Flavor Boulevard

It is not pretty, but from the label I knew right away that it would be good. Strips of nutty taro embedded in soft-chewy tapioca just got on my list of things to make, if I ever feel like cooking. That can mean only one thing: the online recipes seem that simple.

If you google “bánh khoai môn hấp“, and presumably you read Vietnamese, the first links you find will contain something like dried shrimps (tôm khô) and pork, perhaps some mỡ hành (green onion in lard), too. That version is similar to Woo Tul Gow (or Woo Tau Ko). I haven’t tried that nor seen it in any cling-wrapped styrofoam plate at banh mi shops. If you don’t read Vietnamese, well… that’s why you have me :D: I translate. Here’s the Vietnamese recipe of the (vegan) steamed taro cake from Thư Viện Phật Học (The Library of Buddhist Studies), which most resembles what I’ve gotten from Alpha Bakery & Deli. Actually, this recipe sounds better.

Like most Vietnamese recipes online, this one lacks precise measurement (which I agree with to some extent, but that’s beyond the scope of this post). So I searched around and found a more detailed but also more complicated recipe, and here’s my wanna-be-clever combination of the two:

The minimalist’s vegan steamed taro cake (bánh khoai môn hấp)

– 1 lb taro
– 1 bag (200 g) of tapioca flour (bột năng)
– 50 g rice flour
– 150 g sugar
– 2 cans of coconut milk (oooh coconuty!)
– 2 cups of water
Mix tapioca flour, rice flour, sugar, water, and coconut milk together.
With the taro roots: wash, peel, slice into strips (as thick as you’d like, but I’d imagine the thicker they are, the longer it takes to cook the cake).
Gently mix the taro strips with the batter (don’t make mashed taro or you’ll get Kanom Pheuak).
Boil water. Steam the taro-batter mix for 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Fancier versions would include pandan leaves and vanilla, or alternating layers of tapioca and taro.

This is one of the few times when “cake” is not too far off from “bánh“: bánh khoai môn hấp is semi sweet, soft, meatless, and too light to make a meal by itself.

If you try this recipe, do let me know how it goes.
Otherwise, I found it here once for a buck fifty:
Alpha Bakery & Deli (inside Hong Kong City Mall)
11209 Bellaire Blvd # C-02
Houston, TX 77072-2548
(281) 988-5222

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: mung bean milk (sữa đậu xanh)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: Chinese sesame beignet (bánh tiêu)

What hits the spot in the morning better than a hot packed handful of sweet sticky rice with muối mè (sesame-sugar-salt mix)? A hot packed handful of sweet sticky rice with soft steamed whole peanuts and muối mè. Xôi đậu – my forbidden childhood love.

$1.50 for a full tummy.

Mom did not want me to eat too much xôi đậu in the past because peanuts are known for producing gas excess.

Address: Alpha Bakery & Deli
11205 Bellaire Boulevard
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 988-5222

Of my two hundred fifty some posts so far, this Sandwich Shop Goodies series brings me the most joy when writing and also takes me the longest time per post. It’s a collection of the bits and pieces that cost next to nothing. You may say why of course, how can a mere grad student afford The Slanted Door, The French Laundry, or our local Chez Panisse et al. Now although my salary certainly factors in my grocery list, the truth is I’ve lost interest in the uptown food scene. It dazzles like fireworks, and also like fireworks, it doesn’t stay. The mixing and matching of the freshest and strangest ingredients has blended so many nationalities into one that it loses culture like a smoothie losing texture. Those fancinesses don’t have a home. Meanwhile, I can spend days googling an obscure street snack and still regret that I haven’t spent more time, because I know that someone somewhere out there has an interesting story surrounding its identity that I haven’t heard. With such food there’s more than what goes into the pot that I can mention. For example, a simple sticky rice treat has made its way into an idiom, no less.

For twenty five years I’ve heard and used the expression “bánh ít trao đi, bánh quy trao lại” (“give bánh ít, get bánh quy” or “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”) in a million occasions, but not once did I know what bánh quy was. At home we call cookies bánh bích-quy (biscuit) and some shorten it to bánh quy, but the biscuit and the bánh ít are too different from each other to be consider equivalents, and it’s reasonable to guess that the idiom came about before the introduction of Western food into Vietnam. So confused I was. Then one day while foraging the pile of snacks at Alpha Bakery, I almost flipped backward as I found a package of three green mochi’s labeled “bánh quy“.

They’re round and flat at the bottom, each placed on a small cut of banana leaf, purposefully shaped like a turtle shell resting on wet grass. If you look closely you can even see some faint crevices near the rim. So there, mystery unveiled: “quy” means “turtle” in Han-Viet, and the banh gets its name from its look.

Content-wise, bánh quy is indeed just a smaller, rounder, flatter version of bánh ít: sticky rice, tapioca starch, salt, sugar, oil, and a sweet filling. Back in the day, the turtles had either a red or a yellow dot to distinguish between coconut and mung bean paste, but it seems these days only the coconut turtles are still around. Each banh is just big enough and tall enough to fit snuggly in a baby’s palm. Two or three adult bites and you suddenly wonder, hey, where did my sugary, chewy soft bun go?

Buy three at the store for $1.50. Also, look for this other type of bánh ít: bánh gai (bánh ít with thorn leaf extract)

Address: Alpha Bakery & Deli (inside Hong Kong City Mall)
11209 Bellaire Blvd # C-02
Houston, TX 77072-2548
(281) 988-5222

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh da lợn (pig skin pie)

This post is submitted to Delicious Vietnam #12, April edition, hosted by Anh of A Food’s Lover Journey. I’m so looking forward to the roundup this month!

This is no stranger in the Vietnamese food biz: the layered pastry that gets its name from looking like pork belly, except green and yellow. Of course it doesn’t contain any pork skin, it’s sweet, sometimes may even be too sweet. Dad used to buy a whole pie home, as big as a platter and as warm as a father’s hand. From that same bakery somewhere in the market alley, he would buy bánh chuối nướng (bread pudding) too, which I always preferred to the bánh da lợn. But thinking back on those days when we lived near Bà Chiểu Market, it was certainly the best pig skin pie I ever ate.

Many years have passed, and many bánh da lợn have been eaten by me, both in its homeland and across the seas. The best way, I figured, to slaughter these chewy beasts is to peel off the layers one by one, when it’s warm. That wet, smooth skin of tapioca flour, when warm, is fragile. You don’t want to break it while peeling, and you want to drop it whole in your mouth to wrestle with its resilience, all the while inhaling the sweetness of pandan leaves and vanilla fused in its tone.

Simply put, a cold “pig skin” is a dead “pig skin”. A warm mung bean paste layer is also less sweet than a cold one, and thank goodness the bean layers are always one fewer than their tapioca neighbors. The pies Dad bought from that market bakery would have white chewy layers too, and the green ones didn’t look radioactive green like those we get from sandwich shops these days. Ah marketing strategies, just like somewhere in Vietnam someone thought of calling it “bánh chín tầng mây” (cloud nine pie) (because pork skin doesn’t ring any two-cent poetic sound), or when the tapioca layer turns dark purple, because of either magenta plant‘s leaf extract or food coloring, and the bean layer light purple because of taro.

Whatever the case, the original bánh da lợn is still the best. I looked through 51 pages of Google search for its origin, which seems likely lost through generations of home cooking and street food mingling. You see, it was never really a praiseworthy, historically recorded invention in the kitchen. There’s no village or province associated with the best bánh da lợn. It’s probably from the South, even if “lợn” is the Northern word for “pig”. It’s a product from a steamer, it’s cheap, it has texture, kids like it, Dad likes it. That’s all I know.

And by the way, Alpha Bakery & Deli sells some good, thinly sliced, warm numbers for a buck fifty.

Address: Alpha Bakery & Deli (inside Hong Kong City Mall)
11209 Bellaire Blvd # C-02
Houston, TX 77072-2548
(281) 988-5222

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh xu xê (couple cookie)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh quy (turtle mochi)

When you reach(ed) mid 20s, don’t you just hear all sort of marriage announcements popping up among your social circle? By the time of college graduation, half the girls I know have gotten their wedding registry up on Facebook, and I thought okay it’s just an American thing (the wedding I mean, though the registry is American too). Then this past Christmas my best college friend missed our annual reunion for his big day in India, and another pal who I thought was still wandering the streets of Chengdu dropped the bomb that he’s engaged. Then I got news that two of my eleventh grade buddies in Vietnam are going to say the vows (not to each other) within this year. Then it really hits me.

I haven’t written about any wedding party food, even though I’ve been to many weddings :D. So why not celebrate this year’s Valentine’s day with a Vietnamese confection whose name derives from the main characters of any wedding: bánh xu xê, originally called bánh phu thê, or “husband (and) wife”?

My translation “couple cookie” is for the sake of consonant concordance. They are similar to neither American cookie, Scottish cookie nor British cookie. These little bouncy sweet green pillows get their names from being gift desserts at Vietnamese couples’ engagements back in the day, when they used banana leaves to make little boxes instead of a double layer of cellophane wrapper. At one point the adults called them bánh phu thê, then the kids mispronounced it to bánh xu xê (|soo-seh|) and the name stuck. Technique-wise, it takes a grandmother’s experience to make a mixture of sticky rice flour, arrowroot starch and water into a translucent jello casing that is resilient but not sticky. Some of us might find its crunch-chewy texture too rubbery, other would question its lack of flavor, but the skill of transforming ingredients alone is admirable, and I like chewing. 🙂 In fact I like the outer layer more than the filling.

Traditionally, taro cut into strips are mixed with the cooked batter to give onyx-like patterns, while the modern concoctions can have sesame seeds on top or dry coconut strips within to spice up the homogeneity. The fancy pâtissiers of old Northern Vietnam villages might also sprinkle a few drops of pomelo flower extract into the mung bean paste filling for enhancing fragrance. But I wouldn’t expect that from our local sandwich shops in the States, not when it’s less than $2 for a pack of four.

It’s the kind of sweet you either love or hate. My mom loves it. The Gastronomer suggests using it to pelt your loved ones. It’s the perfect representation of a marriage really, and I’m not talking about the symbolic meaning of glutinous rice (bonding) and all. Its shiny outlook is inviting – everybody likes to get married, then you take a bite and find it tough, lackluster, disappointing, at the least not quite as expected – the post-wedding depression, then you get to the core and discover some tender sweetness after all. 🙂

Got ’em from: Alpha Bakery & Deli (inside Hong Kong City Mall)
11209 Bellaire Blvd # C-02
Houston, TX 77072-2548
(281) 988-5222

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: chuối nếp nướng (grilled banana in sticky rice)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh da lợn (pig skin pie)