Viet World Kitchen

Thai Grilled Chicken Recipe (Gai Yang)

The sun decided to make an appearance this past week in Santa Cruz for longer than just a couple of hours a day! I was unfortunately stuck in my office reviewing edits on a writing project. After finishing on Friday, it time for a real weekend. 

To start things off, Rory opened up a liter bottle of a dry Riesling and I made Thai grilled chicken (gai yang).  Mymenu choice was inspired by two things: (1) the jar of Thai sweet chile sauce I recently made and (2) memories of a fabulous rendition of gai yang at Sailors Thai, a renowned restaurant in Sydney, Australia.

I had basically given up on ordering cloyingly sweet grilled chicken at Thai restaurants, but my dining buddy that evening, Bangkok-based journalist Jarrett Wrisley, convinced me to order the signature Thai dish. He was prescient in saying, “If this is a good Thai restaurant, they should at least do this well.”

We were startled by how good the gai yang was at Sailors Thai. Jarrett and I politely fought each other over every last bit of flesh and tangy-spicy sauce.

Sailors Thai was started by David Thompson, the chef/owner of Michelin starred nahm at the Halkin hotel in London and the soon-to-open outpost at the Metropolitan in Bangkok. David is one of the foremost authorities on Thai cuisine. He is feisty in nature and uncompromising in his cooking. Over the years, he has elevated Thai food to a high level of craftsmanship and respect that it deserves.

Thompson’s cookbooks, Thai Food and Thai Street Food are phenomenal works. Thai Food is one of my reference books and I used it to work up this gai yang recipe, which is frankly super easy.

Hardline traditionalists would use a small chicken (think game hen size) but I opted for chicken-leg and-thigh quarters. They are juicy, cost less, and taste great.

Brush the sweet chile sauce on at the end or serve it on the side. Do both, if you like. You can’t lose.

Grilled Okra Recipe

If people dislike okra, it's usually because of its mucilaginous (read: slimy) nature.  I know okra as a bright addition to tart-sweet Vietnamese seafood soups and an earthy fried Indian side dish. In those Asian preparations, okra doesn’t reveal its gummy nature. Rather, you savor its ridged skin and little round seeds. You marvel at its lovely spoke structure and graceful appearance.

Okra is native to Africa but traveled to India at some very early point in time; no one is sure when that happened. In the 19th century, okra found itself in Southeast Asia and it moved on to China after that.

The pod has a mild flavor and plays well with other ingredients. It’s also a relatively expensive vegetable most of the year. For those reasons, it rarely has a starring role and is often cooked with other ingredients.

Summer is okra season as the warmer months coax their tropical nature and foster growth. The quality of the pods during summer is spectacular. Last week, at the India Cash and Carry market in San Jose, CA, a group of women huddled around a particularly fresh box of unblemished okra, picking their purchase one pod at a time. My husband noticed the group and jumped right in. He ended up with 1 1/2 pounds of gorgeous okra.

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.

Easy Grilled Pizza with Trader Joe’s Dough

 

This summer, I’ve reviewed, dissed, and re-purposed Asian-inspired prepared food products from frozen dumplings and Chinese barbecued pork to rice paper rolls. Last weekend, I decided to take a non-Asian Trader Joe’s product to make a Vietnamese-style dish. Trader Joe’s excels at western flavors and products, and I’ve been using the Trader Joe’s pizza dough for several years whenever I want a quick pie. It’s not the best pizza dough you can make but it’s darn good for a convenience food. And for less than $1, you get a pound of great dough. Plus, you can keep it refrigerated for a couple days.

I typically cook pizza in a hot oven, stretching it into super thin crust pizzas and baking it on a stone preheated for 30 minutes to 450F. But it was warm last weekend and I didn’t want to heat up the house. Rory wanted pizza and he suggested that we try grilling it as prescribed in the August issue of Sunset magazine. I checked out the article and noticed that Sunset’s grilled pizza technique came from Jamie Purviance, a seasoned cookbook writer and author of the excellent Weber’s Way to Grill. We followed Jamie’s technique, and working together, in less than 45 minutes, we make 4 amazing grilled pizzas, topped with goodies from our garden and leftovers in the fridge. That’s as fast as going to a pizza joint or calling out for a pizza.

Banh Hoi with Grilled Beef Recipe (Banh Hoi Thit Bo Nuong)

Delicate in flavor with a slight tang, banh hoi rice noodles are a special event Vietnamese food that’s often enjoyed at parties and celebrations. They’re instantly recognizable as the white noodles are shaped like rectangular mats of thick white cheesecloth. They're very thin, finer than Italian angel hair pasta. It’s best to purchase banh hoi (pronounced “baan hoy”) fresh from a Vietnamese market or Chinese barbecue shop in a Vietnamese community where they’re typically sold on Styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic wrap. For a general low-down , take a read of Vietnamese Noodles 101: Banh Hoi Fine Rice Noodles.

Banh hoi are not eaten on their own, but rather as an accompaniment to rich, flavorful morsels, such as slices of this easy-to-prepare grilled beef. Vietnamese people love to bundle up food in lettuce and fresh herbs, which is exactly how this dish is enjoyed. Just grab a piece of lettuce, layer in some herbs, a piece of banh hoi rice noodle and slice of beef. Dip your creation in some nuoc cham dipping sauce and enjoy the intermingling of flavors and texture. It’s a lovely one-dish meal for summer’s grilling season!

Grilled Shrimp on Sugarcane (Chao Tom) Recipe

These fragrant grilled savory-sweet morsels are a classic Vietnamese appetizer/party food. Perfect for noshing with friends along with a cold beer or dry white wine. For chao tom, a garlicky shrimp paste is wrapped around a stick of sugarcane, briefly steamed to set the paste and shape, and then grilled to finish. Pieces of the shrimp are typically wrapped in lettuce with herbs and dipped in some nuoc cham dipping sauce. The delicate flavors of chao tom (how to pronounce chao tom) are a wonderful mouthful. And, the sugarcane stick functions both as a great skewer that doesn’t easily burn up and after the shrimp has been removed from the sugarcane, you can chew on the sugarcane for a chase of refreshing sweet sugarcane juice. How fun is that?

Chao tom is a central Vietnamese specialty (there are many kinds of chao from that region but this one is most popular in Vietnam) and you may have encountered it on restaurant menus. I’ve wanted to make it for months but couldn’t find readily available fresh sugarcane. Since it would be months before the Hmong farmers would be offering fresh sugarcane at our Saturday farmer’s market, I had to find alternatives.

Vietnamese Restaurant-Style Grilled Lemongrass Pork (Thit Heo Nuong Xa)

We flew Jetblue back from New York City on Sunday and when we stepped out onto the tarmack at San Jose airport (you have to do that at San Jose’s terminal C), it was 10pm, humid and hot. The pilot had announced that it was about 75F. I’m always thinking about my next meal and said to Rory, “It feels like a nice evening in Southeast Asia. Let’s grill something tomorrow with lots of garlic and fish sauce.”

Though I went to New York to teach cooking class and for business meetings, we had plenty of time to eat out with friends. The Shanghai soup dumplings were delightful, and so was the Greek food at Snack Taverna, Tuscan fare at Bar Pitti, old-fashioned Italian at Felidia, high-end homey Japanese at Aburiya Kinosuke, Belgian fries at Resto, ramen at Momofuku Noodle Bar, and modern American at Craft Bar and Gramercy Tavern. We even left Manhattan for exceptional food at Cucharamama in Hoboken and a spritely lunch at Marlow and Sons in Brooklyn. (If you’re wondering, we walked a lot and the fifth-floor walk up that we rented enabled us to fend off any weight gain.) But at the end of the week, I hankered for home cooked food. In fact, whenever I return from a trip, I look forward to cooking my own food.

Vietnamese-Korean Connection: Grilled Pork Belly Lettuce Wraps

 

Last Sunday, I went on a Korean market tour with 3 gal pals – Hyunjoo Albrecht, Linda Lim, and Karen Shinto. You may know Karen, the food stylist who tried to stab me with chopsticks on my Asian Dumpling cookbook photo shoot. Hyunjoo is a Korean food expert and Linda is a lifestyle marketing expert and avid cook and eater.

Korean food is a mystery to me as I’m a little rusty with my Hangul (!!) and most Korean ingredients are labeled in their language full of neat circles and straight lines. There are only a handful of Korean ingredients involved in the cuisines of the Land of the Morning Calm. For example, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, and chiles are the dominant seasonings. Gojuchang is a fermented chile paste that has an addictively smoky, earthy flavor that I’ve enjoyed on numerous occasions in bibimbap rice preparations. However, whenever I’ve gone to a Korean market and had to face with a wall of Korean chile paste tubs, I can’t figure out which to select and blindly choose the highest priced gojuchang. Don’t get me started on cryptic vegetable labeling such as “Korean radish” and “edible leaves.” I’m a mess in a Korean produce section and the banchan side dishes section of a Korean market.