NATURALLY NUTRITIOUS

With healthy dishes that favour veggies and are made with unprocessed ingredients, Vietnamese cuisine may well be the way to go, Emily Price discovers

Light, healthy dishes that celebrate vegetables, glean flavour from herbs and spices rather than relying on butter or cream, and are made with accessible, affordable, fresh ingredients, often without wheat and dairy; if there is a country whose food embodies the way we are being encouraged to eat now, Vietnam is it.

“The Vietnamese cuisine is wellbalanced in so many ways. It’s naturally low in fat, many of the dishes are glutenfree and, most importantly, it’s extremely flavourful,” says Cameron Stauch, a Canadian-born chef who has just released his first Vietnamese cookbook.

Before writing Vegetarian Viet Nam – which was inspired by his young son’s decision to give up meat and fish while the family were living in Hanoi – Stauch spent years travelling the country, learning about regional recipes from restaurant chefs and street food vendors, as well as nuns, monks and home cooks of all ages. Over many a shared meal, he says that he gradually built up his culinary repertoire based on these shared insights, titbits of information and family secrets. “Although the cuisine has evolved over centuries, the dishes remain healthy and simple, yet sophisticated,” he explains. “Vietnamese cooks use a lot of seasonal vegetables and fresh herbs, fiery chillies, nutty sesame seeds or fried shallots and squirts of lime juice to create dishes that dance in between salty, sweet, sour and spicy flavours.”

In contrast to a more European style of eating, where historically meat has been viewed as the main component of a meal and vegetables a supporting act, Vietnamese cooking has always been more egalitarian. “The essence of Vietnamese food is lean meat or seafood mixed with lots of herbs, spices and vegetables, but we also have many vegetarian options because vegetarian eating has been part of our culture for thousands of years,” says chef and restaurateur Lily Hoa Nguyen, who grew up in Ho Chi Minh City and opened Vietnamese Foodies, a small cafe in Jumeirah Lakes Towers at the start of this year.

“There is so much variety in Vietnamese food that I think everyone can find something that’s to their liking; we have grilled meat skewers, salads, fresh rolls and crispy rolls, noodle soups, wok-fried noodles, braised dishes with rice and so much more,” she adds.

Although Hoa Nguyen has always been passionate about food and cooking – by age 13 she was acknowledged as the best chef in the family – it was when she moved away, first to Istanbul, then Paris and finally the UAE, that she came to truly appreciate the food of her home country. “I realised how healthy authentic Vietnamese food really is. We rely on gluten-free rice, rice paper or rice noodles, the food is normally cooked in broth or water instead of oil, and we don’t use any dairy or MSG in our cooking,” she explains. “There are not many other cuisines where the dishes have such an abundance of textures and flavours, yet are still so light.”

All things considered, it really is time for Vietnamese cooking to shine. Read on for our primer on popular dishes, find out where to sample them in the UAE and try a recipe at home.