Learn to cook in Vietnam
Sharon Stephenson explores one of our must-see spots for 2018.
There are 261,000,000 things I could be doing with a carrot. I know, because I just googled it.
Instead, I’m trying to turn one into a flower with a stupidly sharp knife. And panicking when it ends up looking more weed than flower.
I’m at the Saigon Culinary Art Centre, in Vietnam’s second largest city (we’re supposed to call it Ho Chi Minh City, but hardly anyone does).
Twelve of us have turned left into a graffiti-ed alleyway and climbed a flight of the stairs to learn about Vietnamese cuisine and how to recreate the pungent Vietnamese flavours at home.
Chef Dung tells us food is at the heart of Vietnamese culture. ‘‘Almost every aspect of social, devotional and family life revolves around the procurement, preparation and shared pleasure of food.’’
She explains that Vietnamese cooking borrows both from the Chinese and the French, but it tends to be fresher and lighter than either of these cuisines.
It also varies along regional lines, with food from the tropical south generally spicier than the Chinese-influenced cuisine of the north.
I quickly draw a veil over my carrot flower efforts and move onto salad rolls which basically involve wrapping boiled shrimp, bean sprouts and fragrant bundles of mint and basil in wafer-thin rice paper. It’s hardly difficult but, dipped in shallow bowls of nuoc mam (fish sauce), these bundles of goodness stalk my taste-buds for days afterwards.
It’s hard to spend long in this frenetic country without encountering a bowl of steaming pho (pronounced ‘‘fhu’’).
There are numerous variations on this clear noodle soup that’s usually eaten as a breakfast food but most, says Dung, contain some combination of four classic ingredients – stock, meat, silky rice noodles and herbs.
Other add-ons include shallots, ginger, fish sauce and spices such as black cardamom, fennel, cassia and star anise. Lastly comes the chili, which whacks you between the eyes and reminds you that you’re in Vietnam.
Today we’re making a chicken pho and after blanching the chicken carcass with pungent spices, we heap noodles, sprouts and shredded chicken into a huge bowl.
It’s love at first whiff for my olfactory senses but before we can sit down to eat there’s one more dish to make, sizzling Vietnamese pancakes.
Dung shows us how to create a golden batter with rice flour, turmeric and spring onions. In an over-sized wok she tosses fistfuls of bean sprouts, onion and pork for the meat eaters, shrimp for the others, sloshing the batter in afterwards.
The trick, it turns out, is to swirl the batter around quickly over a high heat, starting from the edge of the pan so that it moves inwards and creates a uniform round shape. And then to slow it down, moving the wok in a clockwise direction until the extremities turn golden brown and crispy.
I was definitely the weakest link in this culinary journey, but I can’t remember a cooking class where I had so much fun.
❚ The writer travelled with the assistance of Air New Zealand and Saigon Tourist Travel Service (saigontourist.net).