basic vietnamese flavors

These are the basis of so many of the recipes that I grew up with. Sort of traditional, very basic, easy to make, but so flavorful.

Vietnamese-Style Marinade for Pork and Beef
4 tbsp soy sauce
3 tbsp fish sauce
4 tbsp sugar
2 cloves garlic, minced
ground black pepper

Marinade meat for at least 30 minutes before grilling or pan frying (with some extra virgin olive oil). Makes for some pretty good pork chops, casual steaks, or stir fry. The soy sauce and fish sauce are both really salty and acts as a brine. Since salt is known to enhance the flavor of meats, and the meats absorb some of the marinade, the flavor permeates the meat entirely, instead of just staying on the surface like a rub or thicker marinade. The sugar caramelizes when cooking to give a really nice brown color and texture to the outside, not to mention a slightly sweet taste to balance out the saltiness of the brine.

Dipping Sauce (also known as fish sauce)
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tbsp sugar
3 tbsp water
squeeze of fresh lime, to taste
crushed or minced thai pepper, to taste

The term fish sauce is overloaded. Fish sauce refers to the bottle you buy at the store and the dipping sauce you create from the bottle, so one really has to pay attention to the context of how the term is used. I can't say how many of our family friends and my personal friends are repulsed by the initial pungent smell of this sauce.. (I'll spare you the explaination of where the pungency comes from) but after eating it, they are hooked...


Vietnamese-Style Coffee
Brewed coffee with chicory (Cafe du Monde or Chock full o'Nuts)
2 to 4 tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk

Spoon sweetened condensed milk into mug, pour brewed coffee over it and stir. Optionally, pour the mixture into an ice-filled glass for iced coffee.

The traditional way is to use a Vietnamese coffee press to make the coffee really strong and thick. However, there are several problems with this: (1) the coffee press lets some of the grounds through, (2) I don't like the design of the press, and (3) finding a press is surprisingly hard. Espresso is almost equivalent, but with the pressure brewing (instead of gravity/drip brewing), the chicory flavor is muted. So I just use my regular coffee maker to get the gravity brewing and just adjust the amount of coffee to my taste. No matter how you brew it, it all works, tastes great, and gives a crazy caffeine buzz.

Now time for the geeky food science side of me. Brewing coffee is similar to performing an extraction in a chemistry lab, minus the toxic chemicals. A good extraction (in terms of taste) is a function of surface area of the coffee (how finely it's ground), temperature, and time. Use coarser coffee for a slow brewing process (like drip brewing) and finer coffee for faster brewing (like espresso brewing with pressure). The pressure brewing gets only those first flavors from the coffee extraction and leaves all the bitter elements behind. Since the pressure brewing happens so quickly, the grounds have to be really fine to maximize the extraction effect for a strong coffee. Slower drip brews are good are better with coarser grounds since it takes more time for gravity to pull the water through the grounds and the filter. Using fine ground coffee in a drip brew gets a lot of the bitterness. The amount of bitterness that comes out of the grounds also depends on temperature. Water that is too cold doesn't get enough flavor out, water that is too hot results in terribly bitter coffee (from the oils in the beans). Optimal temperature that I've found is about 140-160 deg F for drip coffee, but of course if you use a coffee maker, you have no control over that. But some of us have fancy coffee presses.. not me though :) Clearly, the variables (surface area, temperature, and brewing time) are interrelated, and we don't have a good equation to describe it all, but empirically, we know when we brew drip coffee to use coarse grounds at 140 deg F and when we brew espresso coffee we raise the temperature and use finer grounds.

Just wait until I talk about tea. It really is an art and a science...