Vietnamese hits all your taste buds
Sour, spicy, sweet, bitter and salty, food of the asian country has the power to hit all your taste buds. ELLA WALKER finds out how to make it at home.
THE first pancake is always a dud. It doesn’t matter how smooth your batter, how hot and Teflonned your pan; the debut is always a crumpled mess that flops sadly onto the plate.
This is true whether it’s an English pancake destined for lemon or sugar, or, as in this case, a turmeric-spiked rice flour and coconut milk crepe, laden with plump prawns and a forest floor’s worth of coriander. Impaled by rogue bean sprouts and soggy rather than crisp, I have utterly massacred food writer Uyen Luu’s sizzling crepes. I hope she will forgive me.
I order in Vietnamese food every chance I get: fragrant chicken pho (“fuh”); coarsely shredded papaya salads; golden spring rolls and enticingly translucent summer ones; pork-prawn wontons with sesame and chilli oil; chargrilled, fish sauce-drenched aubergines . . . but until now, I’d never attempted to cook it myself.
Why even try when the depth of flavour seems unfathomable to achieve? When every dish is so zingy and bold, fresh and sprightly? Who has such lightness of touch? Luu, that’s who. And me, it turns out, when armed with Luu’s new recipe collection, Vietnamese.
The dishes in the brilliantly blush pink cookbook are designed to “demystify Vietnamese cooking”, promises Luu, who reckons the most common mistake people make when approaching the cuisine, is “they think it’s more complicated than it is”.
You can’t really blame them (ok, me) when the “flavours feel and taste complex”. However, to hit those key Vietnamese flavours — sweet, sour, salty, umami, hot and bitter — it’s just a matter of combining ingredients, Luu insists. There’s no need to be intimidated.
I start off slow with the stirfried greens; a tangle of noodles, shards of pak choi and a sauce I didn’t even have to go shopping for (the ingredients — from maple syrup to soy sauce and sesame — are possibly already in your cupboards). It took literally 10 minutes to throw together, and the Thai basil I did go out and buy especially, was fully worth the trip (plus, it added an aniseedy lilt to Rachel Roddy’s Roman cherry tomato pasta a few nights later, when I’d run out of standard basil).
The ginger chicken I try next proves to be an alchemical triumph of caramelised brown sugar, chicken thighs and a hefty scattering of fresh ginger matchsticks. I grow sceptical when told to add a full teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper to the bubbling pan (surely not a full one?) but am an idiot to argue. It brings warmth and depth and almost tricks you into forgetting that really, it’s the fish sauce you should be applauding, because that’s the umami deliciousness holding everything together.
We crunch through spears of asparagus and broccoli on the side, a sign of Luu’s insistence to make things work for you. She just specifies “greens” — whatever greens you’ve got will do perfectly. Hence why my dodgy first crepe is folded scrappily into shells of iceberg and baby cos lettuce, and although I have a few strands of Thai basil left, and a little coriander and mint, I bump it up with chervil from a pot on the balcony too. All greens welcome.
We eat the lettuce-wrapped crepes in shifts, dunking them in a piquant fish sauce that runs down your wrists. They get crispier and crispier as I get more patient (i.e. quit poking around the pan) and the pan itself gets hotter and hotter, until the crepes crackle when they hit the plate. The piles of herbs, abundance of prawns and