A sticky crusty crush

Do you like that crisp, burnt, gochujang-dyed rice crust at the bottom of the dolsot when you scrape off spoon after spoon of bibimbap? If the answer is yes, I’m certain that you’d fall for this one too. Mom cooks her xoi in a non-stick pan, with coconut milk and little water. Somehow, without a precise recipe, she can make a shell of brown, sweet and crusty sticky rice every time. Then we fight each other for it when it’s still warm and just a tad chewy, leaving the soft innard xoi for my dad. Approximate recipe: Xôi cháy (literally “burnt xoi”, usually considered a point against the skillful xoi cooks, but I think it’s better than icing on a cake, it’s the best part of a perfectly cooked batch of xoi) – 1 lb sticky rice – 1/2 lbs mung bean (halved is fine, unscraped) – 1 can of coconut milk – 1/2 tsp salt – sugar (lots! ~ 8-10 tbs) Continue reading A sticky crusty crush

Treasure in the Jung

Oakland Chinatown, except for places like Tây Hồ, Bình Minh Quán, and the Korean restaurant on 13th street, carried on its everyday business on Thanksgiving as if it were a town in China. The Chinese dedication is admirable and to be grateful for. Without it I would haven’t had two meals worth of $1.75 wrapped in bamboo leaves. Yes, two meals. Jung, as the lady at Sum Yee Pastry pronounced, is a heavy deal. At first I thought it was a Vietnamese banh gio, except for the leaf wrapper being dried instead of smooth, damp, and waxy. I asked her for the name and couldn’t make out what she was saying, I asked her to write it down but she didn’t know how, she then asked if I was Vietnamese and switched to my mother tongue in her mixed Chinese tongue to explain that this thing is eaten on May 5th just like banh chung is eaten during Tet. Aha, so it’s zong zi, the great great great grandfather of banh u tro! Turns out zong zi (just a different, and much more common, […]

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Desserts at Vietnamese restaurants

Raise your hand if you’ve ordered dessert at a Vietnamese restaurant. What? Vietnamese restaurants have desserts? Yep, they do. But they’re always on the last page of the menu, which you never get to because you stop at number 1 – Pho dac biet (special noodle soup) or summ’n. Besides, nobody ever bothers to ask if you’d like to have dessert before they bring out your check. And besides, pho usually fills up the once empty cavity, so no more room for sugar loads. But next time it’s okay to leave some broth and some noodle behind, cuz they do have some delicious sweet deals outback. Not bubble teas. Black eyed pea che is one. Mushy, plump peas dissolve on your tongue with gooey sticky rice and coconut milk. I adore che dau trang at Kim Son and at Lee’s Sandwiches in Houston, but this beauty in a glass served at Le Regal does not disappoint either. Of course, do NOT eat the mint, as much as I’m for flavor mixings, this mint is purely a matter of decor. Also che, […]

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Sandwich shop goodies 12 – Chuối nếp nướng (grilled banana in sticky rice)

They all look the same. A myriad of things wrapped in wilted banana leaves sitting on the counter at a banh mi shop. Few patrons seem to notice the snacks as they occupy themselves with sandwich orders and the more meal-like rice or noodle to-gos, so much to the extent that the sellers too have little interest in selling their counter treats. Humbly, I point to these slender, charred and dry parcels piled in a box near the Pockys and inquire about their name. The hostess throws me half a glance infused with boredom, “Chuối nướng,” she moves her lips. So “grilled banana” they are. It takes an utterly simple form: a banana inside a sticky rice shell inside a banana leaf, charcoal grilled. Crispy, then chewy, then gooey sweet it goes as you sink your teeth through the bounteousness. It’s the factoriless meatless corn dog sans wooden stick of Southern Vietnam. Children would wait around old grandmas in the ‘hood to watch them grill the banana dogs and drool; adults would grab the banana dogs for breakfast, lunch, or late night snack when a wind chills […]

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What to get and not to get at Dara

Diagonally across the intersection from Crepevine on Shattuck are one Thai restaurant and one Thai-Lao restaurant, right next to each other. We know that it’s pretty much impossible for us to get a pure Lao dish in America, given that we can’t really tell the difference between Lao and Thai names. Still, the three-lettered word addition on the sign has an alluring effect on us mini-globavores. So we choose Dara over Cha Am. Secluded high above street level with a red brick gradation ascending up to the door, Dara offers its patrons two seating choices: out in the garden curtained by a multitude of mini palm trees, bamboos, and kalanchoes, or indoor, surrounded by faux gilded statues, metal vases, and wall ornaments. There’s no music; except for the talking in the kitchen far back, the only sound you hear here is your own voice. The dinner menu at Dara has a list of house specialties, Lao finger foods (with familiar items like sai gauk, satay gai, noke todd, nam lao), various noodles and curries, and of course, pad thai for […]

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Sandwich Shop Goodies 8 – Bánh bao chỉ (loh mai chi)

Yet another sticky rice snack that I vaguely remember eating one or twice during the early childhood, and found again in a San Jose sandwich shop more than ten years later. I was excited when I saw these green balls covered in coconut bits. We Vietnamese call them bánh bao chỉ to distinguish from the meat-filled steamed bun made from wheat flour known to us as bánh bao. Just as bánh bao comes from China, so does bánh bao chỉ. Just as bánh bao are baozi and mantou in Mandarin, mandu in Korean, manju in Japanese, manti in Turkish, and many more, bánh bao chỉ too has its share of names. The most-result-yielding Google search belongs to loh mai chi, commonly shown as little sticky rice flour dumplings with sweet ground peanut filling. Other variations in Malaysian and Chinese food blogs are snowball, loh mi chi, chi fa bun, muah chee (yeah, these are really cute you’d want to kiss them too)*, noh mi chi, and ma zi. Once again, I feel the need to learn Mandarin. Some say “noh mi” means “sticky rice” in Cantonese, but what does “chi” mean? Others, […]

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Sandwich Shop Goodies 6 – bánh dừa (coconut sticky rice stick)

If anything can be called the Vietnamese granola bar, it’s bánh dừa. Coconut bánh. The simple name lends room for innocent confusions with the French Coco au Miel, the Malaysian kuih binka gandum, the coconut cookies, and a whole flock of other Vietnamese coconut treats also known as bánh dừa (with some additives like “grilled”, “honeyed”, or “lemon”). People of the deep south don’t get too fancy with names: when the bánh has coconut milk mixed with sticky rice and is wrapped in coconut leaves, it has every right to be call a coconut bánh. Besides, children identify it by the unique look. A stiff, almost cylindrical case, as long as a palm and almost two fingers wide, is made from wrapping one single young coconut leaf around hours of training, to protect the glutinous rice and bean paste core for days in the tropics’ heat. The one I bought stays good for two weeks in the fridge, unwrapped. Continue reading Sandwich Shop Goodies 6 – bánh dừa (coconut sticky rice stick)

Sandwich Shop Goodies 5 – Bánh khảo (bánh in)

It looks just slightly bigger than a chocolate bar, and about as thick. It has three thin layers, one bright yellow sandwiched between two whites, like a rectangular slice of hard boiled egg. The humble appearance of bánh khảo, like so many other Vietnamese old school treats, masks tremendous creativity and skill of the country’s villagers. And so little is known about it. Some just say it came from the Chinese immigrants, others believe it’s a special fare of the Tày, an ethnic group in the second-farthest-north-border province Cao Bằng, where Chinese influence seeps through the forests and mutates with a mountainous feel. All we know is when you go to Cao Bằng, you get a bar of “pẻng cao” (bánh khảo) for 1000VND (less than 6 US cents), whose middle layer can either be sweet with peanuts and honey, or savory with sliced fatty pork. The savory kind is a staple to the Tày people. The flour from roasted sticky rice grains, let sit overnight, mixed with sugar and pressed into a thin sheet, somehow can stay good for a whole month. Its light weight makes a good dry snack […]

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Sandwich Shop Goodies 4 – Xôi bắp (sweet sticky rice and corn)

Every morning at six, sometimes five thirty, my dad went to the market with my mom’s grocery list, and on the way back picked up something fresh for my breakfast. He had to be extra early if we wanted xôi that day, because the warm morsels folded up in banana leaves wouldn’t last past six thirty. Sweet xôi was a popular morning food, until they started putting in lap xuong and pork floss and turned it too close to a lunch thing. But our xôi lady, and later her daughter, never made anything but sweet sticky rice in their loyal steamers. Every morning, sitting on a plastic stool and head half-covered by the cone hat, they surrounded themselves with three or four shining aluminum wok-like basins on the low table, neatly cut squares of banana leaves, old newspaper and rubber band in the side basket. Those aluminum basins often had peanut xôi, black xôi (which actually looked purple), and one other speciaux du jour. My mom was so concerned with my health that she would pick off all the peanuts if my dad got the peanut xôi, and I got […]

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Sandwich shop goodies 3 – Bánh ú tro (Vietnamese-adapted jianshui zong)

It’s been two weeks, but better late than never. After I read Jessica’s zong zi post on Food Mayhem, images of amber tedrahedra just wouldn’t leave me alone. I talked to my mom about them, and I could hear her voice crackle with sweet memories over the phone. We haven’t had these sweet little things for years. We used to eat them by the dozens every lunar May. Like most Saigonese, we didn’t do anything huge to celebrate Tet Doan Ngo, but bánh ú tro was too scrumptious a tradition to pass. Each pyramid is just a little over an inch tall, whichever way you roll it. It’s unclear whether the traditional zongzi grew smaller when Chinese immigrants share the recipe with their Vietnamese neighbors, or only the dessert zongzi (jianshui zong) is favored by the locals over savory types. Most Vietnamese have also long dissociated this sticky rice snack with the Chinese reason behind Duanwu festival, if not to assign the Fifth of Lunar May to commemorate the death anniversary of Vietnam’s legendary Mother Âu Cơ, kill off bad bugs, make ceremonial offerings to family […]

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