Viet World Kitchen

Tasty MSG-free Frozen Asian Dumplings

I have tried so many commercially-made frozen Asian dumplings over the years and have been disappointed. Mushy flavorless fillings, unremarkable skins, and MSG are usually the culprits. But nevertheless, I always check the freezer cases at Asian markets for something new and interesting. Who knows, I may discover and learn something new.

Most recently, I bought a bag of frozen Asian dumplings made by WeiChuan, a company that produces Asian food products (frozen, canned, and dried) for sale in the United States. Their products are usually reliable. You may also know Weichuan from informative cookbooks such as Chinese Snacks, which I used as reference work when researching for Asian Dumplings. 

A few weeks ago, I noticed a new dumpling promotion at Lion Foods in San Jose. It was for WeiChuan’s new line of Asian dumplings called the “Shan Dong Dumpling Series.” The dumplings are MSG-free (hurray!) and made in the U.S.A. Both points were touted on the packaging, reflecting WeiChuan’s understanding of consumer trends and concerns. No one wants to eat Melamine-laden dumplings.

Vietnamese Noodles 101: Banh Pho Flat Rice Noodles

For decades I thought that the flat rice noodles that went into pho noodle soup and stir-fries were only available in dried form. That’s how we bought them in the United States. About 15 years ago, those “banh pho” rice noodles (named such in Vietnamese because they go into pho noodle soup) started being sold fresh in Cryovac packages at Asian markets. My mom still bought the dried kind. Then one day, I asked her about fresh versus dried banh pho rice noodles and she responded, “They were always fresh in Vietnam. We had no dried banh pho when we lived there.”

Wait, had I been living a faux pho life all these years? No, child, the dried ones available here are good and convenient to keep on hand when you have a neighborhood noodle vendor around the corner.  Duh, like pho. Indeed, go to Vietnam today and you’ll find freshly made noodles sold at markets and used at noodle joints. In the U.S., fresh noodles aren’t as readily available, but there are dried noodles that cook up wonderfully.

Our conversation earlier this week on defining faux pho spurred me to continue my (occasional) series of posts of Vietnamese noodles. Also, a couple of days ago, I noticed a young woman struggle with trying to find banh pho noodles at an Asian market. She got flat noodles but they were made of mung bean starch. I hope this guide will help you buy and use this ubiquitous Vietnamese noodle.

What to Do with Bone-in Pork Belly?

Grocery stores fascinate me and it’s common for me to spend a couple of hours wandering the aisles, even in markets that I frequent often! It can be frustrating to my husband when he accompanies me on shopping trips, but my default explanation is: “I’m doing research!” Over the years, I’ve learned to save such super long research trips to when I’m shopping alone.

Last week, while perusing the butcher counter of Maxim market in San Jose, CA, I came across gorgeous slabs of pork belly with the rib bones still intact. Most pork belly is presented boneless, perfectly convenient for simmering into dishes such as a Vietnamese kho or its Chinese equivalent of red-cooked pork belly, or a Japanese version of char siu pork. This one looked different and without knowing exactly what I’d do with it, I bought one. The cost was $2.99 per pound and my slab of “fresh pork belly w/ ribs” weighed 3 pounds. You do the math. It was a minor investment that may pay off deliciously well.

What exactly is bone-in pork belly? It’s apparently the full belly of the pig. What we commonly call pork belly -- the stuff that bacon is made with -- has had the spareribs removed. Given that, pork belly with the ribs intact is a double whammy cut. If you like pork belly and pork ribs, why not keep them together?

Given my recent homemade Peking duck exploits, I plan to roast the pork belly to a crisp. Can't blame a girl for prolonging her adventure in fatty food! But I was wondering: Do you have experience cooking or eating this cut?  Or, how about some creative suggestions?

P.S. Of course I’ll report back on the roasted pork belly!

A Tipsy Baker and Hungry Engineer Cook My Books

I had an embarrassing realization yesterday – that I had completely missed out on two wonderful food bloggers test driving recipes in my cookbooks, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen and Asian Dumplings. They published their humorous, heartfelt experiences in November and I was oblivious. Hit me on the head and say, “Duh, Andrea!” I felt like such a turkey, not just because November is all about Thanksgiving!

One of the food bloggers was Jennifer Reese of The Tipsy Baker, who wrote of the challenges and rewards of shopping for and making an entire meal from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. Jennifer’s piece appeared in the Northern California edition of Sunset magazine, which up until yesterday I thought I received. Lo and behold I’ve been getting the Southern California edition, which explains all the LA and San Diego stories! A Sunset editor kindly sent me the November 2009 issue in which Jennifer’s piece was printed. Below are the covers that got me mixed up and the generous 3-page spread.

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 If you received that Northern California issue of Sunset, check out Jennifer’s rollicking account of taking her copy of Into the Vietnamese Kitchen with her to New May Wah market on Clement in San Francisco. She’s even photographed holding the book. What’s more touching to my culinary soul is that she fell in love with mam tom – the funky purply shrimp sauce. Jennifer made a simple central Viet preparation of Minced Pork and Lemongrass and Shrimp Sauce (thit heo xao mam ruoc, page 132) and described the dish as “ambrosial.” She tackled the banana blossom salad, water spinach and coconut cassava cake too. Reading Jennifer’s story of how my cookbook helped her get over her anxiety of shopping for and cooking with unfamiliar ingredients put a huge grin on my face. Check out more of Jennifer’s writing at her site: Tipsybaker.blogspot.com

Similarly, April of The Hungry Engineer dove into Asian Dumplings with gusto. She’s a smart cookie who writes with an earnestness that charms and draws you into her words. April recounts how she questioned my suggestion of using the wooden dowel rolling pin for making Asian dumpling wrappers and then becomes a convert, “busting out wrappers like nobody's business.” She thoughtfully read the book to prepare herself to make pork and napa cabbage dumplings, as well as the chile oil. There are people who’ve said to me, “Asian food is so time consuming. Why do you want to make dumpling wrappers from scratch?” Read April’s post on cooking from the Asian Dumplings cookbook and find out!  

Tiny Little Saigon in New York

  

There are “Little Saigons” in cities throughout the world. But in New York City, the Vietnamese area exceeds the diminutive connotation. In Manhattan’s sprawling Chinatown, “Little Saigon” is truly little. In fact, it’s tiny. However, I’ve found all my culinary needs for preparing Vietnamese food in a handful of shops near the Grand Street subway station. Pop your head up from the station and you’re looking at the New York’s bevy of Vietnamese shops. It’s an L-shaped teeny area that spans Grand Street up to Bowery and southward down to Hester.  There's produce for sale on the street and people milling about looking for groceries and sundries. The shops are small and packed, kind of like what you'd find in Vietnam itself!

Along Grand, I’ve found a butcher, seafood vendor, and a Vietnamese market that proudly announces its Vietnamese affiliation as a “Sieu Thi Viet Nam” – Vietnamese market. You’ll find fresh herbs, noodles, fish sauce and even net-like wrappers called banh re, which are hard to find outside of Vietnam these days. That market keeps those wrappers very fresh; if you get them, use them as you would a Chinese spring roll/lumpia wrapper for fried cha gio (imperial rolls).

Richmond and Footscray: Old and New Vietnam in Melbourne

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Australia was among the nations that opened its doors to Vietnamese refugees. There is a very large population of Vietnamese-Australians, numbering roughly 200,000, and 75% of the Vietnamese people in Australia live in New South Wales (Sydney) and Victoria (Melbourne). My trip to Australia began in Sydney where I explored the Vietnamese community of  Cabramatta with Luke Nguyen. On my own in Melbourne, I headed for Richmond and Footscray, as recommended to me by Stephanie Wood, a Sydney Morning Herald food journalist who also blogs at The Elegant Sufficiency.  Stephanie used to live in Melbourne and directed me to these two suburbs to explore the Vietnamese scene here. Some of you recommended Springvale as well but I did not have enough time to make the trek.

Richmond
After checking in to my hotel, I got on a tram and spent the afternoon in Richmond, located just a few kilometers from Melbourne CBD (central business district/downtown). Most of the Vietnamese shops line Victoria Place so I spent hours walking up and down the street. Great little markets, restaurants, and fantastic houseware and restaurant supply shops. At Unicorn, I scored Chinese egg tartlet pans that are hard to get in the U.S., and at Chefland I found moon cake molds to add to my collection.  What’s striking about Richmond is how much it looks like Vietnam. Narrow buildings with some colonial architecture, there’s even a mini version of the landmark Cho Ben Thanh market clock tower from Saigon. With the peeling paint and Melbourne’s dreary spring weather (think Seattle), I felt like I was in Hue or Hanoi in winter. Only most of the people here are southerners.

Cabramatta: Little Saigon near Sydney

I’ve been in Sydney Australia since Wednesday for the Sydney International Food Festival’s World Chef Showcase. I arrived feeling fresh from having actually slept for 8 hours  on the 14-hour flight, courtesy of Qantas Airlines. After checking in, I called my local contact, Luke Nguyen (photo above).  He let me chill for a few hours and then we went out for drinks and dinner at Aria, one of the finest restaurants in Sydney with a sweeping few of the harbor. The food and wine showcased Sydney's finest, but the highlight came the next day when Luke took me to Cabramatta, the hub of Australia’s Vietnamese community.

Luke is the chef/owner of Red Lantern Restaurant, cookbook author (Secrets of the Red Lantern and The Songs of Sapa was released on 10/1/09), and a travel-TV show host. He's also giving back to his community of Cabramatta by being its unofficial spokesperson. For months on email he'd been telling me how keen he was on taking me to his Little Saigon in Sydney. 

First off, it's not in Sydney proper like lots of Little Saigon's I've been to. Cabramatta is highly unusual as it reflects an Asian-Western sensibility as I've not experienced. It felt oddly like a cleaned up version of Saigon. The shops, food and liveliness made me feel right at home. My kind of people.

I was so impressed with the vibrant community as it’s had its fair share of challenges in the past. Luke recounted how unsafe it used to be browing up with gang and drug trafficking problems in this area. Sydneysiders (it’s a strange term) were scared to go to Cabramatta (or Cabra as the locals say it).  But when we went on Thursday, it was nothing but bustling with shoppers, food and amazing produce. I spent time in Los Angeles during the post-riot era and there was no sense of fear or impending doom in Cabramatta. It was mellow. We met with city managers who have various campaigns going to highlight Cabramatta's cultural and culinary offerings to the urban Sydneysiders. Nowadays, it's not so much a public safety issue but of of a distance. Convenience? Okay -- the train takes you directly from downtown Sydney to Cabramatta and the toll roads are even faster.Cabramatta is located 45 minutes away from downtown Sydney. It takes longer to get to Saigon itself!

I don’t have time to go into all the details but wanted to post some photo highlights here for you.

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What sticks in my mind about Cabramatta -- the Little Saigon in Sydney:

• The local population is 67% Vietnamese – that’s 2 out of 3 people!
• The condensed area is lively with shops, alley ways, and markets that say, “All Viet All the Time” but in an oddly Australian-Vietnamese-Asian kind of way. Look at the banh mi vendor stall that looks like a super cleaned up stall in Saigon.
• Great bun mam noodle soup made with a mam nem, a funky, murky, sludgy anchovy fish sauce. Tastes much better than it sounds.
• Shopkeepers are Viet, Lao, Cambodian or Chinese. See the text on shops.
• You can get kangaroo meat, which tastes kinda like buffalo and venison, Luke said.
• There are separate vendors for meat, seafood, and produce like in Vietnam. Totally cool in an old-school way.
• Just as I had heard – the produce is super fresh (perky, just-harvested herbs) and the fruit is gorgeous (mangosteen, jackfruit, and 3 or 4 types of mangos).
• Crazy good seafood in the form of fresh fish, giant tiger prawns, tiny raw school prawns (sorta like tom tep, I think), mud crabs, blood clams, and new things like spanner crab.

I’ve been eating very well but I wished I had a kitchen to cook some of these ingredients!

Have you been to Cabramatta? What are your favorite shops and restaurants? I'm going to Melbourne next week, so let me know your insights there on Viet stuff too!

How Little Saigon is Like Real Saigon but Not

Last weekend, Rory and I were down in Southern California visiting our families. After a big lunch at my parents’ house on Saturday, we headed up to the grand daddy of Little Saigons in Westminster. We went with my sisters Yenchi and Tasha (they went with me to Saigon last year), Yenchi’s daughter Paulina, and we met up with an old family friend, Loan, whose family were our next door neighbors when we lived in Saigon. Loan brought along her niece, 9-year-old Kelalani. I hadn’t seen Loan in years and Lanchi is heading off to start her freshman year at Yale in August, so we all figured it would be a nice reunion/send off to goof around in “Bolsa” – the Vietnamese-American insiders’ term for Little Saigon. The main drag is Bolsa Avenue, hence the nickname. Loan’s family still lives in Little Saigon and there won’t be anything like Little Saigon in New Haven for Paulina!

What was supposed to be a short walk around turned into 4 hours of aimless wandering, shopping, and eating. My day-to-day life is packed with overly productive to-do lists, but that unstructured afternoon was a welcomed reminder of the pleasures of doing little. It was a nice vacation of sorts. Certain situations felt just like being in Saigon itself while others awakened me to the realities of being in America. Here are a few things I observed: