Someone once said to me that Vietnamese food is like Thai food but without the flavour. While I must admit that Thai food is my favourite cuisine, Vietnamese food can be full of flavour, spice and colour. On my first trip to Vietnam, my friend and I took part in a Vietnamese cooking class at Hoi An, a beautiful town which used to be a Portuguese trading village. I recall making some very decent looking Vietnamese spring rolls, which is quite impressive in hindsight given that at that point in my life I wasn’t exactly highly skilled in the food department, except eating of course! The other major culinary highlight of that first trip was a beautiful, fresh banquet of Vietnamese food on a junk in Ha Long Bay as we made our way to Cat Ba Island.
My second visit to Vietnam, unfortunately, didn’t contain many fond memories at all. I had just begun my time living in Thailand, and I went to Vietnam with a German mate in order to renew my tourist Visa. Throughout that two day trip, we were pick-pocketed, overcharged by the hotel, ripped off by a ‘tourist guide’, nearly involved in a fight through no part of our own, and tricked into going to a ‘karaoke’ club where we found ourselves surrounded by over twenty girls and, within ten minutes (during which we were trying to extricate ourselves from the position we were in), were slapped with a bill for over thirty beers which the girls had apparently had and which we had apparently agreed to pay for!!! Ah, the memories.
At this stage, I’m not too well versed in Vietnamese cuisine. I do enjoy Pho in the morning, although as an Asian breakfast I don’t think you can go past Khao Tom Moo (Thai Rice Soup with Pork), which I have cooked and will post at some stage in the near future. I think Luke Nguyen’s cooking show on SBS, which I managed to see the end of when I returned to Australia, displayed some beautiful dishes and the range of ingredients and recipes in Vietnamese cuisine. I didn’t intentionally seek to cook a Vietnamese dish – rather, I was captured by the picture of this recipe on the iPhone application for taste.com. While I’m usually not a fan of anything that has a flavour similar to aniseed, I love the depth of flavour and smokiness that star anise provides to dishes, and the cut of meat, caramelised by the palm sugar, made this dish melt in my mouth and became one of the best dishes I had eaten in a long time. You know that feeling when you take your first bite and it’s almost indescribably delicious, and you can’t believe that you actually cooked it! What really lifted this dish too, not that it needed lifting I suppose, was the addition of fresh slices of Lebanese cucumber and chopped coriander to the steamed rice. I thought to myself, yeah sure, it will probably be nice, but it surprised me how well it complimented and improved the pork, primarily I think because it provides a cold and crunchy contrast to the hot and caramelised pork. I’ll definitely prepare my rice like this much more in the future for such dishes.
Recipe (serves 3-4):
1kg pork belly
1 tbs peanut oil
8 eschallots
6 garlic cloves
60ml soy sauce
125g palm sugar
250ml water
2 whole star anise
1 tsp Chinese five spice
1 tbs fish sauce
8 spring onions
Jasmine Rice
1 Lebanese cucumber
½ cup coriander
Heat the oil in a wok over a high heat. Add 1/3 of the pork and stir-fry for 5 minutes or until brown. Repeat in two more batches.
Heat remaining oil in wok over medium heat. Add eschallots and garlic and cook for 5 minutes or until golden.
Add pork, soy sauce, palm sugar, water, star anise and five spice. Bring to the boil.
Reduce heat to low and cook, covered and stirring occasionally, for 1 hour or until the pork is tender.
Increase heat to high and bring to the boil. Cook for 10 minutes or until sauce thickens.
Add the fish sauce and ½ the spring onions and stir to combine.
Garnish with remaining spring onions and serve with rice topped with cucumber and coriander leaves.
Cuisine: Vietnamese
Source: http://www.taste.com.au/ (Winter) iPhone Application
Rating: Five stars
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