Blog
27.07.2009
Bánhmì11 is donating 50% of this week’s (1/8/2009) trading profits to a development project in Thanh Binh, Vietnam
Back in 2005, I was lucky to spend a summer in rural Vietnam, first Ben Tre and then Can Gio province, on a volunteer project. We joined thousands of Vietnamese students in the Mùa Hè Xanh or Green Summer campaign to teach and work on infrastructure projects. Although we were supposed to be the teachers, we came out stronger for the lessons we learned from the children and local communities. I took home a box of hand-written notes the students wrote us before we left and little crafts they made out of shells or palm leaves. I got to see a part of Vietnam which I would have been sheltered from if I never left the country in the first place. It made me laugh, it made me cry and most of all, it made me remember to return.
This month, from August 2 to 12, one of Bánhmì11’s first friends, Wenqi Chow, will embark of a trip with 14 fellow Singaporeans in collaboration with YMCA Vietnam to go to the district of Thanh Binh in the Dong Thap Province, about 250km from Ho Chi Minh City. They will be refurbishing the infrastructure of the local school and as part of the process provide some basic English lessons to the village children. They need to raise at least $3000 to cover the minimum cost of the project, including building materials and transportation. Any excess they raise will given to YMCA Vietnam after to provide study materials for the students.
To this end, Bánhmì11 pledges to give 50% of this week’s trading profit to the group. So if you are picking a Saturday to come out to Broadway Market, come this week because you know you can get a great bánh mì as always and your pounds will be traveling all the way to Vietnam to make an impact on many young people’s lives.
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26.07.2009
Bánh mì is best enjoyed when shared with friends.
Friday night past 10pm and the heat is on in Bánhmì11’s kitchen. With all four burners in use, the pate is entering its forth hour and slowly simmering into a cohesive mass. The carrot and daikon radish are julienned and the cabbage is shredded. Squeezing brine out of them, the limes’ sourness and the chili’s spiciness pierce through my gloves and leave a burning sensation on my fingers. The handful of vegetables shrinks to fit neatly inside my palms. But my pickle, deemed not dry enough, is promptly formed into a ball and squeezed again by bà Trinh.
The pate is cooled and we nervously flip it over. As we lift the container, the pate slowly releases the edges and slides off nicely like a cake. With a lack of control not dissimilar to baking, there is no turning back as you can not fix the texture or taste of pate once it has been cooked. With the hours invested in the final product and trying to make everything as fresh as possible, we really don’t have a margin for error.
When people ask us how our bánh mì is so different than any other places, we think this is the reason. We spend a lot more time cooking the resolutely old-fashioned, family-made way. The flavors seem to speak for themselves as by 2:40pm on Saturday we were sold out of all bánh mì. When we ordered double of the number of baguettes from our baker this week, we thought we might be stuck with quite a few left over to eat until the beginning of next week. But the queues just kept forming and we couldn’t make bánh mì fast enough.
We introduced a vegetarian option, which was very well received. While you may have a difficult time finding a truly vegetarian meal in Vietnam, that is not cooked with lard or meat broth or fish sauce, there is wealth of wonderfully tasty dishes in the cooking of Buddhist monks. Drawing on this heritage, Bánhmì11 has created a vegetarian option where the complex juxtaposition of tastes, textures and temperatures in a traditional bánh mì is not lost. The softness of tenderly crumbled fresh tofu mingles with the crunchiness of black dry mushroom and glass noodles and even as an adamant carnivore, you may have a hard time resisting.
Icing on the cake this week was all our friends who showed up at Broadway Market. You came and you brought so many friends and family, or in some cases, your pet. You gave us many critical and honest comments, for which we are truly grateful. We couldn’t really chat but we hope you had a good time and experienced that same special feeling that we got when we came to Ca Phe VN stall the first time. We will make a few improvements next week, fine-tuning the made-to-order process and enhancing the recipe, so that we may be deserving of your support.
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20.07.2009
In the race to make the perfect bánh mì, the bread must not be left behind.
It was almost over. By 3:15pm we had an order for three bánh mì, to be followed by one for seven with jumbo fillings and we were sold out. As quickly as the market turned bustling around 11am, activities ground to a halt by 4pm and the only people left are the large groups engrossed in their own conversations until closing time.
We called this Saturday the relaunch of Bánhmì11. Our focus was on the bread, finding the perfect baguette to encase our hand-crafted fillings, to accentuate, not attenuate, the flavors and textures. We wanted to work with an independent small local business. With big industrial suppliers, bread is never made from scratch on the premises. Pre-packaged, frozen dough is hardly thawed before it is shoved into the oven by a different employee everyday.
So we cycled around our area. Initially looking for a Turkish bakery on the vast stretch of Turkish businesses along Kingsland Road. Turkish are famous for their bread and they do mid-size rolls that reminds us of bánh mì Nhu Lan. Perhaps the only bánh mì in Vietnam that have established a brand, bánh mì Nhu Lan lacks the authentic goodness of a street grub but compensates by the fact that you can count on hygiene and make-me-twenty-bánh-mì-while-I-wait-on-my-motorbike-with-the-engine-on efficiency. So perhaps Turkish bread could work.
But then again, it is not an industralized bánh mì that we want to make at Bánhmì11. So instead we found The Spence Bakery. Next to the greenery of Clissold Park and tucked in the village of Stoke Newington Church Street, The Spence are composed of two instantly recognizable orange store fronts, a bakery and a sister cafe across the street. Katherine and Alex bake all their bread daily on the premises. When we entered the bakery, Anh’s mom almost jumped up with joy. She said without even tasting, just looking at the color of the bread she knew it was good enough. The smaller demi-baguettes have been kneaded so beautifully that the deep diagonal slits expanded vigoriously revealing a light golden brown crust that arose from the inside. Breaking the bread, the crust cracks into small pieces that fall onto the ground instead of sticking onto your hand. Inside the baguette is milky white with a holey crumb structure. When you taste the bread, it is mild without a hint of sourness. The baguette is made with French wheat and baked on the premises daily, no wonder they taste so wholesome!
So now we are back to basics, starting with a demi-baguette that looks and tastes gorgeous. The way it is made reflects the heritage of bánh mì and the way its owners operate the business converges with Bánhmì11’s values. By every measure, our bánh mì is fabulous, we think. But its consistency will need to stand the test of time and the scepter of bad bread, bad business is never really very far away.
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12.07.2009
All good things have a difficult beginning…
In memory of my bike...
As we fold up the last chair and close the van, Rob sums up our first
day trading: “Let’s put that down to experience, shall we?”.
Twenty-three bánh mì on our official launch is not bad, given that it
was horrible weather and most other market traders claimed it was a
disastrous day. Absent almost all of CapheVN regulars and we still
managed to reach half of our target number. It would not have gone
down in history as a day that was not meant to be, if not for the fact
that my bike was stolen right in front of our eyes a few minutes
before closing. Not happy about losing my bike!
When we decided to do bánh mì, we knew we were getting into the deep
end. Even with Anh’s mom being a bánh mì professional, making the
Vietnamese baguette in the UK is a different game. After our
successful trial runs, none of us could foresee that our bread
supplier would turn out to be a source of grief. The New York Times
called making bánh mì “a race against death” because the bread needs
to be fresh. For all the wonderful fillings that we make from scratch
at home, the meat that is hand-picked from a specialist butcher at
5am, the daikon radish that needs to be soaked with in brine and
squeezed out of water five times, we have lost the battle when the
bread that encases these ingredients is not consistent. Our bread
today was a doughy mess that refused to turn crunchy regardless of how
long we heated it in the oven. The crust was a pale color that
suggested it had not been raised or baked at the right temperature.
This was our first management lesson, when you outsource a process,
you also lose control over it.
So we owe our customers today a heartfelt “sorry” for the bread. Hence
the B.Y.O.B promotion. If you bring your own baguette, we will make
you a bánh mì for £1.50, instead of the usual £2.50 price. As said, we
want to make bánh mì and be the best at it. Before we can open our own
bakery and control the consistency of the bread, we are open to new
sources of good baguette. Share with us your baguette and where you
got it from. If we end up with your baker as our supplier, we shall
give you free bánh mì for a year!
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