Cha Cha Cha

Putting the char into bun cha

bun cha is a blunt instrument. For all the subtlety engendered by Vietnamese cuisine, bun cha acts as a counterpoint: blackened rissoles of pork teamed with charred slices of pork belly in a thin fish sauce, vinegar and sugar stock with sides of bun noodles and assorted greens. Depending on season, either slices of green papaya or chayote (choko) are set afloat upon the stock.

The emphasis however is on the barbecued meat. After mixing components, loose charcoal from the pork is suffused through and suspended in the stock, leaving a thin black ring of charred detritus around the bowl and clinging to every slurp of noodles. The dish is omnipresent at lunchtime in the north of Vietnam, tough to find in the south, practically impossible to stumble upon overseas without guidance or a moment of serendipity. The above bowl was from Bun Cha Dac Kim on Hang Manh Street, Hanoi, not quite “utter bollocks” as one of my favourite food writers denounced them but certainly not the best bowl. The bun cha at 20 Ta Hien St is a much better bet – their fish sauce is punchy and lively, and leaves Dac Kim in its fragrant wake.

I’m beginning to suspect that the quality of food in Vietnam is inversely proportional to the height of the plastic chairs at the restaurant or stall. If a restaurant has stools short enough for your elbows to knock into your knees each time you slurp at your bun then it’s a good find; if plastic chairs are absent then all the better. I’m not sure how folding metal tables work into this equation but they’re somehow vital to it functioning at all.

The sides

What Dac Kim lacks in vim, it compensates with bulk. The greens are plated a foot high, the damp bun noodles weighing in at about two pounds, and a spare bowl of stock and papaya is at hand just in case your bowl runs dry. I noticed a trend down south in Veitnam for pho joints to list that “Bill Clinton ate 2 bowls” on the door, regardless of whether he ate there at all. I’m hoping that Dac Kim will follow the trend and list “Bill Clinton ate 2 bowls, then lapsed into a food-related coma”.

the servery

Location: Bun Cha Dac Kim, 1 Hang Manh St., Hanoi. A better bowl can be found at Bun Cha, 20 Ta Hien St. hanoi.

Price: 35000 VND with a plate of spring rolls for good measure.

Defeated in Hue

I generally don’t fail when I’m hunting for street food. I take wrong turns, missteps into blind alleys, but for the most part I find something worth eating.

Hue in central Vietnam defeated me.

My schooling in Vietnamese cuisine is more weighted towards the South than the North, due to the flow of southern refugees to Australia after the American War. My idea of central Vietnamese food tends to stretch as far as the occasional bowl of bun bo hue, although I had heard rumours of an Imperial cuisine, of sticky rice cakes in multitude variations, of a spicier and rich Vietnamese food. I still don’t know where that is located but I doubt that it is in Hue. The last vestiges of local restaurants that I could find seem to have been rendered bland by the constant stream of uncritical tourists; my efforts to find anything out in the ‘burbs fruitless and futile. Imperial cuisine seems to only exist as part of a day tour.

My small moment of success was on Truong Dinh St at Ba Hoa, a smallish street restaurant that sells nought but Hue regional specialties.

Ba Hoa trades in what I’d describe as a Hue Rice Cake Happy Meal. Banh beo, circles of rice cake topped with minced dried prawn and pork, corralled by gelatinous banh bot loc, rectangles of steamed tapioca flour each containing a chilli coated and slightly crispy whole dried prawn. The banh bot loc are are steamed in a rectangle of banana leaf and served cold and topped with a few strips of pork crackling. The plating reminded me of an upturned jellyfish, who prior to their beaching had a predilection for pork and fried onion. It seemed like a minor victory.

Location: Ba Hoa, 7 Truong Dinh St, Hue, Vietnam. Opposite is an identical restaurant; further down the street is a stand doing a roaring trade in sweet iced drinkche and local shellfish specialty, com hen.

Did I miss something in Hue? Is there a street food secret there waiting to be uncovered?

Pimp my regional cuisine: Hoi An

Hội An in Vietnam openly pimps out its regional specialties with flagrant disregard to public taste, be it inferior tailoring, Vina-Franco-Sino-Japanese architecture or local food. The tourist-focussed restaurants that don’t offer bland facsimiles of hoanh thanh (wantons, generally fried), banh beo/banh vac (a steamed rice-flour wonton) and cao lau as an incongruous and brazen set menu are thin on the ground; the 60,000 dong carte du jour de rigueur.

Good cao lau is a pork battleground with slices of char siu-style roast pork, lard-heavy croutons and noodles, and a thin porcine stock fending off the intrusion of bitter fishwort and cress. Like Hoi An’s rich architectural heritage, it is hard to pick which influence came from where and whence. Unlike the buildings, it’s hard to find an exemplar; an edible equivalent of Tan Ky House.

The above cao lau was flaunted from a specialist stall on the eastern edge of Hoi An’s central market for the hours from early breakfast through late brunch alongside banh khoai, a miniature crispy omelette of egg, rice flour and turmeric filled with prawn and bean shoots. The banh khoai are rolled in a square of rice paper with a sliver of starfruit and some more fishwort, served with a peanut and sesame sauce. Their soggier cousin banh xeo is a different, but equally tasty beast.

The cao lau couldn’t be more local: every ingredient is on sale within twenty metres of the vendor, noodles for bun alongside the fatty yellow cao lau noodles. The dish’s official history dictates that the water used in the dish must be drawn from a single well in town.

Slices of crouton in their pre-deep-fried state

Price: bowl of cao lau, 10,000VND; banh khoai, 5,000VND per roll.

The pleasure of pork skin: Banh Mi Bi

Vietnam is one of the few places on earth that you can eat a sandwich whose prime ingredient is roasted pork skin and feel virtuous for doing so. Banh mi bi must rate as one of the world’s perfect sandwiches: crispy pork skin with a luscious hint of creamy fat, perfectly balanced with a tart pickle, streetside mayonnaise, shredded spring onions and red hot chilli; all contained within an hours-old mini-baguette. It’s a world ahead of your average pâté-packed banh mi, if only because the meat tastes like it came from a very happy swine. To double the meat pleasure, Tiem Banh Gia Phat on Phan Dinh Phung street in Da Lat topped it off with pork floss, a meat condiment that is in my estimate, second only to bacon.

The only reason that I picked Tiem Banh Gia Phat was for their surgically clean banh cart. It looked like somewhere that with a tray of scalpels could double as a roadside operating theatre. The bakery out the back also seemed to do a vigorous trade in Vietnamese simulations of French patisserie.

Price: 8000VND (US$0.50)

The Street Sausage of Saigon: Thit Nuong

It helps to be obsessed by a single dish when you arrive in Saigon. I usually hit up a few of my favourite restaurants (the upmarket street food specialist Quan An Ngon, commercial pho franchise Pho 24 anywhere about town) and then am lost in a sea of choice. There’s bun of almost limitless variety, multitude variations on pho, and street food on every corner and clinging to each alleyway. I negotiate these choices by getting momentarily obsessed with seeking out a single dish and then moving on. I felt like thit nuong: casing-free Vietnamese pork sausage, served with the rice noodle bun or in the ultimate Vietnamese sandwich as banh thit nuong; and with this idea for a dish as organising principle, I hit the streets for some local charred charcuterie action.

In the basement of the mall-like Andong market in Cholon is a small concentration of thit nuong vendors, along with the normal assortment of dehydrated animal stalls. I picked the thit nuong vendor that both had the more impressive charred sausage display and laughed the most at me. I’m not really that funny.

Bun thit nuong cha gio

The sausage was garlicky and sweetly caramelised, the rest was light on the herbage and bean sprouts but topped with crushed peanuts aplenty. Now, to find a new obsession.

Price: 14,000 VND

Korean Street Food Recipes: Hoddeok

Hoddeok is a Winter street food in Korea that is slowly transitioning into year-round fare. In essence, it’s a fried yeast dumpling, flattened to a pancake, with sticky cinnamon sugar centre. From a brief trawl of vendors around Myung-dong, there seemed to be two versions: one fried in a sandwich iron (above) resulting in a crispier outer shell and more consistent disc shape; the other (below), fried and pressed onto a greasy hotplate. Both delicious.

Ingredients – Makes 5

1 1/4 cups plain flour
6 tbsp milk
Pinch of salt

To start the yeast:
1/4 tsp dry yeast
1/4 tsp white sugar
2 tbsp water

Stuffing
1/4 tsp cinnamon
5 tbsp brown sugar

Mix the yeast, white sugar and water and leave in a warm place to ferment for 15 minutes. Sieve the flour into a bowl, add the salt, milk and yeasty water. Mix well, cover and leave to rise for two hours. Go see a movie or something.

Mix the cinnamon and brown sugar together for stuffing. Oil up your hands (if not sufficiently oiled from movie popcorn) and take about 1/5 of the dough, flatten into a thick disk and place a tablespoon of stuffing inside. Seal like a dumpling.

Add oil to frypan and heat. Place your sugar filled dumpling into the oil. When brown, turn over and flatten the dumpling into a disk with a spatula. Cook until browned.

Korea: French fry-coated hot dog

If Coney Island witnessed the birth of the hot dog, Seoul in South Korea saw subsequent generations mutate into a an entirely new genus of animal. An animal coated in a skin of batter and french fries then presented deep-fried on a stick. See the best sex parties here xxx !

After first witnessing this monstrosity on Newley Purnell‘s site, I thought that chasing it down would be difficult. That it would be the type of food that only demented South Korean carnies sold for a scant few days of a State Fair until their consumers ended up in the waiting queue for a heart bypass. The taste is about as obvious as it looks: greasy but still crispy fries glued to a hotdog with a thick, neutral batter.

It turns out that Seoul is packed full of artisan hot dog vendors. Vendors wrap them in bacon, mashed potato, corn batter or what looked to be seaweed then invariably deep fry them. I spotted three french fry-coated hotdog vendors in the narrow alleys of Myeong-dong alone and a few more in the neighbouring Namdaemun Market.

home-made budae jigae

I blame this mutation on the Korean War. When meat was scarce in the years during and after the war, Koreans made do with whatever they could scavenge from the surplus from the US armed forces bases – Spam and hotdogs. To make these items edible for Koreans, the locals mixed them together with the paste gochujang in a makeshift stew named “Budae jjigae” (부대찌개) – literally “base stew”. Over the subsequent fifty years, the locals have grown to love the processed meat-flavored soup and it now graces franchise restaurant menus, the only difference being that the stew now contains actual meat along with the mechanically-separated variety.

There seems to be no particular rules to making the stew, insofar that you need gochujang and hotdogs to start, and then whatever seems to be lying about the average Korean kitchen to continue: kimchi, frozen dumplings, greens, ramen, rice cake, actual meat. 50 years of hotdog flavoured broth has to do strange things to your palate and drive you towards experimenting with hotdogs in an obscene and deep-fried manner.

Recipe

Try: French Fry Coated Hot Dog on a Stick Recipe

The Last Appetite

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