Cooking The Books

Bun (Cha and Bo Hue)

In the second installment of the soups of Vietnam we have another soup that takes its name from the noodles in it, this time the round cross sectioned rice noodle/vermicelli - bun.

In its most simple guise this is just like any plain noodle soup, said noodles in meaty stock with some spring onions no doubt.  What goes in alongside can make it pretty special though.

Our first encounter was Bun Cha where the base soup was joined by fresh bamboo shoots (incomparable to the tinned variety) and delightful pork kebab meat.  Chunks of fat and lean were well seasoned and coated with sesame seeds then cooked over an open flame for that inimitable taste.  All this effort for breakfast too.

The second Bun was in Hue, where it took the town's name to make 'Bun Bo Hue'.  Bo means beef and outside of the meat the main difference was the stock.  Gone was the plain affair, replaced by a more fragrant broth topped with a red, oily film of chili. Again this was served first meal of the day.

In both forms it was served with lime wedges and chili on the side so you can adjust the hot and sour to your liking.

Later that day in Hue I attended a cooking course where we learned to make said dish so i can post the first recipe on this blog for a long time.

A Cock and Bull Story

...Or something along those lines anyway.

A while back Paul Merton did a series travelling through China and one place he stopped at was a Beijing restaurant specialising in animal penises.  If I remember currently they had all kinds, from the small (dog) to the large (donkey), believing that as well as tasting good they also help the libido.  I also thought he'd said it was a fairly pricey establishment.  When back in China in made a few inquiries but my suspicions were confirmed and it was way above my unemployed-for-the-last-6-month budget.

As luck would have it though I went out for a meal in Hanoi and nestled amongst the various noodles, spring rolls and stir-fries was the delectable sounding 'Bull's Penis in Herbal Soup'.  Luckily my companions shared my open mindedness to food and we cracked on.

The soup wasn't the nicest looking dish, all brown and lumpy, but it did smell pleasant.  We'd eaten lots of herb rich Chinese broths in Malaysia and although they don't seem to have travelled to the UK much they're very good.  Here we had their familiar odour with a good dose of cow flesh too, albeit it a specific part of flesh.

A root around in the soup showed there was two very distinct types of meat in there.  The first was very soft, offal like in texture as it lacked the striations of muscle.  The second was seemingly just big lumps of gristle.  I'll be the first to admit I'm not an expert on the male genitalia, cow or otherwise, but there is one I know pretty well and I just can't find any big gristly lumps on him anywhere.  My guess is that when harvesting these fellows a good portion of their support framework is taken too.

The soft stuff, which I can only assume is the shaft and helmet, was very tasty.  Meaty in taste and with the aforementioned soft texture of an organ.  The gristly stuff was some of the most challenging things I've ever eaten, they were literally 1cm by 3cm cylinders of what tasted like pure gristle, each taking a good couple of minutes chewing to get down.  Why folk would eat them for pleasure I do not know, a view shared by the rest of the party.

Whilst it was good to knock it off the list I'm not sure I'd be rushing back for more penis but, as Gordon Ramsay would say, 'Bull's penis - done!'

Bit Tet

In a quest to find somewhere local to eat in Hanoi we headed north from Bia Hoi corner (a cross roads of 10p beer joints) in search of some street food.  After only a couple of blocks we were rewarded with the familiar asian site of lots of red and blue plastic tables and chairs, stuffed to the rafters with locals.  Perfect.

We took our seats and started to browse the menu.  Whilst doing so I perused the tables around us, equally happy to point rather than speak my order, to see if anything looked tasty.  I noticed a couple of tables sat eating what looked like plates of crinkle cut chips and gravy.  I maybe a southerner through and through but I'm proud to enjoy this great northern delicacy so set upon putting my case forward to the others in my group.  Being surrounded by long term travellers it wasn't hard to convince them we needed some Western food.  We asked the waitress for some and she replied 'Beefsteak?'.  Not only was it chips and gravy, hidden underneath was a dinky little 4 oz steak, a throwback to the French colonial days I can only assume.  Does it get any better than this?

It was only after ordering that I noticed literally everyone in the restaurant had ordered it alongside other dishes.  A glance to my left showed why as a 10 foot banner announced Bit Tet (beef steak) in foot high red letters, complete with 2 foot wide photo of said beef steak.  Seems we'd stumbled upon a steak specialist.

Whilst the steak would win no prizes (well outside the value prize anyway, it was a mighty £1.25) stood up against 10 oz of 28 day aged, drippingly rare Longhorn it was damn good.  It was well browned yet tender, the gravy more a garlic and pepper sauce with the once crisp chips yielding to it in parts in soggy edged defeat.  If that wasn't good enough after near half a year of rice and noodles it came with a crusty baguette, another throwback to colonial days, which was perfect for mopping the plate clean.

Western food without the guilt.  I like.

Pho

With China gone it was time to enter Vietnam, which in the culinary scheme of things isn't too much of a hardship as what I've had of their food in London's Vietnamese establishments is pretty special.

If you had to think of one dish as being Vietnam's most famous then I think few would argue against pho (pronounced nearer fer, with its 6 or 7 tones Vietnamese is a challenging language to say the least), the noodle soup that takes its name from the tagliatelle shaped rice noodles in it.  Normally coming in bo (beef) or ga (chicken) varieties, along with the noodles and meat spring onions and various herbs - coriander/cilantro, Thai basil or mint - tend to make an appearance.  The stock is always meaty and savoury - due to the preponderence of boiled meat here it has normally had had a good few joints of meat boiled in it - and flavour is added from barbecued ginger and onions too.

In London a pho tends to be an elaborate affair, alongside your noodle soup you get a separate bowl with beansprouts, chillies, lime wedges and the aforementioned herbs.  In the north of Vietnam, where the best pho is meant to come from, it's a much simpler affair.  A bowl of noodle soup with chili sauce on the table, you're either given lime wedges of there's a jar of squeezed lime on the table.  I'm guessing London's Vietnamese are of the southern variety.

Either way, once your lime and chili are in you're left with a hot sour noodle soup that is one of the world's greatest.  Best of all it is your de facto Vietnamese breakfast so you don't have to wait too long after getting up before getting your first of the day in.  I'm a big believer in spicy noodle soups as hangover cure - lots of salty liquid to rehydrate, carbs from the noodles and a burst of chili to wake you up and clear the throat - and with Hanoi's local brew 'bia hoi' costing about 10p a glass (literally, 3000 dong at 29,000 dong to the pound) it came in handy on a few occasions.

Our first two phos were within an hour of crossing the border.  My lack of Vietnamese meant I'd have to wait for the archetypal beef pho but the chicken was good still and the crisp skinned pork belly slices in the pork pho were a revelation.  The yearning for China was starting to wane already.

Shortly into our trip a new food obsessed German friend, who'd I'd first met in China two months back and happened to be passing through Hanoi from the south as we entered from the north, suggested a trip to Pho Gia Truyen.  He'd read it was the best pho in Hanoi and as Hanoi has the best pho in Vietnam and Vietnam the best pho in the world...  You see where I'm going.

The establishment is at 49 Bat Dan, right by the tourist centre of Hanoi, but when we went it was all locals, all pushing to get to the front of a queue to place their order, take their pho and find somewhere to sit.  This is a purist establishment serving simply pho bo, no chicken or pork, but you do get the choice of 3 types of beef.  Most places just have raw beef, which gets a quick swilling in boiling stock prior to a near raw addition to your bowl.  Alongside this Pho Gia Truyen also sold thin slices of cooked beef and thicker slices of a more striated beef, a brisket maybe, simmered till near falling apart.  Being a greedy Westerner I took all three.  It was damn good pho, greatly helped by the 3 types of beef and the tastes and texture they afforded.  It was all about the beef though, a lot of the Hanoi pho have a plain - albeit it very good - stock but here the aromatics were more noticeable.  Certainly my favourite pho but it's not for me to call the world's best.

Mapo Doufu

This is a special post for me.  Back when I started this blog in October 2007 mapo doufu was the first dish I blogged.  I'd just bought Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cuisine and fallen in love with the dish and the cuisine.  Sichuan became a food mecca for me and here I am finally there.  What more fitting a dish for my first Sichuan meal in Sichuan than mapo doufu?

For those that don't know ma po dofu is an oily beef and tofu concoction, heavily spiced with Sichuan pepper and chili.  Chewy beef and soft tofu combine with the fiery seasoning in culinary heaven.  In Chengdu there's a chain of restaurants specialising in the dish and taking its name so we headed across to Chen Mapo Doufu to try it out.

When I've read about Sichuan pepper people always speak of the numbing effect of it - how it leaves your lips tingling - and whilst I've noticed it a bit in dishes I've cooked at home nothing could prepare me for this.  Sichuan pepper must not travel too well because here the numbing effect was most pronounced - citrusy, zingy, lip tingling like food has never left me before.  I've heard that rural dentists in the region use Sichuan pepper prior to dental work and whilst I wouldn't fancy root canal treatment after it I can well believe the story.

I'd also heard that the Sichuan food in London is toned down for the British palate.  Anyone that's eaten in Bar Shu or Snazz Sichuan may find this hard to believe (a friend said his body won't let him believe Bar Shu food is toned down) but I can confirm this to be true.  This mapo doufu was possibly the hottest thing I've ever eaten.  By the end I really thought I could take no more and the girlfriend threw in the towel after one mouthful.

Whilst we're confirming things anyone with Fuchsia Dunlop's books may have thought the 100ml of oil in the Mapo recipe was a misprint.  It wasn't.  Sichuan Mapo Doufu is basically tofu and beef swimming in lip numbing, tastebud destroyingly hot oil.  Tasty tofu and beef swimming in lip numbing, tastebud destroyingly hot oil but tofu and beef swimming in lip numbing, tastebud destroyingly hot oil nevertheless.