Viet World Kitchen

Chile Salt for Fruit and Veggies (Bot Muoi Ot)

I made the mistake of buying a so-so watermelon recently. It weighed over 8 pounds and looked decent on the outside but was flabby tasting on the inside. Watermelon, unlike other melons, does not ripen further after harvest. I was stuck with it. My husband wanted to throw it out and start over.

Wait, I said, let’s try some chile salt on the melon and see if we can perk up its taste. Fruit (melon, papaya, mango, pineapple, tart apple) and vegetables (jicama, cucumber) are often enjoyed with chile salt in tropical Asia; Latins share the same foodway. The result is a certain refreshing sweet heat on the palate.

I’d bought the following jars of chile salt. One is Vietnamese and the other is Latin (I got it while I was in Texas).

While both had salt, sugar, chile powder, and citric acid, the Trechas brand included colorant and preservative. I’d had the Viet one around for a year and it had changed color. However, the Viet one had more salt than sugar and a delicate tang and heat that sparked up the watermelon nicely. I liked its taste on its own. The Trechas was tangy more than anything else and lacked a pleasant flavor.

Homemade Kinako Toasted Soy Flour

Powdery toasted soy flour imparts a wonderful tan color and nutty finish to foods. Called kinako, it’s a Japanese ingredient that’s used in Taiwanese kitchens too. Surprisingly, toasted soy flour is also entering high end kitchens in China. When I traveled to Chengdu last year, uber Sichuan Chef Yu Bo made his own from roasting and grinding dried soy beans. He used the powder to finish a dessert preparation in his tour de force tasting menu at Yu’s Family Kitchen.

I needed toasted soy flour today for an afternoon snack of Japanese sweet rice dumplings (shiratama dango). Unfortunately, I wasn’t near a Japanese or well-stocked Chinese market! I remembered Yu Bo telling me that he simply made his own.

I thought of making kinako myself but read online that grinding the beans had to be done slowly and carefully. Then I realized that in the United States, many health food stores carry soy flour. You can buy small quantities for next to nothing in the bulk section. The grinding had been done for me so all I needed to do was toast the flour! Bingo.

Seared Ginger Raita Recipe

This is the raita that I recently served with the basic yellow split pea dal and with other dishes for a wonderful Indian meal. You may be familiar with raita that features cucumber but give this one a try. It’s lovely in many ways and despite the various levels of heat from the ginger and chiles, the flavors are mellow.

This raita recipe comes from my friend, Niloufer King, the award-winning author of My Bombay Kitchen. When I watched her make this amazing yogurt mixture, I could not believe the amount of ginger that she used. Raw ginger flavors the yogurt but the star is the seared shreds of ginger, which contribute a sweet heat and wonderful texture to the yogurt.

As soon as I tasted the raita, I wanted to make it myself. It instantly became a regular in my kitchen. I hope it becomes one in yours too!

Japanese Stealth Ingredient: Vegan Soy Sauce Concentrate

One of the questions that renowned Japanese food expert and author Elizabeth Andoh asked me when I visited her in Tokyo last month was this: “Have you ever made my soy sauce concentrate? Come on, tell me the truth.”

Yikes, talk about putting someone on the spot. And there I was, a guest in her home. I truthfully responded that I’d never made it from her earlier book, award-winning Washoku, though I had studied the recipe several times. Elizabeth, the consummate teacher and provocateur, pulled out a couple of small bottles of inky, slightly syrupy sauces from her fridge. One contained dried fish and the other was vegan, she explained.

She had me taste both. Wow. I was sold. The soy concentrates, brewed at home, were savory sweet and delectable. I wanted to lick the spoon but stopped short of acting improperly.

The concentrates were addictively good, thanks to a fair amount of umami in the liquid. Japanese cuisine is much about laying an umami foundation. For the concentrates, glutamate-rich ingredients such as dried kelp, fish, and shiitake mushroom are used. They’re rehydrated and then simmered with soy sauce and other ingredients to create flavor bomb.

I like both versions that Elizabeth had me taste in Tokyo, but the vegan version published her new cookbook, Kansha, is easy to prepare from ingredients available at specialty markets or health food stores. I now keep the seasoned soy concentrate in my fridge to add instant flavor boosts to marinades or cook foods. You can use it as a finishing or dipping sauce.

Grilled Whole Fish in Banana Leaf Recipe (Ikan Panggang)

Banana leaf is not merely nature’s placemat. Asian cooks use it like plastic wrap, foil, and parchment paper. The beauty of using banana leaf is that it imparts a wonderful tea-leaf like scent to food during the cooking process. It’s kinda like the Southeast Asian version of French cooking en papillote (in paper)!

In the Vietnamese kitchen, banana leaf perfumes silky sausages and headcheese and many dumplings. But we seldom wrap large whole fish in banana leaf and grill it like our Southeast Asian brothers and sisters tend to do. Fresh lotus leaves, which are huge and easy to wrap with, is more typically used. Or, you use mud to encase the whole fish, usually freshwater snakehead fish (ca loc in Vietnamese). Or, you just grill the fish in a wire frame basket.

But who has fresh lotus leaves and mud at their disposal? Or the right size wire basket? Not me.

The other night, I thought of a wonderful lunch of grilled whole fish that I enjoyed with Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman in Kuala Lumpur in 2008. It was served with a briny-spicy-sweet dipping sauce made of funky shrimp paste, sweet kecap manis soy sauce, and chiles. A terrific harmony of Malaysian ingredients.

Wanting to recapture those flavors, I found a similar recipe in Christopher Tan’s Singaporean cookbook, Shiok! Chris is among the leading experts on Southeast Asian foodways and I trust him immensely. His ikan panggang recipe was modestly called “Barbecued Fish” in English. The flavors were fabulously big. I’ve adapted Chris’s recipe here for you.