Week 34 - ăn sáng - Vietnam

BANH CUON

Breakfast in Vietnam is decidedly savoury and usually centres on some form of rice.  If you've had Vietnamese cuisine, many foods eaten for breakfast will be familiar - Pho (meat-based clear soup with noodles and herbs), Banh Mi (a sandwich on French-style Baguette featuring eggs, meat, or pate and fresh herbs and vegetables), and Balut (an almost ready-to-hatch duck egg).  Ok maybe this one doesn't make it to many North American tables but I guarantee that unless you've visited Vietnam or have Vietnamese ancestory you've probably never heard of today's breakfast - Banh Cuon.

Banh Cuon is a very light rice flour crepe that has been stuffed with ground pork, minced shallots and minced wood ear mushrooms.  It is served with sides of fresh cucumber, bean sprouts, Cha Lua (Vietnamese pork sausage) and the dipping sauce Nuoc Cham.

It's Northern Vietnamese in origin and today is enjoyed throughout the country for breakfast and as a late night snack.  (Isn't funny how often breakfast foods double as late night snacks?)

I was hesitant to make this one at home.  The ingredients seemed difficult to find and the crepes are typically made on a special pan that is fitted with a metal hoop that stretches a layer of cloth over the pan.  (Not something I was likely to find at my local Home Outfitters.)  But there were several really great tutorials on-line and in the end I decided to take the plunge.

Finding the ingredients was the first challenge.  I was confidant that my local T & T Asian Supermarket would have everything I needed, however figuring out where they were in the store and identifying them among the hundreds of non-English labelled products was another matter.  Rice flour....check, tapioca starch....check, Nuoc Cham.....check, wood ear mushrooms.... negative.  Where the heck would we find wood ear mushrooms.  They weren't in the fresh produce section and similarly were nowhere to be found among the dried mushrooms.  With some help from my smartphone, I finally found them in a mysterious package labelled - Black Fungus.  Delicious....

I was ready for an equally difficult time with the rice crepes, but following the recipe had little trouble. (Hurray for well-written recipes!)  The filling had a horrendous fishy/pork smell as it was cooking and I started to regret putting Jon through this experiment in Vietnamese street food.  But he's always such a great sport so we plated it up and dug in....

And I am happy to report that it was really good!  I've read that Vietnamese cuisine is based on the yin and yang of the five elements and it turns out this is the beauty of Banh Cuon.  The salty, earthy meat filling (which smelt so off-putting) was balanced by the fresh crunch of the veggies and sweet/sour Nuoc Cham.  There was also a myriad of textures and aromas - soft and silky, hard and crunchy, warm and crumbly.

Correspondence	Elements[5]
	Wood	Fire	Earth	Metal	Water
Spices (ngũ vị)	Sour	Bitter	Sweet	Spicy	Salty
Organs (ngũ tạng)	Gall bladder	Small intestine	Stomach	Large intestine	Urinary bladder
Colors (ngũ sắc)	Green	Red	Yellow	Black	White
Senses (năm giác quan)	Visual	Taste	Touch	Smell	Sound
Nutrients (ngũ chất)	Powder	Fat	Protein	Minerals	Water

The Table of Elements in Vietnamese Cuisine - Wikipedia

The Verdict:

For Ease of Preparation:

I have a confession - we made this for supper.  And as a dinner, this was a fun endeavour. But it's definitely way too involved for breakfast.

For Degree of Separation:

Black fungus, fish sauce and ground pork, need I say more?


For Guestability:

For Sustainability:

For Costability:

I expected this one to be expensive, but T & T is one cheap supermarket.

For Overall Appeal:

I can see why Banh Cuon is not more well-known outside of Vietnam.  It's not an easy entry food to Vietnamese cuisine.  However if you are looking for something that captures an authentic morning at a street stall in Hanoi, I encourage you to give it a shot.  Putting together the recipe was my favourite kind of tactile kitchen experiment.

Well cherry blossoms and magnolias have finally blossomed here in Toronto, a sure sign that my entry on Passover breakfast is way overdue!  Check in next time to see us try Matzah Brei...

Week 29 - Kwizija - Bosnia and Herzegovina

BUREK

It seems the world is rediscovering the Balkans as a beautiful and inexpensive tourist choice these days.  A friend who recently went to visit, extolled it's virtues and when asked if they had any exceptional food didn't hesitate to answer, "Burek."


Bosnian Burek is a puff pastry made with ground meat, onions, and a touch of paprika.  It's artfully swirled into a spiral shape and served warm with yoghurt.
 They are primarily a street food and are found in specific bakeries called Burekdžnica. 


Versions of Burek can be found all over Eastern Europe and even into Arabia.  Some versions feature cheese, others vegetables like spinach or squash and yet others have various meat and veggie combos.  You could even say that Bougatsa, from Week 5 - Greek Breakfast (still my favourite breakfast of all time) is a distant relative to the Burek.

Unfortunately there are no Burekdžnica near us in Toronto, so I had to try my hand at this Balkan delicacy.  I was dubious that I would be able to achieve the thin layers of pastry indicated in the recipe, but almost like magic, the dough easily stretched to see-through thinness and was really easy to work with. After making the meat mixture, I rolled it and doused it in copious amounts of butter and oil.  The aroma of it baking in the oven was mouthwatering and worth getting out of bed on a cold March morning...

Altogether, Burek was delightful, especially fresh from the oven.  The pastry although still flaky was a bit more chewy than store-bought phyllo.  For my taste, ground beef is a bit heavy in the morning but the yogurt really helped to lighten it up.

The Verdict:

For Ease of Preparation:

Well, maybe I didn't just whip this one up in five minutes, but honest, it wasn't so bad and could totally be made ahead.

For Degree of Separation:

Pretty much anything with meat (that's not bacon) gets five Cheerios in this category.

For Guestability:

Although a bit weird for guests, you gotta admit it's quite impressive looking...

For Sustainability:

For Costability:

For Overall Appeal:

This was perhaps not the most delicious breakfast we've tried, but it was oddly satisfying.  In the future I might bring this back as a supper food.

It seems the Jumbo Breakfast Roll is not the only breakfast food to be immortalized in song!  Check out "Burek" by Bosnian musician Dino Merlin: