Viet World Kitchen

Soy Chicharron Recipe

I didn’t come up with this idea. It belongs to Seattle-based radio show host Dick Stein. When we met up in September to tape an interview for KPLU, Dick said that after reading and cooking from Asian Tofu, he was inspired to buy dried tofu skin and deep fry it. The result was soy chicharron, Dick said.  

You can do all kinds of amazing things with tofu skin, which despite its name is really the film that forms on hot soymilk. The Japanese call it yuba and the Chinese know it as doufu pi or fu pi (tofu skin); in Vietnamese, tofu skin is called dau hu ky. You have likely had it at dim sum or on a Viet ride plate as a dumpling wrapper to encase a paste of shrimp; the recipe for those fried shrimp tofu skin rolls (xia fu pi juan) is on page 182 in Asian Tofu.

There are many kinds of tofu skin and basically, they differ in how dried they are. If you’re interested in extra details, I posted a tofu skin primer earlier this year and tofu guru William Shurtleff just published an online history of yuba. 

Dick’s tofu skin chicharrones used sheets of dried tofu skin – sold at Chinese and Vietnamese markets near the dried mushrooms. Get a flat package that contains the yellow pieces of tofu skin. Then get ready to fry up the skin into sparkly pieces.

Vietnamese-American Thanksgiving Salad Recipe

After my family fled Vietnam in 1975 and settled in California, we took in American holidays with gusto. My sisters and I studied recipes in cookbooks, magazines, and newspapers, trying to understand our new situation. My frugal mother clipped coupons and roasted free turkeys for years. One Thanksgiving, she admitted that she wasn’t fond of its dryish meat. Uh-oh, we were trying to fit in as best we could, despite the fish sauce vapors in our kitchen and my dad harvesting fresh banana leaves from the front yard with a machete.

To have Thanksgiving without turkey seemed un-American at the time. But mom had had enough. She instead roasted big chickens stuffed with sticky rice seasoned by cognac, shiitake mushroom, thyme and butter (see the recipe in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, the rice chapter). Roasted chestnuts with butter and cilantro was her go-to side.

Mango Pudding Recipe

Last Friday we went to a Burmese restaurant in Daly City that was just fabulous. We ordered way too much food at Little Yangon that there was little room for dessert. After a lengthy conversation with chef/owner Khinn Ma Ma, we realized that our parking meter was nearly out and hurriedly asked for the check. She promptly responded but also sent us off with a complimentary mango pudding to “sweeten our palate.” It was gelled with agar so the texture was very firm. Flavorwise, it was delicately sweet – much like the mango pudding that you get at dim sum restaurants, which I seldom order. Such mango puddings are often made with evaporated milk, which kind of deadens the fresh brightness of mango. After I had a few bites, I thought about making my own, without evaporated milk.

If you’re not familiar with mango pudding, it has British colonial roots in India but is super popular tropical Asia, though it’s not a major deal in Vietnam. Sometimes the pudding is soft like a custard but  while other times it is super firm like jello. The former is generally thickened with cornstarch while the latter is gelled with agar agar or gelatine. I like the firm, jello-like texture but admit that it's not a luscious pudding per se. However in the Asian mindset, this sweet snack hails from the pudding family but got changed along the way to fit local situations. 

Poached Peaches with Ginger and White Wine Recipe

Whenever I see ugly peaches for sale at a steep price, I think of poaching them for a quick summertime sweet. It’s quick and easy old-fashioned cooking. If you're like me and used to long for the canned peaches that went into the fruit cocktails that our moms made in the 1970s, this is the adult version. 

Super ripe peaches are relatively easy to peel with a peeler or even your fingers. I got these at our local farmer’s market last week. There were the “rejects” at an organic stand where the “best quality ones” were being sold for $3 per pound. My uglies were $1 per pound. I selected four, imagining that they’d fit into a small pot at home.

The peaches were freestone or semi-freestone, meaning that the pit pulled away easily from the flesh; such peaches are great for cutting up for pies and the like. You can use clingstone but it may be hard to halve and remove the pit, a step I take to hasten the poaching process. Most commercially sold peaches are freestone or semi-freestone.

Chilled Edamame with Star Anise Recipe

You must be thinking that I’m in a cool food mood these days. Indeed, we’ve had an unusually warm summer in Santa Cruz, though punctuated with the expected foggy mornings. But that aside, summer always begs easy breezy recipes that you can have sitting in the fridge, right? That way, you can pull them out for a nutty nibble, or to add to something else.

This Chinese cold edamame dish is an old one, based on a recipe that used lima beans that I found in Irene Kuo’s classic, The Key to Chinese Cooking. I’ve made them with frozen limas and favas but the edamame is extra nice. Plus, they don’t mush during cooking.