 Vietnamese I’ve been back to Texas heat and rain for a week, but my blog will still be on California for who knows how long. With my snail fast speed *maybe* we’ll finish talking about California when I graduate. Anyway, 3 years after leaving Saigon guess where I had my first Vietnamese banh bao in America… Lee’s Sandwiches in Houston. My first impression? Decent. That’s all I could say about Lee’s banh bao. But that was then. Now I can say something else: Huong’s banh bao is better. (I blogged about Huong’s Sandwiches here and here) Continue reading More from little banh mi shop
 Vietnamese If you have a handful of shrimp, some pork, some cassava roots, and a banana leaf, what would you do? I’d boil the cassava and hope it doesn’t kill me, throw the shrimp and pork in the skillet with some stir fry vegetable, and wouldn’t know why on earth I even have a banana leaf. That’s why I’m not a Vietnamese chef. Banh bot loc. That’s what you can make out of a handful of shrimp, some pork, some cassava roots, and a banana leaf. We were looking at these banana wraps while waiting for our banh mi thit nuong at Huong’s, and the owner, noticing our cuckoo stare, kindly told us what they were. The simplicity of the name gives away the main step of making the banh: loc (filter) the bot (flour), in this case cassava flour, which makes it translucent and a tad chewy. The shrimp-pork stuffing is well seasoned so the banh is good by itself without nuoc mam. I have the feeling the stuffing is cooked separately before coated by the flour to be steamed, but how it is cooked […]
Continue reading See-through banh bot loc
 Vietnamese Except for the little houses with little gardens, and with cars replacing motorcycles, San Jose resembles Binh Thanh District in Saigon. I don’t know the demography of the city, or even of the state of California, but I saw Vietnamese everywhere when I was there. Palo Alto doesn’t breathe exclusively Vietnamese, but it has Asian everywhere. Gas stations, restaurants, office employees at Stanford, ladies walking by your dorm in the morning, the mall… But Palo Alto doesn’t have banh mi. San Jose does. And it has good banh mi. Mudpie found Thanh Huong’s Sandwich from Google (the sign on the building says Huong). Two out of three times we went to San Jose when I was in Palo Alto, we went to Thanh Huong’s. The other time we went to another banh mi place which didn’t have it as nicely as Thanh Huong’s does. Here’s my hypothesis of how banh mi came about: the French colonized Vietnam and brought with them some baguette for breakfast, the Vietnamese looked at the French baguette, thought “what’s the point for being so long?”, made it shorter and lighter, kept the pâté and to heaven […]
Continue reading Banh mi Huong
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