Cooking my way around the world, dish by dish: Week Five

Saturday 30 January: Vietnam 🇻🇳 : Cha Gio and Phó – Fried Spring Rolls and Soup

My 1996 trip to South East Asia ended by crossing into Vietnam, staying a day in the gorgeous city of Hue before ending in Hanoi. Time flies and it shames me that I have not been back since. The food was simple and wonderful.

Luckily, living in Belgium and due to the fact that Vietnam was part of French-colonised Indo-China, I am well-served with decent Vietnamese restaurants. An occasional indulgence is to have fried spring rolls served with lettuce to make me feel slightly more virtuous.

And of course, Vietnam is well known for its fabulous noodle soups: phó. 

So I decide to have a go at both, even though it quickly becomes clear that the soup will require a lot of preparation.  Not only that, the recipe that I follow – found at Recipe Tin Eats – calls for huge quantities of beef to make the base stock: over 3.5 kilos in all and a mixture of marrow, meaty bones and brisket.

Still, I am cooking on a Saturday so I have time, letting the beef stew in boiling water with star anise, cinnamon, coriander, cardamom, onion and ginger for the best part of four hours – filling the house with the delicious smell of the star anise in particular – straining the whole lot (but reserving the brisket) then at the last minute throwing in some cooked noodles, slivers of brisket and some slices of beef tenderloin, letting it cook for a few minutes and then throwing in sliced red chillies, coriander, and beansprouts.

The spring roll – found at The Woks of Life – is time consuming in its own way, combining hydrated thin rice noodles, grated carrot, chopped wood ear mushroom, pork, shallots, ginger, garlic and a mix of egg white, vegetable oil, fish sauce, salt, white pepper and sugar. I arrange them all in small logs, ready for the tricky bit, wrapping them in rice paper wrappers dipped in warm water until ready to roll.

I am sure that there is a clever way to do this and that one learns the feel of when rice paper wrappers are just moist enough to roll, but I never quite got the hang of it in 20 attempts with my rice paper either too stiff or too soggy.  And my rushed technique would have left a true chef covering their eyes. I ended up with a bunch of misshapen stuffed condoms, desperately squeezing them as they dried.  After leaving in the fridge for an hour, which did little for their appearance, I then fry them three at a time until golden (and in my haste, forget that I should double fry). I watch them bubble into even more grotesque shapes. And then serve up with some – sorry! – commercial dipping sauce.

The effect? Let’s start with the soup. Honestly, a bit of a let down after all the effort and expense – easily the most expensive recipe I have cooked. The beef broth and beef slivers are dominated by the fresh ingredients, hardly noticeable underneath, especially the red chillies. It is beautifully fresh, but a bit underwhelming…

The fried stuffed condoms? Actually rather nice… Gloriously crunchy with a fabulously moist inside, the pork juices really coming out with the soft noodles and vegetables, though the mushroom does not really emerge.  Oily and indulgent… and appropriate for a mid-winter night in this horrible time.

Sunday 31^st January: China 🇨🇳 : Gong Bao Chicken and Fish-Fragrant Aubergines

After crazy experimentation, a return to some kind of familiarity, even though I have never been to China.

As with France, Italy and India, how do you represent a country with as wide and varied a culinary repertoire as China?  Impossible so I settle for two dishes from Sichuan: Gong Bao Chicken and Fish-fragrant Aubergines, which, while hardly representative of the whole country, are both delicious and give some sense of the ingredients and cooking approach.

I take them from two books from Fuchsia Dunlop: Every Grain of Rice, and The Food of Sichuan, wonderful explorations of cookery even if many of the recipes are off limits until I can find the relevant key ingredients. I have cooked them before and loved them. Both are relatively simple to cook once you have done the prep.

The aubergines are chopped into thin batons and left to salt before being deep fried until “slightly golden”. Then the wok is emptied of aubergines and oil and chilli bean sauce added, sizzled and then finely chopped ginger and garlic, chicken stock, sugar and then the fried aubergines, before thickening the sauce with some potato flour or cornflour, adding some Chinkiang vinegar and spring onion greens.

Bite-sized chunks of chicken breast are marinated in a sauce of light soy, Shaoxing wine and potato flour (or in my case, cornflour).  A chilli oil is made by frying dried chillies with Sichuan pepper. The recipe calls for 10 chillies but I have learnt to tone it down a bit. Then the chicken is stir-fried until just brown before adding ginger, garlic and spring onion slices, before adding a sauce of light and dark soy, Chinkiang vinegar, sesame oil and a potato flour-water paste and finally adding roasted peanuts.

An hour or so of prep followed by ten minutes of furious movement. Served up with rice.

The effect? The tender chicken pieces. The Sichuan pepper. The soft fruity aubergines. The ginger, the garlic, the spring onions all making their appearance on the palate. The crunchiness of the chopped peanuts. The luscious chilli bean sauce. And more and more, the lingering kick of the chillies and pepper, making my lips tingle and my brow sweat, especially after swallowing a chilli.

It is magnificent.

But it also makes me sad. Because Chinese food should not be eaten on your own, but shared with friends around a joyous table. It makes me pine for happy lunches with work colleagues at the Sichuan Pavilion in Washington, DC: the Asian aubergines bright purple and coming with Thai basil, the chilli fish, the mapo tofu, the pork belly, the tea-smoked duck… It makes me pine for sadly absent friends usually sat around my dinner table on several dishes but now outlawed until this bloody evil virus has been kicked senseless.

Monday 1^st February: Korea 🇰🇷 : Beef Bibimpap

Korea has been on my mind for a while. I was supposed to spend 48 hours in Seoul on an EU-Korea dialogue only for the trip to be cancelled less than an hour before I was due to leave for the airport. My naïve plans for 2020 involved a late summer fortnight on my bike in the South Korean countryside.

A rare joy in the good times was going out with friends to a Korean restaurant just off the Place St Boniface in Brussels and having a hot stone bowl of beef bibimpap, cooking and mixing as you eat, the rice burning to the bottom of the bowl like Swiss cheese fondue.

So I Google for an appropriate recipe and again find a feasible one at The Woks of Life. It involves blanching some fresh beansprouts and watercress separately and seasoning them with salt and sesame oil. Then stir frying some julienned carrots until tender but slightly crunchy. Then frying minced beef until brown and mixing in some soy sauce. Finally, frying an egg.

Then you arrange the whole lot on a bed of rice together with some kimchi, a “good dollop” of gochujang sauce and a sprinkling of toasted sesame seeds. And then you mix the whole lot with gay abandon. OK, I made the last bit up.

The effect? A confession: I did not fry the egg as I am not wild about fried or boiled eggs. Nevertheless: the whole thing is a gloriously mad mixture of flavours and textures: the beef mince, the crunch of the beansprouts and the carrot, the rather weak watercress, all jazzed up by the kimchi and gochujang sauce.

It is like nothing else and yet it is quite delicious. It even feels vaguely healthy. In truth, it is the gochujang sauce and kimchi that really make it work, binding it all together in a tingly spicy rice mix, but never mind: it is good food.