Travel experiences are all the rage these days and learning how to cook a local dish is fire!
In District 7, a short drive from my home here in Ho Chi Minh City, there’s a small bustling market called Tan Quy Market, and at the western end of it via a narrow set of alleyways, is the modest family home belonging to Quyet and Loi and their two young children.
Natives of Nghe An Province, some 1,500km north of Ho Chi Minh City and the birthplace of the man this city is named after, Loi and Quyet rise each morning at 4am to prepare what’s needed for their ‘specialty’ breakfast dish – banh cuon.
In its simplest form, banh cuon can be best described as a steamed rice crepe, filled with a mixture of wood ear mushrooms, shallots, pepper, garlic and ground pork.
Ms Loi tops her creations with crispy fried onions and then serves them up with a clutch of lightly blanched bean sprouts, fragrant chopped basil and her own special innovation – pickled papaya.
And cosying up alongside it are a couple of slices of hearty and rubbery cha lua, a type of pork sausage.
It’s believed these tasty little rolls of goodness date back a whopping 2,000 years or more, around the time it was discovered that rice could be converted into thin, almost translucent, sheets that can then be used as edible wrappers.
The dish’s roots in Vietnam can be traced back to what was once the small village of Thanh Tri in the north on the Red River and which is now a district of modern-day Hanoi.
The back blocks of District 7 in Ho Chi Minh City are a long way from the home of banh cuon, which demonstrates just how popular the dish is up and down the country, not to mention how dedicated people like Loi and Quyet are to the preservation of Vietnam’s culinary heritage and bringing us what I think is probably Vietnam’s best breaky dish going round at the moment.
I hope you enjoy my attempt at cooking banh cuon. Just don’t go all Gordon Ramsay on me in the comments!
For more videos, visit The Bureau Asia on YouTube
What's Your Reaction?
