from Cantonese food, but they're not fabulous as far as Viet flavors go. One of the things is that Viet food is a bit spicier than Cantonese fare, and there are lots of raw vegetables involved -- a rarity in Chinese cuisine. Given that, I can see where adaptation can be hard. On the other hand, I saw some lovely red-leaf lettuce and fresh mint at the markets.

Ingredients are available for making Viet food in Hong Kong. For example, On Graham street in Central where there's one of the remaining wet markets, there was a tiny Thai grocer where if you needed some nuoc mam, banh pho or banh trang (they only get the thick rice ones in HK), you can.  There are Thai markets near the old airport and Kowloon City Plaza (in Kowloon  City) that offer a good assortment of Southeast Asian ingredients.  But if venturing there is too out of the way, a Hong Konger could pick up many items at one of the City Supers, which are like a combo of Whole Foods and Dean and De Lucca. (Their salt selection occupies 7 shelves and spans the globe, from Asia to Europe.)

If you visit, try venturing outside the touristy areas into the neighborhoods so get good fare at decent prices. You'll also sneak a peek at how regular people eat and shop.

Vietnam Travel Visa - Tips

Anyone who’s been to Vietnam or is interested in visiting has to negotiate the Vietnamese embassy for a visa. It’s always a strange and slightly unnerving situation but things have gotten better every time I go.

Regular Visa
While you can get a visa through a service agency, I usually do it myself through the U.S. post office. My normal procedures are as such:

(1) Go online to obtain the proper forms and instructions at the embassy website.
(2) Verify with the embassy how much the visa fee is by sending an email (use that funky “visa fee” link a the page above to send an inquiry email)
(3) Have passport photos taken
(4) Go to the bank for a money order/cashier’s check
(5) Mail off the materials (form, photos, money, passport) at the post office with a delivery confirmation and postage-paid return envelope so the embassy send my passport back to me.

About 3 weeks later, the visa arrives and I’m happy! That’s been how we’ve gotten our visas in years past.

Visa Exemption for Overseas Vietnamese
This year, I sent for an overseas Vietnamese visa which is essentially an open-ended visa to Vietnam that’s good for a set number of years. It’s technically called a “Visa Exemption for Oversees Vietnamese.” It took 2 tries, but my husband and I received ours. Now we have don’t have to get a visa every time we go to Vietnam! Details are available in Vietnamese and in English through a Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) website.

If you’re interested in filing for one, remember to FOLLOW all the instructions carefully, fill out the online forms, save them in .pdf format, and when printing it out – make sure to INCLUDE  the little barcode in the lower left-hand corner. (This is where I goofed the first time.) To do so, in Adobe Acrobat, print in A4 paper (legal size) or better yet, set the printing preferences to “shrink to fit” and print to regular paper. If you don’t have the bar code, the embassy will return your materials, like they did with ours. They kept the money order so I didn’t send another check when I resent my materials.

I sent a cover letter with my materials and make sure to match their checklist of the following items:

1. The completed 2-page form, signed and dates (don’t forget that barcode!)
2. Photos (staple on the form, attach the other with a paper clip)
3. Valid passport
4. Cashier’s check for processing fee
5. Proof that you’ve got a connection to Vietnam. This means

A. Proof of former Vietnamese citizen ship (I sent a copy of my birth certificate, see the official site for all the options)
-or-
B. Proof of relationship to an overseas Vietnamese (for my husband, I sent a copy of our marriage certificate, see the official site for all the options, e.g, for your kids)

6. Self-addressed stamped envelope (get the post office to asses the right amount of postage)

As usual, I mailed the materials as registered mail with delivery confirmation. Earlier this year, I slogged my way through the Vietnamese instructions. Now, there are English instructions too. Regardless of your language, do read the instructions carefully. This is a bureaucratic process, as with all government type of dealings. (Think of the tax forms that will be due next month in the U.S.!)

Tourism is one of Vietnam’s chief industries and I’m happy to see them make it a little easier for folks to visit.

Safe Eating while Traveling in Vietnam

We're heading into Vietnam's tourist high season. Visitors -- whether overseas Vietnamese or not -- flock to Vietnam when the weather is cooler and drier.  Of course this all depends on where you are. It's just less hot and humid in and around Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), rather damp, cool and dreary in the Hue area, and downright wet and cold to the bone in Hanoi and its environs. As a long, skinny country, Vietnam's regional climates are as varied as its regional foods. If you're going soon, pack layers should you be traveling the entire country.

A trip to Vietnam is nothing without eating lots of Vietnamese food. Jason emailed last week about his upcoming trip and sent this query:

I'll be traveling to Vietnam this December for 2 weeks, and have a question.

I keep hearing about not eating uncooked vegetables, herbs, fruits etc. But I really don't see how that is possible and still enjoy the cuisine. Basically everything has some sort of uncooked herb or vegetable, which is what makes the cuisine so good. With the recent cholera outbreak this seems to be even more of a concern.

Given that I'm going in great part for the food alone, do you have any advice?

Ohhhh yeah. On my first trip back in early 2003, I resisted eating raw lettuces and herbs because I feared getting sick. A doctor in my hometown planted the seed by telling me about his 6-month bout with dysentery after working in Mexico.  My parents kept asking if my husband and I didn't want to go elsewhere -- Europe, Mexico (!?) -- anywhere aside from Vietnam where we could fall ill and have to rely on the local medical system. When my dad realized that we were intent on going back to the Motherland, he handed me a care package that included Cipro, a kind of  antibiotic that will kill anything.

So when in Vietnam, we'd stare down at a gorgeous plate of herbs that'd just been picked from a large bowl of water and had to force ourselves to pass on them. We'd eat our banh khoai crunchy rice crepes in Hue without herbs. In Hanoi, the pho joints we patronized served no garnishes (a traditional northern Vietnamese approach) and we ate the classic noodle soup just as other locals did -- sans any additions and savored the heady broth, fresh noodles and savory beef. On a daily basis, we loaded up on stir-fried water spinach with garlic (rau muong xao toi) to get our load of veggies.  We felt like wimps and occasionally got into fights over whether or not we should risk our lives for raw vegetables.  The doctor and my parents' admonitions loomed over us at every meal.

When we got back to the U.S. we felt like we'd miss out on a certain something by not eating the accompaniments. We NEVER fell ill during the trip. I checked in with others who'd gone back and they sheepishly admitted not eating the raw stuff too.

I've traveled in China and other parts of Southeast Asia and basically ate mostly cooked foods.  That's okay in those countries because there's little raw vegetables and herbs in their cuisines. The only time I got sick was in Hong Kong when I stupidly ate a salad at a Pizza Hut. Vietnam, however, is different, and what distinguishes Vietnamese food is the abundance of raw vegetables. In fact, herbs are called fragrant vegetable -- rau thom. Not partaking in the raw vegetables and herbs is indeed missing a huge point in Vietnamese cuisine, just as Jason suggests.   

Before our last trip back in January 2007, we got thinking and  decided to eat it all. Here are our strategies for dealing with food safety in Vietnam:

1) Start and stay healthy. We made sure we were in shape to travel by keeping our immune system up. We got lots of rest before departing and tried not to get stressed out about packing, getting visas, etc. As with any flight, we took Airborne at take off. To get sleep in flight, we took a natural product called No Jet Lag and wore earplugs; we slept with those ugly blow-up neck pillows to ensure we don't wake up in pain.  (After reading a tip in GQ magazine, my husband even talked me into wearing a mask but it was too hard to sleep with that on!)

On a daily basis while in Vietnam, I took a few drops of grapefruit seed extract diluted in water. It's bitter but it works for boosting your immune system due to its  anti-practically-anything properties. What I use is called Citricidal and it has been and continues to be great stuff  for me. It's available at healthfood stores and natural pharmacies. (It's also good for hangovers.)

2) Locals worry about hygiene too. It's always been this way in Vietnam. The billboards, food labels and vendors all worry about keeping things clean and healthy. An ill customer -- not to mention a foreign visitor -- can ruin your business. Wherever we ate, we watched the locals eat. If they set their cilantro sprig of garnish aside and didn't touch the lettuce leaves, we did too. If they dove into everything, we went whole hog.

3) Eat freshly prepared food. Vietnamese food and cooking is about freshness, not just for culinary purposes but for hygiene reasons too. So we made sure to see our being made in front of us. When that wasn't possible, we checked out the staff and joint to make sure things had a good vibe. Whenever possible, we made eye contact and smiled so that people knew we cared.

4) Trust the cook. An honest cook is more likely to not hurt you with bad food. Look her/him in the eye (and or the service staff)  before you sit down.

5) Enjoy ice judiciously. Beer on ice is one of my favorite beverages in Vietnam but I ordered my beer with ice in places that look like they got ice from filtered water. That meant that if I were in a village or small town on the square in a little plastic chair, I drank my beer warm from the bottle.  My husband came up with a clever strategy of drinking fast. This didn't apply to beer, but other refreshing drinks like delicious fresh sugarcane juice, which had to have ice. We sucked ours up through straws relatively fast to avoid the potentially unfiltered water from the melted ice.

6) Nature's protectors. All that lime, chile, vinegar, garlic, ginger, turmeric and galangal -- they're natural antiseptics. Know that all that comes together to kill potentially harmful bugs and bacteria. Along with the herbs, you've got a powerful phytochemical mix in your food.

7) Peel your own. Unless we were at the hotel's morning breakfast buffet spread where the fruit was already peeled, we peeled our own fruit. Vietnamese people, like many Asian people, peel their fruit. We eat lots of fruit so the nutrients lost in discarding the peel is negligible. My mother won't eat strawberries because it's fruit she can't peel!

8) Take it easy. You may get a little tummy thing that's a matter of your body adjusting. Keep hydrated with bottled water.

The cholera situation right now will make people in Vietnam extra alert so they'll be watching out for their health as well as yours.

Got any tips of your own? Let us know.