THE HUNT: ROLL ON
Bún cha giò thit nuong is popular, unpronounceable for those who don’t speak Vietnamese, and delicious. It retains these virtues when created in your own kitchen.
Bún cha giò thit nuong is popular, unpronounceable for those who don’t speak Vietnamese, and delicious. It retains these virtues when created in your own kitchen.
outside of burger and fries, what is the most common restaurant lunch in the city? I would hazard a guess that it’s Bún cha giò thit nuong. If you’re a non-Vietnamese Calgarian like me, two things can be said about that. As much as we’ve all eaten it, we can’t tell you its name off the top of our head. And secondly, we never think to make it at home.
That dish, of course, is vermicelli noodle salad topped by charcoal-grilled pork and fried spring rolls. And though it may seem labour-intensive, it bears investigation as a project dinner for no other reason than that it is a supremely satisfying one-bowl meal eligible for countless permutations.
Unusually for me, I set out to emulate the most common style of the dish, using multiple internet sources as a rough guide. For the ingredients, I paid my first visit to Forest Lawn’s Lucky Supermarket, a pan-Asian store with locations in Winnipeg and Edmonton, plus another one coming soon to Calgary. With its vast selection and the cheerful anarchy one expects at places like this, I hereby nominate the Lucky as Calgary’s best re-purposing of a curve-roofed Safeway from the 1960s.
Let’s begin from the bottom up. Do you have a set of large, Asian-style bowls? If not, you need them, and they start at around $6 apiece at Lucky. Next is the bún, or rice vermicelli, of which numerous brands and thicknesses may be considered. Surprisingly, in my experience, the ones I examined actually have coherent English instructions for the hydration process. My advice, though, is to err on the side of under-cooking these noodles at first. You can always soften them more later in a bath of warm water, but you definitely don’t want them to turn mushy.
Next come the salad components, led by lettuce and cucumber, with fresh garnishes like cilantro, Thai basil, mint or something more exotic like perilla leaves. (Lucky has a wide array of herbs worth exploring.) But the one essential item is do chua—finely julienned daikon and carrot in a light, sweet pickle bath. That’s what adds crunch to a banh mi, or Vietnamese submarine sandwich. Easy to make, this figures to become a regular in our house.
For the meat, get a nice chunk of pork shoulder and slice thinly. Marinate the meat overnight in generous amounts of sweet soy, fish sauce, minced lemon grass, garlic, shallots and sesame oil. Grill hot and fast, then set aside in a warm oven.
The last order of business is the fried spring rolls. Classic fillings involve shredded taro root and jicama, hydrated mung-bean thread, ground pork and chopped fresh shrimp. Most recipes also call for wood ear mushrooms, which lend texture more than flavour. Here’s a chance for you to get adventurous and bring home the dried version, often labelled “black fungus.” Next, you have a choice between wheat-based egg-roll wrapper or the more traditional Vietnamese rice paper. I tried both; the former is slightly less fussy to work with, but our guests were unanimous in preferring the latter. As for oil frying, the 180 C setting on my induction cooker worked perfectly at about 10 minutes per batch. Since you’re starting with raw pork, use an instant-read thermometer to ensure that you’re achieving a safe temperature.
If serving guests, it’s easy enough to assemble the bowls in advance. Because room temperature is better than chilled, leave them on the counter. Then it’s a simple matter of chopping up the meat and rolls and posing them artfully on each bowl. Finally comes the crowning touch: nuoc cham, the ubiquitous dipping liquid made of slightly diluted fish sauce, fresh lime juice, garlic and chilies.
Will this cause me to stop visiting Vietnamese restaurants? Never. But I’ll definitely be making more versions of this in the future.