Viet World Kitchen

Kohlrabi Stir-fried with Garlic and Egg Recipe (Su Hao Xao Toi)

Many thanks to those of you who contributed ideas on how to cook kohlrabi Asian style. Your thoughts fed my imagination over the weekend. I’d come home from a grueling week-long business trip out of town and was spent. Plus, I pulled my Achilles tendon on Thursday. Hobbling was the best I could do.

The nearly empty fridge had a bag of farmer’s root vegetables – carrots, watermelon radishes, and kohlrabi – half a red onion and some eggs. Recalling your comments and a conversation with my mother about kohlrabi, I whipped up this simple stir-fry to go with a bowl of rice and a watermelon radish salad.

The hardest part of it was peeling away all the tough kohlrabi skin. Trimming the root and stem ends first makes using the vegetable peeler to remove the skin easier. After an initial pass of the peeler, I did it again. Kohlrabi shines brighter once its thick exterior is gone.

Then it was simply a matter of cutting up the kohlrabi into thick julienne, about 1/4-inch wide. You can add carrot to this stir-fry too but that would rob kohlrabi of its stardom. Next time, I may throw a teaspoon or so of finely chopped dried shrimp into the skillet with the garlic and red onion.

Feeling much better after the meal, I hobbled with a much lighter step.

Serves 2 or 3

2 kohlrabi, each about the size of a large orange
2 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons fish sauce
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/2 small red onion, sliced vertically into thin wedges
Salt

1. Peel the kohlrabi and cut into thick julienne. Set aside.

2. Beat the eggs with the fish sauce and black pepper. Set aside.

3. Heat the canola oil in skillet over medium high heat. Add the garlic and onion and cook for about 1 minute until just softened.

4. Add the kohlrabi and cook for 3 to 5 minutes, stirring frequently, until softened. It should weep some liquid. However, feel free to splash in water and/or lower the heat if the skillet looks dry.

Give the egg one last gentle beat then pour over the kohlrabi. Stir to combine and cook for another 30 seconds, until the egg has set. Remove from the heat, season with salt and pepper. Transfer to a plate and serve with rice.

Related post:  Asian Ideas for Kohlrabi? (includes tips on selecting good ones!)

Stir-Fried Beef with Lemongrass and Chiles -- Mark Bittman.com

Remember how I went on the press trip last month? I went to New York, Nanjing, China, and then Hanoi, Vietnam, in the span of about 10 days.  In total, I flew 9 flights in 13 days. I tasted new foods, experienced Asian history, met relatives I didn't know I had, and battled jet lag!

Among the things that I took away from the trip was the stir-fry above. It's not quite Vietnamese thit bo xao xa ot but a hybrid Chinese-Vietnamese preparation that I had on Dragon Air (part of Cathay Pacific Airlines, which co-sponsored the trip).

The simple stir-fry comforted at the end of the journey, and I liked it lots. So much so that I went home and replicated it. It's hard to believe but airline food can inspire!

For the recipe, see this 7/8/10 post on MarkBittman.com:

• Decent Food at 30,000 Feet, Seriously

Related posts:

• Advice for Fighting Jet Lag and Surviving Red-Eyes
• Hanoi Food and Travel Tips: Where to go, what to eat
  
• Hanoi Food and Travel 2010 (initial impressions)

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.

Garlicky Pan-fried Pork Steaks Recipe (Thit Cot-let Chien)

My mom reads this blog and loves to come up with ideas for cool content. This weekend when I visited my parents, she showed me her new twist on one of my childhood favorites: pan-fried pork steaks full of garlicky goodness. It’s a dead simple recipe that reflects Vietnamese-French cooking. Just note the Vietnamese name: thit (meat) cot-let (cutlet/pork chop) chien (fried).

The difference between what I grew up eating and what my mom served the other night is that instead of using dry thin pork chops, my mom now prefers end-pieces of pork loin. She buys them in bulk from Smart & Final for a good deal. They are a pork processing byproduct. She loves it and stands by her pork choice. Would you mess with this woman?

That cut of pork has a moderate amount of fat and lots of flavor. It’s tastier than the pork chops of my youth. All my mom did was defrost the pork (remember, she loves to freeze things) and then used the spine of a cleaver to lightly pound and tenderize the meat, which she cut up into pieces about the size of the palm of her hand. Then she generously seasoned it with minced garlic, salt and pepper.

My parents had a packed social schedule that day and didn’t get home till 5:30pm. Given that, mom prepped the pork the night before and refrigerated it. (You can marinate the meat for an hour at room temperature, if you like.) She let the meat sit at room temperature for about 45 minutes to take some of the chill off.

Then she coated each one in plain breadcrumbs (nothing fancy like panko) and pan-fried the pork steaks in a skillet on her outdoor stove. She loves her patio set up and does most of her cooking there where there’s an ocean breeze and she can ‘communicate’ with the ingredients. It’s a bit like being in Vietnam.

Mom used medium-hot heat and made sure there was enough oil to cover the bottom of the large skillet at all times. Each piece took about 5 minutes to cook, and got flipped over midway. She had to add oil as she fried because she cooked about 5 pounds of meat. Occasionally she would scoop some of the overly fried bits out of the skillet to clean it out.

The result was heavenly. The outside was slightly crisp and the meat inside was succulent and savory. I would have eaten a lot more had there not been so much other food on the table.

When making this simple pork, you don’t have to shop at Smart & Final for the meat. Boneless pork shoulder steaks would be fine. Or, cut pieces from the more marbly end of a pork loin.

We eat these pork chops with fork and knife. It’s one of the few Vietnamese dishes where each guest gets his/her personal slab of meat. Nevertheless, I noticed that everyone at the table – my mom, dad, husband and me – sliced up their entire pieces of pork before any was eaten. Feel free to dip the pork in a bit of chile garlic sauce for some heat. 

Spicy Asian Chicken Wings Recipe

I’ve had a hankering for hot wings these days and it’s not even close to Super Bowl Sunday, the uber chicken wing event in America. At many of the hippest Asian restaurants these days, there is some version of chile-hot, savory-sweet chicken wings. From RockSugar PanAsian Kitchen in Los Angeles to Pok Pok in Portland, Oregon, to Momofuku in New York, Asian-style of chicken wings are on the appetizer menu. Naturally, I wanted to make my own.

Admittedly, I’m partial to the renditions that involve Southeast Asian ingredients, fish sauce, garlic, and chiles. Can you blame me?

When I had the wings at Pok Pok by Ich Truong and RockSugar by Mohan Ismail, I was hooked. Ich (“Ike”) claims that his version is from Vietnam and Mohan is a talented, smart Singaporean chef who monitors and delivers on tasty Asian food trends.  (Read more about Mohan Ismail and RockSugar in my post, "Can Real Asian food be mainstreamed?" on MarkBittman.com)

It was hard to decide whose version was better as they were both addictive to eat. At RockSugar, my husband and I had minor squabble as to who should/would eat the last one. We also could figure out if this style of wings is Vietnamese or Thai or something else. Shed some light, if you happen to know.

My solution is to make spicy Asian chicken wings at home. That way, you can have as many as you want.

Roasted Pork Belly Banh Mi Sandwich Recipe

My parents are both in their 70s and despite their concerns over maintaining a healthy diet and low cholesterol, they manage to splurge every once in a while on fatty pleasures such as crispy roast pork. We typically get it from a Chinese barbecue shop and tell the butcher we want a lean cut. I realize that that is somewhat of an oxymoron when it comes to roast pork but perhaps going lean lessens the guilt a bit. When we buy the pork from a Chinese barbecue shop located in a Vietnamese community, the shop usually sells a few accompaniments for the rich indulgences, such as fine rice noodles (banh hoi) and freshly baked baguette.

I’ve written about eating rich grilled foods with banh hoi rice noodles but a roast pork banh mi – well that is something rather visceral in the Vietnamese culinary consciousness. The primary reason is that it is fast. Get the pork cut up from the barbecue shop, grab a baguette, slit the bread open and stuff it with the warm, crisp, juicy pork. That’s instant gratification. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve brought roast pork (thit heo quay) home to my parents and my mom drags out the baguette. We sit around the table and eat our sandwiches and my parents grin from ear to ear, as if they are kids again in Vietnam – refreshed in body and spirit. What a pleasure to witness and share.

Yesterday, after having picked weeds for hours in the front yard, I needed a rewarding pick-up. I decided to make a pork belly banh mi from last week’s leftovers. My roasted pork belly was obviously not freshly roasted so I had to revive it somehow.

Crisp Roasted Pork Belly Recipe (Thit Heo Quay)

Some of my friends have said that they  are “over” pork belly. How could one ever fall out of love with fat? That would could not happen to  me. I recently slow cooked pork belly and now, with that cut of bone-in pork belly that I got from the Chinese market, I was going to try roasting it. I reached out for advice and suggestions on Facebook and this site included

• N. Fong: Yum! Marinate and slow braised, then roasted!
• J. Washburn: I get a chunk of bone-in pig belly nearly every time I go to Austin. It runs about $2.09/lb. there. Several ways to cook 'em. One of my favorites is rub with 5-spice, slow roast, run skin side under broiler to blister when done.
• J. Adams: Char siu!

See the comments section of the post on this unusual cut of pork to get Jarrett’s Thai take on Momofuku’s roast pork belly. Sunflower in the UK provided excellent information on a Chinese version of crisp pork belly.

Gazing at my bookshelves, I remembered seeing a recipe in Vietnamese-Australian Luke Nguyen’s The Songs of Sapa, a Vietnamese cookbook that’s up for an IACP cookbook award this year. I looked it up and his recipe intrigued me for the following reasons:

(1) It came from a Vietnamese vendor in Vietnam and Luke attached a great family story to the recipe.  I'm a sucker for a good story, you know that!
(2) Required scalding the skin, which I just did for homemade Peking duck so I felt like I was on a roll.
(3) Involved these unusual ingredients: annatto oil, cornstarch, and baking soda. What do these ingredients do to the pork belly during roasting?
(4) Was very easy.

I wanted to keep things simple to allow the meat to shine. So I tried Luke's recipe out, and the results were good for my first time out with roasting bone-in pork belly. Pork in Vietnam often times requires scalding and scraping as it can be tough and needs to be cleaned – somewhat like scraping your tongue, which Asians have been doing since ancient times. Seriously.

Chicken and Bamboo Shoot Noodle Soup Recipe (Bun Mang Ga)

The other day, I soaked and cooked a bunch of dried bamboo shoot (mang kho) and squirreled them away for Tet so that I could simmer some with pork hocks. But the chilly winter weather got to me today and I defrosted a batch of the prepped bamboo shoots to make bun mang noodle soup, a Vietnamese favorite; bun refers to round rice noodles (think bun rice noodle salad bowls!) and mang refers to bamboo shoot. I looked in my cookbook library and found Vietnamese recipes that paired bamboo shoot with chicken, duck and pork hocks (called bun mang ga, bun mang vit, bun mang gio heo, respectively).  Chicken is the fastest and easiest to make as it is readily available at any supermarket. It’s also less expensive than duck and lighter than pork.

Vietnamese food is often quite simple yet seemingly complex. That's the beauty of this preparation -- just a few average ingredients coming together for spectacular results. People have asked me what makes bun mang taste good. The answer has less to do with the protein than the quality of the bamboo shoot; for tips on buying and preparing this standard Asian ingredient, read “How to Cook Dried Bamboo Shoot.” The dried bamboo shoot lends its golden hue and naturally sweet-savory flavor to the broth for bun mang. Normally, wood ear mushroom is added for contrasting color and crunch but I love to drop in some reconstituted shiitake mushrooms so that the soup is super laden with umami goodness.