Thit Heo Nuong Xa

That would be lemongrass-marinated pork in English.

From the picture it looks pretty complicated, but it's really very simple and easy to make.

It's just a couple thick pork chops or a hunk of pork loin (not too lean!) marinated overnight in a paste of:
2 Tablespoons light brown sugar
1 Tablespoon garlic, chopped
1 Tablespoon shallot, chopped
3 Tablespoons lemongrass, white bits finely grated
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 teaspoon black soy sauce
1 1/2 Tablespoon fish sauce
1 Tablespoon neutral oil. Grill or fry them up and slice it it thin against the grain.

Add grilled green vegetables. I had pak choy on hand. Also sliced tomato and cucumber and a poached egg are nice additions.

Put those over a big bowl of coconut rice:
6 oz rice
1 1/3 cups coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 bay leaf
cooked on a standard rice cooker cycle.

Plain white rice is OK, but the coconut rice does add a nice little something.

and top with drizzles of:
Nuoc Cham
3 Tablespoons fish sauce
3 Tablespoons rice vinegar
2 Tablespoons sugar
125 milliliters water
heated until just about to boil and then mixed with
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 hot pepper, thinly sliced
2 tbsp lime juice
1 small carrot, shredded
and cooled

and
Scallion and garlic chive oil
250 milliliters neutral oil
4 scallions, finely sliced
1 handful garlic chives, finely sliced
1 pinch salt
1 pinch sugar,
simmered briefly and cooled,

and sambal hot sauce
from a bottle and better suited here than over-hyped Sriracha to my mind.

OK, maybe it is a little complicated, but you don't have to do it all at once. You can make a big batch of the pork and keep it in the freezer, make the sauces a day or two before and cook whatever vegetables you've got to hand.

It's as tasty as it looks. More tasty if you don't think it looks so good.

CSA week three - Beef with betel leaf and lemongrass stir fry

My turn to tell how I dealt with this week's CSA mystery ingredient. I found a pretty simple Vietnamese-style stir fry that used the betel leaves as a substantial part of the dish--as a vegetable, not just a flavoring. Unfortunately, that meant that after I scaled everything else down to fit the five leaves I had, I only had enough for one modest serving. Here's my modified version:

Beef tossed with wild betel leaf and lemongrass
Original version created by Luke Nguyen

Ingredients:
100 g lean beef sirloin, thinly sliced
5 betel leaves, roughly sliced
1/2 lemon grass stalk (white part only), finely diced (peel off dry outer shell)
1 small clove garlic, finely diced
most of 1 hot chili, finely diced
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon soy sauce
2/3 teaspoon sugar
a little cilantro, chopped for garnish
the rest of the chili, finely sliced for garnish

0. Mix fish sauce, soy sauce and sugar in a small bowl.

1. Heat a medium pan to over high heat to smoking hot, add oil and lemon grass, cook briefly until fragrant. Add garlic and chili. Stir fry until they become fragrant too, then add beef.

Stir fry two minutes, until beef is cooked through and starting to brown. Add seasoning mixture and betel leaf. Stir fry 1 minute more, until betel leaf is wilted.

2. Remove to a plate, garnish and serve with rice.


I know some others had difficulty with the flavor of the betel leaves, but I liked them. Maybe it's the difference between having them raw or cooked. The cooked betel leaf flavor is quite distinctive and hard to describe. It's a bit spicy, a bit smoky, a bit medical. It's one of those odd distinctive flavors like curry leaves and kaffir lime leaves that have no easy paralell for comparison in Western cuisine. I can see it being a bit rough on it's own, but I wouldn't want to eat straight curry leaves or kaffir lime leaves either. They're meant to be mixed with other flavors. Here, moderated by the sugar and complimented by the lemongrass, the closest comparison I can find is root beer--the real stuff, not the artifically flavored version you can commonly get. I quite liked how it paired with the beef; it would probably work well with pork, too, I think.

The dish as a whole needs a little tweaking, though. Two minutes on high heat is too much for thinly sliced sirloin and the soy sauce ended up a caramelizing when I dumped it into the hot pan. If I had been making a full-sized recipe in a wok, that would have worked better. But, overall, it was pretty tasty and it did show the betel leaves to good advantage.

CSA week one - Bap xao

Here is a Vietnamese corn salad that uses some similar flavors as the Thai corn soup I made earlier this week, but turns out very differently. It didn't turn out great because of the tough not-very-sweet corn we got, but it wasn't out and out bad and it showed a lot of promise. I found it at Vietworldkitchen.com.

Ingredients:
3/2 Tablespoons cooking oil
1 Tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup chopped scallion, both white and green parts
3/2 Tablespoons dried shrimp (Chinese, SE Asian and Mexican varieties are all quite similar so feel free to substitute with whatever you've got.)
1 hot pepper of your preference, chopped
2 cups fresh corn cut from the cob (my two cobs each produced a little under a cup so I topped it off with frozen corn.)
3.4 Tablespoon Vietnamese fish sauce (milder than the Thai variety)
dash salt

1. Rinse the dried shrimp, dry them off and either finely chop them or, preferably, run them through your spice grinder to create a powder.

2. Heat the oil and butter in a wok or large pan over high heat. Add scallion, dried shrimp and pepper. Stir fry briefly until scallion is wilted and the mixture is aromatic.

3. Stir in the corn. Add the fish sauce and salt. Cook, stirring frequently, for 3-4 minutes, until the corn is cooked. (This week's tough corn took longer and never really got tender.) Remove from heat and adjust seasoning adding salt or sugar as necessary to create a savory-sweet flavor.


To make a full meal out of this, I served it over rice and topped with a skewer of shrimp. I wanted flavors on the shrimp to match the corn, but not too closely, so I used an oil based marinade flavored with garlic, ginger, scallion, sesame oil, red pepper, salt and fish sauce and then cooked them in a very hot cast iron pan still in their shells to protect them from the heat. I probably should have scraped off the scallions first. Still, they came out just fine.



As for the corn, the fishy salty savoriness is a pleasant counterpoint to the corn's buttery sweetness. It's a complex balance for such a simple dish, but I suppose that's typical of Vietnamese cooking. The corn retains a good bite (being kind of tough and all), but they squish nicely so they are cooked through. The best bit is the fond--mixed shrimp shreds and corn milk browned into a crisp powder--that I scraped off the pan and sprinkled into the salad. I like the added textural element, but I regret that that there's still a lot stuck in the pan. Next time, maybe, I'd add a deglazing step (Maybe with white wine; I could see that working with the flavors of the dish.) so all that flavor ends up on the corn. I wouldn't mind the salad just a little moister anyway.

Vietnamese fried rice

O.K., this is just fried rice and you don't need to be told how to make fried rice, but this quick-and-easy way to use leftovers is a little different from the more familiar Chinese version so it's worth documenting.

When I did it, it turned into a huge production number, but you can just consider the contents of each bowl a list of possible ingredients to choose from and you'll be fine. Use whatever you've got handy and follow the same procedure of fluffing the rice then cooking the vegetables in stages before mixing the sauce then rice back in. It is really easy if you are using leftovers they way you're supposed to and not prepping everything right there like I did.

In that first bowl are:
a few cloves garlic, chopped
an equal amount of ginger, crushed and chopped
1 stalk lemongrass, cleaned and thinly sliced
1 small handful dried kaffir lime leaves [I've been picking them off my kaffir lime tree and drying them myself. I'm finding dried rather easier to work with than fresh although not nearly as flavorful so you have to use a lot more.]
1 carrot, peeled and diced small

In the second bowl are:
2 links lop chong (Chinese sausage), microwaved 1 minute to partially cook, cooled and sliced
1 half cup peas
1 1/2 cups bean sprouts
4 large shrimp, cleaned and cut into centimeter-sized pieces
1 small handful cilantro, chopped

On the plate are:
2 eggs, beaten, gently cooked into an omelet and sliced
2 scallions, chopped

In the sauce is:
2-3 Tablespoons Vietnamese fish sauce (milder than Thai)
2-3 Tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 Tablespoon sugar
1 Tablespoon sriracha hot sauce (did you know that this was invented in Los Angeles? You don't see this brand or quite this formulation outside the U.S.)


Step one was to heat up in my wok:
1 Tablespoon canola oil
1 Tablespoon chicken fat
1 teaspoon sesame oil

to which I added:
3 cups day-old rice
and stir-fried until the rice had regained its fluff.

Out that went and into the wok went another Tablespoon of canola and another Tablespoon of chicken fat. Once that was hot I added the contents of the first bowl.

When the aromatics were nicely aromatic and the carrot starting to soften, in went the contents of the second bowl.

When the shrimp was just about done (just a minute or two), I added the sauce and cooked it down a little. Then I returned the rice and tossed it around to get all of the rice coated before adding the eggs and scallions. A little more stirring to get everything well-distributed and warmed through and it all went out of the wok and into a big bowl.

To finish, I garnished each serving with:
chopped cilantro
ground peanuts
caramelized onion (I keep a small bag in the freezer)
crispy deep fried garlic (I keep a small jar in the pantry)
a squeeze of lime
and, after I took the picture,
thinly sliced hot pepper
a drizzle more of sriracha



So that's 25 ingredients all told. And you can really taste each and every one of them. Enormously complicated, but everything retains their own flavor and texture and works together. There are deep savory flavors infused into the rice, crisp fresh-tasting vegetables, aromatic citrusy notes and just a touch of heat. And all sorts of textures in there too. I don't know how I did it, but this is quite spectacularly good. Or maybe I was just very very hungry since dinner was two hours late?

Was it worth all the effort? Well, I am getting five servings out of it, so on average with the four zero prep-time meals, maybe?

Pork clay pot

Pork medium saucepan, more accurately. This is an adaption of a classic Vietnamese dish by Mark Bittman from his Bitten blog (and in the NY Times Chef column 5 years previously). I've looked around for more traditional recipes and it doesn't look like he changed it much other than the cooking vessel. I did find that you can use pork belly instead of pork shoulder but you'd have to cook it an extra hour. I can't find pork belly locally so not really an option there. One other point is that it's important to use the milder Vietnamese fish sauce instead of the saltier Thai version. I used the wussified supermarket fish sauce I picked up once when I couldn't make it out to the Asian grocery. Nice to know it has a legitimate use.

All that said, I was interested less in the authenticity than in the unusual technique of cooking the spices and then the meat in a caramel. It's an interesting alternative to the standard oil and water mediums and I was curious how it would work technically. Now that I've tried it I'm not sure I've got any great insights. It did seem to stick to the meat so it browned better than you'd expect in an overcrowded pan, but that may be an illusion since it's brown to start with. There not have been much Maillard reaction going on for proper browning. More experimentation will be required.

Recipe: Pork Clay Pot

Adapted from Charles Phan by Mark Bittman

Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons neutral oil, like corn or canola
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1/4 cup chopped shallots
1 tablespoon minced ginger
1 small chili, minced
1 1/2 pounds fatty pork, cut from shoulder, or about 2 pounds fatty pork chops, cut into 1- to 1 1/2-inch cubes
2 tablespoons fish sauce, or to taste
1 teaspoon ground black pepper, or to taste
4 hard-cooked eggs, peeled
Salt if necessary
Shredded scallion for garnish [cilantro too]
[Sriracha hot sauce which is Thai or a Vietnamese vinegar-based hot sauce if you have it]

Cooked white rice.

1. Put oil in a saucepan or clay pot large enough to comfortably accommodate pork; turn heat to medium. Add sugar and cook, stirring occasionally, until it dissolves and colors a bit, 3 or 4 minutes. Add garlic, shallots, ginger and chili and cook, stirring occasionally, until shallots soften, about 5 minutes.

2. Add pork and raise heat to medium-high. Let it brown a little, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes. Add 1/2 cup water, and fish sauce and black pepper. Bring to a boil, then adjust heat so mixture simmers steadily. Nestle eggs in mixture and cover pot. Cook for about 30 minutes, stirring once or twice, until pork is tender, adding a little more water if mixture threatens to dry out.

3. Taste and adjust seasoning, then garnish with scallions and serve with rice.

Yield: 4 servings.


Hey look, the yolk didn't oxidize and get all green and stinky. I wonder why not.

The pork is cooked just the wrong length of time. You know how meat starts tender, toughens while you cook it, and then gets tender again as the connective tissue dissolves? A half hour gets it just to the wrong point on that bell curve. At least I kept the simmer low. Upon further consideration, the meat isn't tough as such, just chewy. I'm putting the rest back on the heat for at least another half hour. [45 minutes did the trick, although it did a number on the eggs.]

The sauce is rich with pork juices, sweet and a little funky from the fish sauce. Fair on its own, but really good when balanced by the tart and sweet from the hot sauce and the fresh herbs. It's only half a dish without the garnishes. Cooking the sauce down to half its volume would probably do it some good too. Now that I've done the research I find that many recipes leave the lid off and cook the sauce way down. I'll do that when I continue simmering the pork. [I only cooked the sauce down a little but the flavors got pretty intense so I didn't want to go any further. Be careful. I think the particular nature of your chili and fish sauce are going to make a big difference here.]

I'm thinking that there's no reason this dish couldn't have vegetables too. Root vegetables to soak up the flavor like the eggs did would be best: carrots, daikon, turnip, that sort of thing. I haven't got any of those in the house right now, but I think I might revisit this recipe in the middle of next CSA season.

CSA week four - Chao tom

a.k.a. Vietnamese shrimp paste on sugarcane.

How did I not think of this yesterday? This is, I think, the only dish with sugarcane most Americans have tried. I think it's the only one I've tried. It should have just popped into my head.

What's odd about this dish is that, while most Americans wouldn't dream of making it at home, what you get in restaurants isn't really right. It's not that it's prepared poorly--it's not a particularly tricky dish--but when you're eating it, you're supposed to eat the sugar cane too. I don't think most people recognize that stick as food and even if they did they wouldn't be willing to sit in public gnawing on it like a woodchuck and spitting the fibers out onto their plates.

As usual I looked around at different recipes. There's some small variation in binders and some recipes add a little pork but beyond that it's pretty straightforward. As usual I made it a bit more complicated.

This isn't really a recipe that requires a lot of measuring. The amounts of many of the ingredients I used were determined by how much I happened to have on hand.

Ingredients:
2 4-5" lengths of sugarcane, peeled and quartered
4 ounces raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
4 ounces pork, coarsely chopped [This is a much higher pork to shrimp ratio than the recipes call for so I supplemented the shrimp with]
1 Tablespoon dried shrimp, soaked in warm water for 30 minutes [Also, the recipes that called for pork generally specified fatty pork which the leftover pork I had wasn't so I added in]
1 Tablespoon lard
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 medium shallot, finely chopped
1 Tablespoon lemongrass, finely chopped [no recipes call for this, but I had it in the refrigerator and it didn't seem like it would hurt]
1 egg white
1/2 teaspoon fish sauce
1 large pinch salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 Tablespoon toasted rice powder [You can buy this in Indian and Asian groceries. If you do, look for the dark roasted variety. I made my own by pan-toasting two Tablespoons of risotto rice (glutinous rice would be better but I don't have any at the moment) with a tiny bit of oil for three and a half minutes in a cast iron pan over high heat. It goes from raw to burnt in the last forty-five seconds so be careful. And then, after it's cooled a little, ground it up in my spice grinder.]

0. Put the pork and shrimp in the freezer for a half hour to firm up a little. Preheat your broiler or your grill or a big pot of oil.

1. Put shrimp, pork, dried shrimp and lard in a food processor. Process until smooth.

2. Add everything else except the sugarcane. Process until smooth again. Remove the shrimp/pork paste to a bowl. You're going to be digging in there with your hands and you don't want the food processor blade lurking at the bottom. You might want to refrigerator it for a few minutes at this point to make it easier to work with.

3. Wrap each stick of sugar cane with shrimp/pork paste leaving an inch or so at either end. I had enough for seven so I saved one stick for dessert, but I think some of my paste-layers were a bit thick. A third inch is about right.

I took a while for me to figure out a good method and since my hands were full I couldn't get any pictures of it. Sorry. What I found was that if my hands were moist, but not wet, I could pat out a square of shrimp paste in the palm of one hand. All of those fibers in the sugarcane grab onto the paste so with just a little pressure it sticks more to it than to a slightly wet hand so I could put the cane at one side of the square and roll it across pulling up the paste as it went along.

The results aren't perfect so I had to patch up holes and then roll the stick between both palms like I was rolling out a rope of Play-Doh to even and smooth it out. I wonder how it's actually supposed to be done.

4. I broiled mine about five inches from the heat, five minutes on the first side and then two on the flip and they turned out looking quite lovely. I can't speak for the alternative cooking methods though.

The traditional dipping sauce is nuoc cham. I had a some left from the batch I made a while back.

The meat by itself has a nice mixture of flavors with broiled shrimp and pork accented by the tang of fish sauce and the herbal notes of the lemon grass, but it really perks up when mixed with the sugarcane juice. And it's even better with the nuoc cham so don't neglect that.

It is a bit tricky to eat if you actually try to bite off pieces of sugar cane from the side, although he bits of exposed sugar cane at the ends have been cooked into edibility. I found it easiest to bite down on the end to scrape off the meat and squeeze out the sugar juices with my teeth leaving a flattened strip of fibers that I could snip off with scissors. Very undignified but it did minimize the spitting.

Alternatively, you could skip the sugarcane and just add a couple teaspoons of sugar to the paste and make patties out of it, but where's the fun in that?

CSA week one: Suon Nuong Xa

a.k.a. Grilled Lemongrass Pork Tenderloin Skewers

When I posted about the CSA box this week I wrote that lemongrass meant Thai cooking but when I actually looked around for recipes I found Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian recipes using it too. Since it's going to take four recipes to use up all the lemongrass I'm going to make a point of cooking recipes from four different cuisines.

First up is Vietnamese. This recipe is from Corinne Trang's cookbook Authentic Vietnamese Cooking via Sara Moulton's show Sara's Secrets. It's for a dish you'll recognize--those skewers of pork served over a big bowl of rice noodles in every Vietnamese restaurant on the planet (excepting banh mi stands, of course. Can you get banh mi anywhere in Miami? I think I'd actually drive some distance through Miami traffic to get some).

I didn't make any big changes to the recipe so here it is straight from the Food Network website:

Prep Time: 30 min
Inactive Prep Time: 1 min
Cook Time: 20 min

Level: Intermediate

Serves: 4 servings

1/4 cup fish sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
3 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 stalks lemongrass, outer leaves and tops removed, root ends trimmed, and stalks finely grated
1 large shallot, finely chopped
2 large cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 pound pork tenderloin, thinly sliced
16 bamboo skewers, soaked for 20 minutes and drained
1 recipe Rice Vermicelli: Bun Thit
1/2 cup chopped unsalted roasted peanuts
Nuoc cham, as needed, recipe follows

Stir together the fish sauce, soy sauce, sugar, and oil until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the lemongrass, shallot, garlic and pork and mix to coat the meat evenly. Allow to marinate at room temperature for 20 minutes or refrigerate for at least 1 hour or up to overnight.

Slide 2 to 4 slices of pork onto each skewer so the meat is flat with the skewer going through the slices several times. Grill over a barbecue (make sure that the flames have subsided and the coals are red with white ashes). Alternatively, heat a well-oiled grill pan or non-stick skillet over high heat and, working in batches, cook the skewers until the edges crisp, about 1 minute per side. Remove the skewers from the grilled pork.

Divide the grilled pork among the bowls of rice vermicelli. Sprinkle peanuts and drizzle nuoc cham over each serving. Serve immediately.

Fish Dipping Sauce: Nuoc Cham

5 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons water
1/3 cup fish sauce
1/2 cup lime or lemon juice
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 or more bird's eye or Thai chiles, seeded and minced
1 shallot, peeled, thinly sliced, and rinsed (optional)

Whisk together the sugar, water, fish sauce, and lime juice in a bowl until the sugar is completely dissolved. Add the garlic, chile, and shallot, and let stand for 30 minutes before serving.

Yield: 2 cups Preparation Time: 5 minutes Cooking Time: 5 minutes Non-Active Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Recipe courtesy Corinne Trang, Authentic Vietnamese Cooking, Simon & Schuster, 1999


Personally, I don't particularly like rice vermicelli (There's not a whole lot there to dislike there either, but I don't think it adds anything much to a meal.) so I served the skewers over a bowl of mizuna and a big scoop of white rice instead. The picture's harder to parse than I expected. Those are wedges of tomato on the left hand side and the fiddly bits on the pork over on the right are sprinklings of ground peanuts.

I also added dollops of hoisin sauce and sambal chili garlic sauce to complete the trio of sauces you need for a proper Vietnamese meal. Actually, I thought the hoisin and sambal were better accompaniments than the nuoc cham. I'm as big a nuoc cham fan as much as the next guy, but it was the weakest complement to the dish.

The marinade used most of the same ingredients so the nuoc cham just watered down the intense flavors of the pork which actually was best--hot, tender and juicy, bursting with complex pungent and herbal flavors--right out of the pan. The couple minutes it took for me to fix up the bowl all pretty were much to its detriment. On the other hand, the sambal and hoisin worked with it nicely and lots of other things will benefit from being dipped in the leftover nuoc cham.


Oh, and I should say something about grating the lemongrass. I only had to remove one outer leaf and a little wedge of woody stem out of the bottom before running it through my microplane grater. It was surprisingly easy and released lots of flavor that you could taste even through the fish sauce and pork fat in the final dish. Beats crushing it with a cleaver and fishing it out later by a long shot. That's the benefit of having fresh local ingredients.