Viet World Kitchen

Stir-Fried Clams with Spicy Bean Sauce Recipe

In the early 1990s, I received a fellowship to study at Chinese University in Hong Kong. That year of study helped me polish my language skill but more importantly, I got to eat my way through Hong Kong. My friends and I would go to the Kowloon night market and browse the stalls of overly padded bras and cheap knock-off goods before we settled on a few evening street snacks.

My all time favorite Hong Kong night market dish was clams in bean sauce. The small clams were as big as a quarter and thin shelled so there was a ton of them piled high on a plate. Hot from the wok, each order was unceremoniously plopped down on a flimsy table. My friends and I sat on stools and ate the clams with bamboo skewers, slurping all the sauce we could, scorching our tongues as we worked our way to the bottom of the plate. It cost roughly $2 an order. Seriously.

I’ve been looking for a good recipe for that dish since then. Most U.S. Chinese restaurants offer clams in black bean sauce but frankly, the pungency of fermented black beans overwhelms the delicate clams. I did not realize the error of my ways until I tried Grace Young’s stir-fried clams with spicy bean sauce recipe from Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge.

It’s not fermented black beans that I was looking for, but rather ground bean sauce. Ground bean sauce is sold in jars at Chinese market, and though it is definitely salty, it is not as forceful and earthy as fermented black beans. Ground bean sauce plays well with other ingredients, falling into the background to add savory depth.

Regular whole salted soybeans, also sold at Chinese markets, function in the same way, though they are not as nuanced as ground bean sauce. I used salted soybeans as the jar was what I had in my pantry.

The result was terrific, full of ginger, garlic, a touch of fresh chile heat. The clams stood up well to the flavors and retained their individual characteristics. I was frankly, happy as a clam. The salty, spicy, savory sauce was great on rice too, just like Grace described in the recipe introduction.

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.

Crisp Lemongrass Salmon Recipe (Ca Nuong Xa)

We never had salmon in Vietnam but once my family tasted it for the first time in America, we immediately adopted it like it was a native fish to the Vietnamese kitchen. It oily flesh and skin are rich tasting, pretty and immensely useful. We steamed it, simmered it caramel sauce and galangal, featured it with tangy tomatoes in everyday soup, and made garlicky salmon patties with dill. This heady preparation is something my mom came up with recently. The recipe is based upon a paste that our cook in Saigon use to marinate whole fish in and then grill it over charcoal. It’s a simple and homey dish.

Salmon filet and the broiler ensure that none of the tasty lemongrass-inflected paste falls through the cracks. I tried this paste with a whole trout and grilled it but the result was not as intensely tasty as the salmon. For this recipe, I used filet that I cut from a whole salmon. It wasn’t a large fish and the filet were at most 3/4 inch thick at the thickest point. If you’re using a bigger fish then adjust the cooking time by cooking it longer. Don’t worry about the marinade time. I thought it would turn the fish mushy or partially cook it but it didn’t. The fish texture turned out fantastic.

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.

Crispy Shrimp Coated with Green Rice Recipe (Tom Chien Com)

After getting the low down on Vietnamese young green rice (cốm), what can you do with the little flakes. One of the easiest ways to savor the rice is to use it like breadcrumbs (think panko) and use it to coat deep-fried shrimp. Look for the rice at Vietnamese markets abroad or bring some back with you when traveling to Vietnam. 

Dungeness Crab in Beer Broth with Garlic and Chile Recipe (Cua Hap Bia)

We’re smack in the middle of crab season and the catch this year isn’t as good as in the past. There are fewer crabs and our crab people down at the Santa Cruz harbor just lost their fishing boat due to an accident. They're buying them from other fisherman and combined with the smaller harvest, prices have gone up across the board. But that didn’t stop Rory and I last Saturday. We grabbed our crab bucket and headed to the harbor.

In the Monterey Bay where we live, Dungeness crab is king. When I was growing up in Southern California, it was the smaller stone crab. You may enjoy blue crab where you are. Whatever breed of fresh, live crab that you have access to, eat them when they’re in season as they’ll be at their sweetest best. Buy them live (check Asian markets and ask local fishermen for sources) to ensure their freshness. Ask for the feistiest ones.

A Tastier, Simple Way to Cook Shrimp

Poached shrimp is used in a number of popular Vietnamese dishes, such as goi cuon rice paper salad rolls (a.k.a. summer rolls) and goi du du green papaya salad. I can’t stand the flat taste of most pre-cooked shrimp and typically cook my own by boiling them in a pot of well salted boiling water. As soon as they turn orange and curl up, I fish them out. But after talking with some fellow Vietnamese cooks recently, I changed my ways.

Lobster Pho a la Emeril Lagasse

Miko from Seattle worked very hard to make an authentic pho noodle soup of his own last year. He was aghast at a lobster pho recipe presented on an episode of Emeril Lagasse's show that airs on the food network.

The recipe has you simmer broth ingredients for about 15 minutes and though there's star anise, there are also lobster bodies. Strain the broth and serve over rice noodles with lobster meat. Miko says on the show, there were some sliced cooked pork and Chinese sausages too but no bean sprouts. In the online recipe I saw no Chinese sausage (lop cheung/lap suong) but the sprouts were there. It's like a quick noodle soup that he made, and not a pho. But he had to frame it in some manner that fit the episode, which was called "Lovin' Lobster" and orginally aired in 2006.

Strange... there are many kinds of inventive pho that feature seafood but I've never seen one with lobster. I don't think you'd get a big bowl for less than $20!

I've held you in suspense long enough. Here's a link to the recipe:

Emeril Lagasse's Lobster Pho

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