Food Processor

Served with Carrot-Cumin Slaw (recipe below) or potato salad, this chicken dinner is perfect picnic fare. Leftover chicken makes a great lunch the next day.

This is a recipe that I first tried out a really long time ago for a friend in high school who had decided to become a vegan. A pie with tofu may sound odd, but silken tofu is very smooth when you blend it, and helps make vegan desserts rich and satisfying without dairy products. Although the texture is a little different than traditional pumpkin pie, the taste is almost exactly the same. The only way to make this better is to find vegan whipped cream to put on top.

This soup is perfect for a chilly autumn night, when you just want to wrap yourself in a warm blanket and watch television. It is as easy as cutting up the vegetables and waiting for them to cook. And the best part is, because the vegetables get puréed in the end, it doesn’t matter how big or small or funny shaped they are. But do be careful not to put too much in the blender at a time, unless you’re trying to redecorate your kitchen.

Crêpes are incredibly delicious and probably one of the most versatile foods you can make. They feel fancy and sound impressive, but are fairly cheap to make. When you make these, do not, I repeat do not use the so-called Parmesan that comes in a green shaker can. Use the real stuff; you’ll need about 3 ounces to make 1 cup.

I love all pesto, but when it’s homemade you absolutely can’t beat it. It’s so fresh and delicious that you really don’t need to mess with it. This pasta is fabulous hot, but—bonus—it’s also great cold. So you can have it for dinner one night and then take the leftovers for lunch the next day.

In my mom’s saigon kitchen, the food processor, a modern luxury appliance, was reserved for making giò, while the old-fashioned hand-crank meat grinder was used for delicious liver pâtés like this one. We regularly enjoyed it, tucked into bánh mì or simply smeared on a baguette slice. In the traditional Viet interpretation of French paté, pork or beef liver, pork meat, and fatback are seasoned with lots of garlic and sometimes Cognac and Chinese five-spice powder (a substitute for French quatre épices). Some cooks add tapioca starch or flour as a binder, and, when available, they line the mold with caul fat for encasing the meat mixture. The paté is then steamed, steamed and baked, or baked in a water bath, the method usually depending on whether or not the cook has an oven. When my mother came to the States and switched from pork to chicken for making giò, she began saving the left over livers for this light, elegant pâté. She also started making the pâté in a food processor. If you want a more intense liver flavor, use half pork and half chicken liver, or make an all-pork version, cutting the liver into 1-inch cubes before processing. Don’t skimp on fat, or the results will be dry and tough. Meat today tends to be lean, and this recipe needs the fat to achieve the right taste and texture. You will end up with a large pâté—the better to impress others with your efforts.

The term giò is used not only for the ubiquitous meat paste, but also for describing any charcuterie that is log shaped. Most giò-style charcuterie is wrapped in banana leaf, including this wonderful sausage spiked with dill and crushed black peppercorns. Because beef is a luxury meat in Vietnam, giò bo is a special treat. It is not commonly sold at delis and markets, which is fine because it is simple to make at home. Lean top round steak (a.k.a. London broil) yields great flavor and a fine texture.

A cornerstone of Vietnamese cooking, this smooth meat paste is the most important recipe in the charcuterie repertoire and forms the base of three sausages in this chapter. It is also used to make meatballs (page 86), acts as the binder for Stuffed Snails Steamed with Lemongrass (page 42), and may be shaped into dumplings similar to French quenelles and poached in a quick canh-style soup (page 61). This recipe, which calls for chicken rather than the traditional pork, is my mother’s modern American approach to gio. Chicken, a luxury meat in Vietnam that is affordable here, is easier to work with and yields a particularly delicately flavored and textured paste. Additionally, chicken breasts and thighs are readily available at supermarkets, while pork leg, the cut typically used, isn’t. A recipe for the pork paste appears in the Note that follows.

These addictive bite-sized riblets are perfumed by lemongrass, and the addition of caramel sauce to the marinade—a trick of the trade often used by food vendors in Vietnam—imparts deep color and flavor. Honey is a fine substitute that results in a slightly sweeter finish. Removing the tough membrane from the underside of the rack (a technique borrowed from American barbecue masters) and a long marinade yield riblets that are chewy-tender. The rack of spareribs must be cut through the bone into long strips. Don’t attempt this yourself. Instead, ask your butcher to do it. Serve the riblets as an appetizer or with rice for a satisfying meal. For a Viet twist on the classic American barbecue, pair the ribs with Grilled Corn with Scallion Oil (page 183) and a green salad or Russian Beet, Potato, and Carrot Salad (page 186).

Smooth, well-seasoned meat and seafood pastes have many uses in the Vietnamese kitchen. Here, a pinkish orange salmon paste is shaped into small cakes before undergoing a two-step cooking process: an initial steaming to cook the cakes, followed by broiling, grilling, or frying to crisp the outside. The cakes are sliced and served as an appetizer or dunked into Simple Dipping Sauce (page 309) and eaten with rice for dinner. If you have enjoyed Thai fried fish cakes (tod mun), these will remind you of them. When my mother came to the States, she substituted salmon for the rich-tasting tuna she had used in Vietnam. I have since prepared the cakes with the ahi tuna available here, but the results were too firm and dry. The fattier salmon is superior. If you can’t find skinless salmon fillet, buy 2 1/3 pounds of skin-on fillet and remove the skin before you cut the fish into chunks. The cakes can be frozen after they are steamed and then thawed and crisped for a good last-minute meal or snack. The recipe is also easily halved, but I advise you to make the whole batch and tuck away the extras for when you need a quick dish.

Rice that has been slowly toasted and then ground is mixed into smooth meat pastes for added texture and depth or sprinkled onto foods as a garnish. It can be purchased, usually packed in small plastic bags, but it is more fragrant and flavorful when freshly made. Some cooks like to grind the rice in an old-fashioned hand-cranked coffee or spice grinder. I prefer the speed of an electric coffee grinder that I reserve exclusively for grinding spices.

In the Viet kitchen, tuong refers to various heady sauces made from fermented beans. It might be thin like soy sauce, which some folks call nuoc tuong (tuong water), or thick like this sauce, which accompanies Southern Salad Rolls (page 32), Beef and Jicama Hand Rolls (page 30), chicken meatballs (page 86), and Delightful Crepes (page 277). There are several ways to prepare this sauce, and my family’s version is based on nuoc leo, a sweet and earthy sauce from central Vietnam made with pork liver. We substitute lighter-tasting chicken livers, which are saved from whole chickens used for other dishes. Sweet hoisin sauce tempers the chile and garlic, while tomato paste brightens the sauce, which otherwise would be dull brown. At Vietnamese restaurants, this sauce is often called peanut sauce and made with peanut butter, a nontraditional ingredient. It is convenient and tasty, but not as complex and deeply flavored as this liver version. If you do not like liver or are a vegetarian, make the version in the Note that follows.

Used sparingly to coat food lightly, this sublime sauce goes well with seafood, chicken, and even boiled green vegetables. If you are portioning it for your guests, serve it in small, shallow dishes, as a little of it goes a long way. This sauce is so good that a family friend drank his serving. While an electric mini-chopper makes quick work of mincing ginger (cut it into 1/2-inch chunks and use a little lime juice to move things along), a sharp knife will allow you to hone your knife skills. For the best flavor, select a heavy knob of ginger with smooth, thin skin.

Heavily influenced by the cuisine and culture of the Middle Kingdom, Viet cooks prepare many classic Chinese sweets, including these cookies. Although Chinese almond cookies are available at Asian bakeries and markets, I prefer to make them myself to ensure that they are full of real almond flavor. The cookies are slightly crispy at the edges and tender in the middle, and have a nice rich color from the glaze. I often make a double batch of this dough and freeze the extra, along with some whole blanched almonds, so that I can simply thaw the dough and bake it up when I crave the cookies.

At a glance, this recipe may look like the one for Sizzling Crepes (page 274), and in fact these crepes from the central region begot sizzling crepes. But the popularity of the child has eclipsed that of the parent, and nowadays it is hard to get banh khoai unless you make them yourself or go to the source, Hue, where delightful crepes live up to their name. They are crunchy, rich from being cooked in a fair amount of oil, and full of toasty rice flavor. Banh khoai are traditionally fried in special small cast-iron skillets (five to six inches in diameter) with long handles (so you can avoid the splattering hot oil). They are difficult to find, however, so I use an eight-inch cast-iron or heavy nonstick skillet.

Named for the ssssseh-ao sound that the batter makes when it hits the hot skillet, these turmeric yellow rice crepes are irresistible. Fragrant with a touch of coconut milk, they are filled with pork, shrimp, and vegetables and eaten with lettuce, herbs, and a mildly garlicky dipping sauce. Most Viet cooks make sizzling crepes with a rice flour batter, but the results fall short of the nearly translucent ones made by pros in Vietnam. To reproduce the traditional version, which captures the alluring toastiness of rice, I soak and grind raw rice for the batter. It is not as daunting as it sounds. You just need a powerful blender to emulsify the batter to a wonderful silkiness. Adding left over cooked rice and mung bean, a technique I found buried in a book on Viet foodways, gives the crepes a wonderful chewy crispiness. Make your crepes as large as you like. These instructions are for moderately sized eight-inch ones. In Saigon, the same crepes are typically as big as twelve inches, but in the central region, they are as small as tacos. At my house, we serve and eat these crepes as fast as we can make them.

Here is a curry with big flavors, thanks to lots of lemongrass, curry powder, ginger, and chile flakes. The coconut milk unifies all the elements and enriches the dish. For the best Viet flavor, buy Vietnamese-style curry powder (page 327) at an Asian market. Serve the curry in a shallow bowl with a baguette for dipping or spoon it over rice or noodles.

When preparing this Chinese classic, Vietnamese cooks, like their northern neighbors, often rely on canned creamed corn, once considered an exotic foreign import in Asia. The velvety sweet-savory result fuses East and West. Here in the States, fresh corn is plentiful, and making this soup with kernels cut from the cob yields bright flavors that aren’t cloying. Neither cornstarch nor egg is needed to create a creamy texture. The natural starch in the corn provides it. Some cooks add a variety of embellishments to the soup, but I prefer to keep it simple, using only sliced shiitake mushrooms for their flavor, texture, and visual appeal. Make sure you use the sweetest corn possible, whether from your local market or farm stand, fresh or frozen.

The ingredients for this recipe resemble those for rice noodle bowl with beef (page 224). But instead of having big assembled bowls, diners compose their own small bowls, soaking the tender, sweet, salty pork in sauce, tearing up lettuce and herbs, adding some noodles, and then nibbling on their creations. Traditionally, a meal of bún cha is unhurried and encourages long conversation. A famous Hanoi rendition of this northern Viet specialty combines sliced pork belly and pork patties made from chopped shoulder, but I prefer a less complicated and healthier version that uses marinated pork slices. A grill best mimics the traditional brazier used in Vietnam, but the pork slices can also be roasted in the top third of a 475°F oven until nicely browned (about 9 minutes on each side).