The
recipes you've requested highlight a neat aspect of Vietnamese culture and food
traditions -- we love to experience the cuisines of other countries! Viet people
enjoy unusual flavors and textures so we're always looking for new food discoveries.
Through lots of experimentation with the classic dishes or cooking concepts of
other cuisines, Vietnamese cooks have developed a knack for mimicry and invention.
From
what you've described, the first recipe you asked for is a classic Cantonese beef
chow fun – one of my favorite dishes to order at a Chinese restaurant, albeit
it's always too greasy! The Chinese dominated Vietnam for 1,000 years so it's
natural that there are Chinese dishes in the Vietnamese repertoire.
Through
lots of trials at home, here's my favorite recipe from Grace Young's award-winning
cookbook, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic family recipes for celebration
and healing (1999). The flavors are exceptionally well balanced and complex
– better than you'll get at most restaurants! My remarks are in [brackets].
For a nice color contrast, substitute blanched broccoli or other green vegetable
for the bean sprouts.
(From
Grace Young's award-winning cookbook, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic
family recipes for celebration and healing (1999))
Beef
Chow Fun
Hu Tieu
Xao Thit Bo
8
ounces mung bean sprouts, about 4 cups
8 ounces flank steak, well trimmed
¼ teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon thin soy sauce [light, not lite/low
sodium soy sauce]
1½ teaspoons cornstarch
1½ teaspoons Shao
Hsing rice cooking wine [sherry may be substituted, don't buy Chinese cooking
wine, which has salt]
1 tablespoon Chinese dried black beans [salted/fermented
black beans]
1 pound fresh broad rice noodles [sold in plastic at Chinese
and Southeast Asian markets]
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 slices ginger
2 teaspoons finely minced garlic
2 scallions, cut into 2-inch sections
2 tablespoons oyster flavored sauce
Rinse
the bean sprouts in several changes of cold water and drain thoroughly in a colander
until dry to the touch.
Halve
the flank steak with the grain into 2 strips. Cut each strip across the grain
into 1/4-inch-thick slices. Place in a shallow bowl, sprinkle with baking soda,
and stir to combine. Add the soy sauce, cornstarch, and rice wine, and stir to
combine; set aside.
Rinse
the black beans in several changes of cold water and drain. In a small bowl, mash
the black beans with the back of a wooden spoon. Leaving the noodles as a slab,
cut the noodles crosswise into 3/4 –inch-wide strips. [If your noodles were
refrigerated, rinse them under warm water to refresh them.]
Heat
a 14-inch flat bottomed wok or skillet over high heat until hot but not smoking.
Add 1 tablespoon oil, ginger, and garlic to the wok, and stir-fry about 15 to
30 seconds, until fragrant. Carefully add the beef, spreading it in the wok. Cook,
undisturbed, 30 seconds to 1 minute, letting the beef begin to brown. Add the
mashed black beans and, using a metal spatula, stir-fry 1 to 2 minutes, or until
the beef is browned but still slightly rare. Transfer to a plate. Rinse the wok
and dry it thoroughly.
Heat
the wok over high heat until hot but not smoking. Add the remaining 2 tablespoons
oil to the wok with the noodles, spreading them in the wok. Cook undisturbed for
1 minute, or until slightly crusty. Add the bean sprouts and stir-fry 1 to 2 minutes.
Return the beef with any juices that have accumulated to the wok, add the scallions
and oyster sauce and stir-fry 1 to 2 minutes, or until heated through and well
combined. Serve immediately.
Serves
4 to 6 as part of a multi-course meal.
Sate
Seafood Rice Noodle Soup
(Hu
Tieu Hai San Sa Te)
As
for the noodle soup, it's a new “invention” of Vietnamese cooks abroad.
It's not a traditional Vietnamese dish but riff on Indonesian or Malay sate. Admittedly,
I've never eaten this soup though now that you've emailed me on it, I'm very curious.
I researched my Viet-language cookbooks as well as other Southeast Asian cookbooks
for sate.
The
Viet approach tends to be pretty straightforward in that the sate is based on
sautéing a paste of garlic, chilies, peanuts and sometimes lemongrass up
in oil. You can add ginger too. I've read in Viet recipe books from Vietnam that
such a sate paste is mixed with coconut milk to make marinade for grilled meat
– like a traditional Southeast Asian sate. In the states, however, it's used
more liberally and is also apparently mixed into stir-fries, and as you've requested,
used to make a soup.
(Note
that the Viet version of sate is very simplistic when compared with the Indonesian
or Malay version. There are none of the complex spices and the traditional candlenut
is replaced with peanuts.)
I
imagine that with your noodle soup, the restaurant added some sate paste to a
light chicken stock to make the soup. Once the flavors bloomed, they dropped in
the seafood and let it gently poach before ladling everything over (or fine egg)
noodles. Flavoring wise, a little fish sauce was added to the broth. This is my
hunch based on the fact that a restaurant wouldn't likely have a designated sate
soup broth sitting around, especially if the bulk of their orders are for other
traditional soups like pho.
Anyway,
to replicate this soup at home, you have two options: (1) go to a Chinese or Vietnamese
market and buy a jar of sate paste or (2) make the paste at home. Yesterday I
was at a Ranch 99 market in the San Jose, CA area and saw for the first time this
small (about 4-ounce) jar of Vietnamese sate soup paste.
Making
the sate paste
Last night, I experimented and came up with a pretty tasty
paste which I turned into a lovely soup. This is the recipe I came up with:
Place
the following into a food processor:
1
fat or 2 small stalks of lemongrass, trimmed*, quartered and roughly chopped
3 shallots, roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
4 to 5 Thai
dragon (or bird) chilies, stemmed and roughly chopped
¾ cups roasted,
unsalted peanuts
1 tablespoon oil
(*Note:
Before using lemongrass, chop off and discard the bottom 1/2 inch of the base
where the layers come together; this portion of the stalk contains a hard core
that's tough to cut. Then chop off the green woody top section, which may be boiled
in water for 15 minutes to yield a terrific tea. Any loose or dry outer layers
should be discarded too. Each remaining stalk should be cut into manageable 3-
to 4-inch sections.)
Process
to a paste. It won't be satiny smooth but it should be rather creamy.
Put
¼ cup vegetable (or canola) oil and the paste in a Teflon skillet over
medium heat. Start stirring it and let it cook for about 7 to 10 minutes. The
paste will lose some of its raw smell and impart an almost sweet aroma. It will
also darken in color, to a light caramel. Take it off the heat and mix in 1½
teaspoons salt and 1½ teaspoons sugar. In total, you'll have about 1 cup
of paste that can be stored in the fridge or to be used for soup.
You
can use all the paste at once -- there's probably enough here for about 3 to 4
quarts of stock, which will yield you about 6 to 8 bowls of noodle soup. Or, use
it as needed. Because I've just come up with this, I don't know how long it will
last in the fridge; I suppose you could freeze it.
Using
the sate paste for soup:
What I did with the paste was simply mix it into
some chicken stock and let it simmer for about 15 to 20 minutes. During this time,
I adjusted the flavoring with a little fish sauce and salt. The paste bloomed
beautifully in the stock to produce a cloudy light yellow broth; it was thickish
due to the ground peanuts. The lemongrass came through, and so did the chilies.
When the broth was heady enough for my taste, I dropped in the seafood and let
it gently simmer for a few minutes. I also threw in a few cubes of tofu, some
shreds of crunchy wood ear and some leftover soaked glass noodles. Then I garnished
with some scallion rings and cilantro and enjoyed it!
For
you in terms of our efforts to replicate the restaurant's version, get some dried
rice noodles (banh pho) and soak the in hot tap water for about 15 to 20
minutes until they're opaque white. Drain them and set them aside until you're
ready to eat. For each bowl, use a long-handle strainer to blanch a portion of
noodles in boiling water for about 20 seconds. Pull the strainer out and let the
water drain back into the saucepan. Empty your noodles into the bowl. Then ladle
in your sate broth and seafood, garnish and eat.
What
to do about making stock:
As for your chicken stock, make your own with
chicken carcasses, ginger and onion; simmer it for a good 2 hours. Or, if you're
in a pinch, use this shortcut: Take some canned chicken stock (Swanson's is nice)
and dilute it with water using a ratio of 1 part stock to 2 parts water. Simmer
this for about 20 minutes with a a few slices of ginger, some scallion and if
you'd like a few sprigs of cilantro (think of it as parsley). There, you've just
Asian-ized the canned stock.
Try
this out and let me know your thoughts. For me, the sate soup was a rather delicious
shot in the dark!
Have
fun,
Andrea
