Blog
15.10.2009
For Bánhmì11, cooking is a means to an end, eating.
One of the biggest difference in running a stall selling food, compared to let’s say, organic soaps, is that you spend a lot of time preparing. It may seem obvious but for some reason, but it did not click to us when we started out, just how much cooking we will be doing for one day’s trading. First we started cooking on Friday night, then we started on Thursday and now we start on Tuesday.
Cooking in Bánhmì11’s kitchen is a slow and painstaking process, from the rhythmic beat of mortar and pestle pounding spices together to the whistle of the pressure cooker as the steaming hot container is lifted out and into a cold water bath. There is no short cut, just a string of small movements that must be followed meticulously. The recipe is a blue print, but cooking means looking away from the written words and at what’s stirring in the pot, what’s browning in the oven, and touching the tenderness of the meat, the crunchiness of the vegetables, the softness of tofu and mushroom, and feeling the heat of the pan, the coolness of fresh water, and smelling the scent of cinnamon simmering in red wine. It’s a sensory experience that is all consuming, that asks for your full focus and attention, that intertwines the mind and the heart and the body, like playing an instrument, in this case literally with pots and pans.
But cooking would be so easy if it was so soothing all the time. The truth is cooking is tiring – perhaps the last bastion of manual labor. Rolling pork takes strong hands, cutting out kilos of fat takes stamina, and standing up all day gives you a sore back. It’s exasperating, like that week when we went through twenty-three iterations of making pate to find the right recipe and reach the right texture. And sometimes it’s terrifying, like when we turned off the wrong stove and burned the chicken the night before market day, and had to start all over again. It’s an odd human triumph in the fight to keep food from perishing. It’s nature’s measure of its power, of showing you surprises and reflecting your most honest state of mind. It’s so difficult to cook a good meal when you are tired, or angry, or bitter and bored and it’s so effortless for food to taste good when you are unburdened and untroubled.
So the reason you cook, apart from satisfying a twice-a-day necessity to stay alive, is because you care. And usually it extends beyond yourself, since one rarely bothers to cook just for oneself. Our moms always complain but then they cook again every day, each meal as elaborate as the last one, in solitary silence except for the spinning of the ventilating fan. It’s not so much what’s enjoyed over the stove as what’s relished at the table. This is the one hour in the day when we sit together and chat. So in a way, cooking is always an act of preparation, of getting ready for something more intimate, more sharing and receiving.
Cooking is also about growing, and becoming independent, both as a literal act of being capable of feeding oneself, and metaphorically about coming out of the shadow of a parent. Almost every food memory starts with a matriarch figure, the mother or grandmother, stirring and sweating in a dim, hot kitchen, and you tugging at their feet, nearly invisible in a hurried chaos. And as we grow up, we move from the sink, peeling root vegetables and washing leaves, to the stove, mixing and blanching and concocting. This is where the transformation happens, where ingredients become dish, plants become nutrition and little girls become women.
When you are in the business of cooking, the pressure surmounts. The mistakes are hard to be forgiven. But the pleasure is the same, some of it is in cooking and most of it is in serving our food. In seeing customers’ reactions, in meeting people who come back to order more, in watching people share a Vietnamese baguette for the first time, in hearing our banh mi become a conversation topic, in knowing that the stall is a place to get together. That’s when food gains its soul, through the life that’s breathed in by the people who make it and the people who eat it.
That’s perhaps when we meet eye-to-eye over the counter not as roles, vendor and customers, but as persons, with first names. When we hear the longing for conversation in the voice of the middle-aged woman who comes at the end of the day, asking about the difference between artichoke and ginger and ginseng teas. When we catch a glimpse of curiosity in the child who stretches his arm toward the banh mi in the cart’s glass window, as his parent is dragging him away. When we watch people holding their banh mi warm in their hands, pulling it up from the baguette bag, pressing the bread together, examining and smelling before taking their first bite.
We love cooking. But we don’t love it because of the recipes, or the ingredients, or how aesthetically pleasing it is (which by the way is not always true, especially when you cooking with fresh liver and pork belly). We love cooking because we get to eat, and other people get to eat, and that in itself is a joyful and beautiful thing. Now there will be a pile of dishes to be washed, utensils to be cleaned and the floor to be mopped. And we can’t keep track of whether we just cooked for twenty people or a hundred and twenty and we just know that the endless cycle restarts every week. But still the sound of the crusty bread cracking in our hands, the succulent flavors of pate and roast pork and crunchy carrots, excite and satisfy us every time. We suppose that momentary sensation happens to every one, at least once, that’s why they come back. We certainly hope so.
Photo Credits: Phuong N. Nguyen
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09.10.2009
How Bánhmì11 celebrated our first Mid-autumn in London
Saturday was possibly the windiest day thus far this year. It also happened to be the eighth full moon of the lunar calendar and to celebrate Trung Thu, the Mid-autumn festival, Bánhmì11 put together our first event. Blocking the wind from the stall with two trolleys, shielding the oven and gas stove with a large collapsed carton box, we wondered if the wind would really let us keep the food warm. Rob had put double-weight under the umbrellas and double-clipped them next to each other, like connecting compartments in a beehive. When a big wind blew over, the entire construction shook, we retreated into the back of our collars and everyone froze for a moment, but despite the occasional pause; the strings held, the umbrellas withstood the wind and the stall continued its rhythmic activities until the end of the day. In the gusty wind, barely warm enough with our scarves, we put up decorations and the lanterns hung from pole to pole, like fragments of our childhood memories lingering under the London sky.
When we were children, Trung Thu was a time to make up with the kid who stole your pencil, to be out in the neighborhood and play tag all day, to forget about doing chores, to ask for our cousins to sleep over, and to stay up really late watching the moon. For weeks, we would have been picking out our lanterns, trading them with the other children, pleading with aunties and uncles to buy us yet another star-shaped one, with just the right color combination, lots of glitter, and lots of trimmings. When night falls, we lit our lanterns and went around our small alleys singing Mid-autumn songs, proud and loud like a well-rehearsed marching band, raising our lanterns toward the sky, or moving them on the ground so they spinned, wearing animal face masks and beating enthusiastically on drums. Under the moonlight, it was a spellbinding show and we participated with such intentional preparation, such ritualistic seriousness and such energetic excitement that made Mid-autumn night truly magical.
Growing up and going away from home, all these activities have faded away but the one thing that remains is that whenever possible, we always eat mooncake and this simple act alone, is enough to remember the spirit of Trung Thu. Before Saturday, we couldn’t eat any of the mooncakes, saving them for big day but we went back and forth over debating which type is really the best- shiny crispy golden banh nuong, or gooey white glutinous rice banh deo, and compounding our conundrum trying to figure out which combination of fillings is the tastiest, mung bean and lotus seed, or coconut and sesame, or egg yolk and sausage. On the day, we cut the mooncakes into small pieces, the way old people usually take them with tea, and shared them around. Perhaps the pastries looked a bit strange, if you haven’t seen them before, but for us last Saturday was as an authentic taste of Trung Thu as you could have ever tried.
No one knows when Mid-autumn became a children’s festival in the Far East, just like how Halloween is the most exciting event for children in the West. Somehow, when we tried to remember what growing up was like, those Mid-autumn nights always came to mind as the most vivid, magical moments and we kept walking down memory lane searching for more. In the colorful fabric of our childhoods, the songs, the lanterns, the stories of Trung Thu were the uncanny threads that stringed the years together. Because of this, we wanted to organize Trung Thu as an early Halloween, to share some of our joys growing up with the lovely children who visit our stall. We noticed that there are a lot of children who visit our stall, but often times they are left out of what we have to offer. They are not allowed to drink coffee and they eat bánh mì with only butter or pate. This was an occasion for us to spoil them with sweet moon cakes, colorful lanterns and fun animal face masks to share and play with others. As for treating the grown-ups, there was plenty of xoi xeo sticky rice, summer rolls goi cuon and chicken salad with Vietnamese herbs that our fabulous girlfriends helped making the night before. The only trouble was that we run out of food too early, so hopefully you got there in time for some mooncake!
London weather has a way of making mid-autumn seem almost like mid-winter, and we could see the soup taking longer to heat up and the bread growing cold and hard more quickly. But being amidst the hanging lanterns, seeing the children at the stall running around with their masks, we were reminded of how as children, we took everything around us more seriously than ourselves, believing in the things our eyes never saw, and through our imagination, every mindless thing came to life. Looking at the moon on Mid-autumn night, we really saw a boy sitting under a big banyan tree, looking down on us, just like the legend has it. We wish that somehow, for ourselves and those who work with us, looking forward and upward, we can see a vision of Bánhmì11 with the same childlike conviction and clarity, and together, we can turn it into a reality.
Photo Credits: Hoa Nguyen
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29.09.2009
Fun in the sun, homegrown food in Havana and other memories from Bánhmì11’s holiday to the jewel of the Caribbean.
The sails are up, raised proudly toward the vertical midday sun. In the cool breeze, they flutter like red and orange butterflies and our catamaran glides on the turquoise blue sea, powerful and yet graceful like a dancer leaping on air and touching the ground for only brief moments. On one side we see miles of glittering white sands, dry palm thatched beach umbrellas and red brick roofs. Here and there are groups of people, small and interspersed like miniature figurines in a toy box, ready to be picked up and played with by the chubby hands of children looking for amusement. On the other side, stretching toward the horizon, beyond the curve of the earth, is the sea, the serene, sparkling, blue and infinite sea. At the back steering the catamaran is our captain Rudolpho, singing old Spanish ballads and intermittently yelling “ca map”, God knows where this half Cuban, half Russian man picked up this Vietnamese word for shark, which gets us every time looking at each other bewildered, and then bursting out laughing. Life here, for a moment, really seems like a beach.
Cocooned within the realms on the resorts, first in Varadero and then on Cayo Santa Maria, our days took on a happy routine, full of physical activities and magical moments. We would get up at seven and head straight to the sea for a morning swim. The beach is almost always empty at this time and the sun is just rising, sparing us of the scorching heat of the rest of the day. The morning sea is spectacular – the sand is smooth, the waves are gentle, the seabed is sloped and shallow, the water is warm, not too salty, and underneath the clear surface, small silver fish swim at our feet, apparently undisturbed and perhaps even entertained by splashing humans. After swimming, we would snorkel around the nearby reef, walk along the beach, take salsa lessons on the terrace, go along with aquagym in the pool (Cuban style, which means a lot of touching, massaging and even squeezing other people’s nose), or simply lazy around on a beach chair with a book.
Sometimes we would break our routine for something more interesting, like going scuba diving from the Las Brujas marina. Our diving instructor was very charming, in that Latin way which means that he is on autopilot for flirting when in front of girls. We had barely sat down on the bus when he announced “I am going to marry one of you three…” and with a spontaneous decisiveness, he pointed at the the one of the us who sat closest to him and concluded with utmost conviction “You!”. We just bursted out laughing, which was probably a good thing because we were quite nervous. It rained the night before and the sky was all low gray clouds. Our boat looked like a rustic fisherman’s operation, with the exception of two rows of oxygen tanks along the sides. By the time we arrived near the coral and anchored, the boat was rocking violently amidst the heavy winds and strong waves. As we put our wet suits on, people started to throw up and were seasick even underwater. We were not in the calm Caribbean waters of Varadero but the mighty Atlantic ocean around Santa Maria. The seabed was shallow but visibility was poor. I held on tight to the hand of my partner, thirty-two year old IT engineer Alberto from Barcelona, whom we had only met a few moments ago. On land he was a complete stranger to me, but under water I held on to him as if my life depended on it. Without the sun, the corals looked not like the colorful underwater world of Ariel the mermaid, but a rugged prairie of yellow-green, willowy high grass. But the fish were very pretty; we saw big purple fish, small silver and yellow fish, octopus and even baby barracudas, long and slim like a knife. The flora and fauna could have been more interesting, but we were content with how well we did underwater, enduring two immersions of forty-five minutes each, and some of us emerging with still a quarter tank of oxygen left. No mean feat for three beginner uncertified divers in the Atlantic currents.
Now one can not travel without experiencing the food. In the resorts, food was unimaginative but abundant and we stuffed ourselves full three times a day. There was always a huge buffet in the main restaurant with everything you expect of a fancy cafeteria. And in addition there were at least three more sit-down restaurants, from romantic seafood criollo by the beach to steakhouse with air conditioning and white table cloths, and then there was the snack bar, the pool bar, the pizzeria, the ice cream parlor and the beer garden, all of which are dangerously enough included in the stay.
Back in Havana, we realized Cuba was the first place we travelled to where we wished we brought snacks along, more than when we were on road trip to Tibet or on safari in Kenya without refrigeration for weeks. Strolling the street of San Rafael near the Capitolio, we found out that the longest queues were not for the best restaurants, but the ration shops where people lined up with their tickets and stamps for the daily bread. There were oranges peeled with a peculiar machine, hot pizza being sold through the bars of a living room window, and pound cake with a top layer of creme caramel by the sidewalk, and soft ice being sold to Cuban children at 3 pesos monedad nacional but ten times more expensive at 1 pesos convertibles to foreigners.
We stayed at one of Bánhmì11’s friends’ parents’ house at the enviable address of Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, in the enviable area of Miramar, with a view to the sea and a private guard around the clock. But even in this stately residence, her mother grows their own vegetables and fruits, because in Cuba, money does not cure the shortages and scarcity of basic food stuffs. There was coconut, papaya, mango and orange trees in the garden. When we cooked squash and spinach, she went out to pick them as the water was boiling. When we steamed lobster, we went out searching for bushes of lemongrass and lime. Every week they travelled outside of Havana, all the way to the Matanzas countryside to local farms to buy chicken, eggs and milk, which we pasteurized at home by boiling and skimming out the cream. The rice we ate was carried in hand luggage from Mexico and there were three American sized fridges in the house, where everything from meat, mushrooms, to tomatoes and mangoes were frozen and stored for gradual consumption.
We ate with a guilty conscience, that perhaps this sumptuous meal was depleting the subsistent garden, that we did not know how long all this food had been saved up for us, that other people were making long trips in the heat so that we could have a smoothie in the morning. But although guilt may have crossed our minds, our stomachs were so satisfied and our hearts truly happy. Everything tasted so good, so fresh, so fragrant; the way organically grown, local, real, just-picked-from-the-earth food is supposed to taste, the way we remembered food tasted like when we grew up in Vietnam before pesticides and growth hormones became so available. We cooked simple dishes, fish soup with tomatoes and tamarind, minced pork sauteed with green onions, and they were more flavorful than the elaborate five-course meals we sometimes ate at home. Bananas were sweet from ripening on the tree and papayas were huge, with a layer of moss outside their skin but firm and fresh on the inside. We still had an appetite in the hot climate and we loved everything we ate, savoring each bite, enjoying each spoonful, not minding the preparing, cooking, dish washing (with a disintegrated sponge) cycle that repeated every few hours, from breakfast to dinner.
Outside of the home and when rationing is not a problem, Cubans showed how they really knew how to cook. Using a mix of very poor Spanish and English, we asked the staff at two hotels nearby for a good paladar, which is a private restaurant in a private residence, as opposed to the state-run restaurants and resorts we ate at for the most part of our trip. We were unanimously recommended to La Fontana, a place only a few blocks down where we lived. London has the underground restaurant scene, and Havana has the paladar scene, both acts of turning the mainstream food on its head and bringing it back into the private home. On the menu was ropa vieja made from lamb, which we did not have the courage to try but went instead for the tomatoes stuffed with crab and avocado, the fillet mignon special and the grilled red snapper special. The food was imaginative, but showing real reverence for the ingredients – from the crisp tomatoes to the ripe and melting avocado to the tender beef- exposing their flavors and leaving their tastes lingering in our mouths long after we have eaten.
Perhaps more importantly, all the staff was always smiling. The waiter was attentive without being intrusive. The sommelier was knowledgeable without showing off. The band approached our table and asked to play music, which meant that we should tip, without being hustling. And as the drummer played the favorite tune of our trip, “Chan chan”, on his bongo, his head was turned around to gaze at Shakira’s bedroom eyes on the screen, which made us smile too. Cuban men, they make no pretense for checking us out by the pool, whistling to us from their truck, crying out from the divider of the road for us to come and join them for beer, and blowing kisses everywhere. But we could laugh it off as they were not vulgar, not weird, just really friendly, really fun. No wonder the women here walk with their head tall, their clothes tight, their heels high and their behind shaking from side to side like they are dancing on a catwalk.
People speak about Cuba and the embargo in the same breath, with a tone of resentment, and pity. But rather selfishly, somehow we saw Cuba’s reluctance to be swept along the wind of change, the chase for prosperity, the race for global competitiveness in some aspects as a blessing for the island. Life here is certainly not glitzy, but the arts blossom. We saw amazing flamenco and salsa and Cuban son, where the dancers were graceful and daring like acrobats, sensual and colorful like carnival paraders. We heard music everywhere, even in the non-tourist quarters of Havana Vieja, where children beat plastic bottles against carton boxes to make the most amazing tunes. We rummaged the arts market and saw an impressive collection on Goya-like bursts of color in oil on canvas, somber black and white portraits of Che and contemporary images of Havana superimposed onto each other into collages. Life here is certainly not full of surpluses, but people are ingenuous with what they have. Plastic bags are washed and dried for reuse, water bottles are never thrown away and used as containers for everything, a plastic colander replaces bin liners and a plate works as cling film to cover food, trash bags are teared up to use in place of tape and sometimes when you really need it, even… condom rings substitute for rubber bands.
The supermarket shelves are empty but people have access to good healthcare. They are not obese, not diabetic and learned to dance, to swim before they could walk. The television has three or four channels of old documentary films but at night people gather around the Malecon, the 8-kilometer long promenade along the sea, watching the sunset, basking in the fresh breeze. Visiting the small village of Cojimar outside of Havana, tracing the footsteps of Hemingway for the thirty years he lived in Cuba, we imagined life here has not changed very much since he left.
Siting in darkness in the white wedding gazebo by the beach, looking up to the starry sky and half moon, listening to nothing but the sound of the waves, we felt like time stopped. We love Cuba because for the ten days that we were there, it turned a bunch of internet-addicts into active people who did not miss facebook, emails, text messaging or even phone calls. It taught us the simple pleasures of moving our hips and legs like we actually can hear a rhyme in our heads, and enjoying the constant companionship of each other without rescheduling to meet up for months. It taught us that t it was okay to smile to strangers who blow kisses at you from a truck, to get up on stage and dance along in the lime light, to breathe underwater while you are throwing up on your regulator. It taught us that it was possible to look great without having ever heard of any designer brand, to make exquisite food from simple ingredients, to listen to thoughts in our heads instead of always finding distractions, to find joy in introspection.
Cuba is easy to love, because we had a choice, to like it and return or hate it and leave. If given a choice between the makeshift plastic and carton jukebox and a computer game, between the street pizza through the window bars and the supermarket frozen meal, between slow moving serenity and the hectic but no-queues life, we can not tell which path Cuba would choose. One thing we do know, however, is that instead of feeling sad for the Cuban people, the way we feel many times traveling through the developing world, we feel envious of this gorgeous, dignified, smiling, and passionate people.
They say Cuba awaits imminent change, that you should go while the legacy is still intact, the way you should visit Tibet before the railroad came or Antarctica before the polar caps melt or South Pacific islands before they submerge. To us, Cuba did seem fragile, but only in that humorous way that a perfect day at the beach may be wrecked by the rain, a perfect meal may be ruined by biting mosquitoes, a perfect mojitos may be thwarted without the yerba buena. Sometimes somethings are too good to hide in memories…and that’s why we will keep coming back for more. Viva Cuba y Hasta Luego!
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16.09.2009
Last minute thoughts prior to take-off
We are on the plane now, heading first to La Habana, Varadero and then wherever else reading Lonely Planet on the plane may inspire us to do. Having planned this trip before we started making bánh mì, we passed our friends the baton to pick up and run with Bánhmì11 for a couple of weeks. When we started out, we thought it was going to be a solitary exercise. We had had it in our heads for so long that we forgot other people might be thinking the same way. But as Bánhmì11 has grown, it has taken a life of its own, drawing in people with a magnetic pull that exceed the sum of our personal charisma.
People come to Bánhmì11 and make a contribution in different ways. Some come on Wednesdays to help with the initial preparation of the meat and pate. Some come on Fridays to help with cooking in the evening and stay over to Saturday mornings to help us finish up. Some come to the stall to take pictures for the photoblog. Some help us with concept for the website and photo shoots. Everyone generously give their time, thoughts and creativity. Bánhmì11 has somehow become a voice, a quiet nudging to move beyond preparing for the next big thing in life to doing the small things that matter now, holding on to each other even when we may be stumbling every step of the way. We met a friend of friends on the train to a wedding in Wales this weekend and we started talking about bring weekly specials to Bánhmì11. We met up last night at Viet Grill for a special treat of off-menu dining and discussed a collaboration for a photo shoot, with a professional model/ actor whom we have only met twice. Almost strangers as we may be to each other, our stories were similar. Bánhmì11 envelops our conversations and gets under our skin even in our sleep. Every post we write, every photo we take, everyone debate we have over the future of Bánhmì11, is a collaborative act of self-expression, of wanting to explode the boundaries. Perhaps it is about challenging the notion of choosing between a career that makes money and one that makes a difference, where we have made a compromise but our friends are about calling out the out-dated stereotypes about a country and a people, or about pacifying an unsatiated appetite for good food and good company.
As we leave our friends the weight of keeping Bánhmì11 alive and running for the next two weeks, we are not unaware of the joys it brings and the shadows it casts on their lives. There will be times when they juggle to finish what they do at work and what they do for Bánhmì11, when they struggle to do more on less sleep, when they risk our friendship over an idea, when their hands and feet are tired and they must not sit down because then the fatigue really hits them. And hopefully, there will also be times when they smile over a problem solved, when they sigh a sigh of relief over the food that taste as it should, when they bubble with excitement over the faces that they recognize.
At the wedding this weekend, the mother of the bride made a speech that brought tears to our eyes. She asked the in-laws to take care of her daughter because she does not live in the UK, to embrace her with her flaws, to love her as part of the family. Now that we leave Bánhmì11 in the trusty hands of our friends this week, we ask you to give them the same support and guidance you have given us. Maybe they will make mistakes that we can all learn from. Maybe they will make improvements that change the direction we move in. As always though, enjoy Bánhmì11 for what it is and we will be thinking of you all, with lots of love from Cuba!
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11.09.2009
A story of the dish that travelled outside its terroir and gained the taste for another place.
One day Caitlin, will you be cooking this too?
In her first episode of “The French Chef” in 1963, Julia Child made boeuf bourguignon. Wonder if she knew that half way around the world, in a country whose headlines probably shared much airtime with her cooking show in those years, there were people who did not only replicate the dish, but made an adventure out of it and created bò sôt’vang. Bò sô’t vang is what Vietnam did with boeuf bourguignon, in a similar way that Vietnam took the baguette and turned it into bánh mì. Vietnam took out the clear, immediately pleasing olive oil, thyme, parsley, and put in subtle, complex, slow-cooking cinnamon, cardamom, star anise and annatto seeds. Bò sôt’vang is the dish that left Burgundy’s blue sky and rolling landscapes of vineyards to come to Indochina’s fiercely flowing red rivers, monsoon rains of the South and wet and windy winters of the North.
Like Julia Child, Vietnam adored French food. It absorbed French influences many years before Americans came to love French food. But Vietnamese cuisine did not lose itself in French food, did not worship and did not fuse. It humbly took note, was somewhat seduced, but ultimately remained indifferent. It doesn’t evolve into a world where chefs are celebrities and cooking shows are primetime television. It doesn’t label “classically trained” chefs as those who reduce sauces, cook root vegetables sous-vide, pan sear fish and make perfect soufflé. But it remains a culinary experience of the people, who learn cooking at home, with basic equipments and everyday ingredients.
The way bò sô’t vang came about, we always imagined, was when a Vietnamese woman tasted boeuf bourguignon and remembered how it tasted and how it smelled. She didn’t have recipes and specialist supermarkets. She guessed how it must have been cooked and used ingredients whose flavors she could imagine. She even substituted red wine with vine leaves. She made it for the family to enjoy and later on she invited guests to taste. From this point, like with all other dishes in the Vietnamese repertoire, bò sô’t vang was passed on from mother to daughter, from family to family. In the absence of cookbooks, cooking shows, food critiques and ranked restaurants, the dish is preserved only by the power of word-of-mouth and the memory of the palate.
That was still the way we learned bò sôt’vang a few years ago in Woodside. We would drive our grocery to the most reluctant culinarily talented couple we knew and crashed their dinner, pretending to contribute with whatever we had picked up that afternoon. We love the dish because like a good companion, it was slow to simmer but quick to comfort. When it’s getting cold outside and we are feeling weary inside, our most acute need is perhaps the very basic one, to be fed spoonfuls of a warm, sweet, and spiced stew.
These days we still have an appetite for bò sô’t vang, which is why we have started making it at Bánhmì11. But we are learning that apart from a good appetite, more experimenting and better technique is needed. Last week the soup was so overwhelmingly sweet from bone marrow stock that you could pour it over noodles and make pho sô’t vang. Corn flour made the soup opaque and cancelled out the vibrant colors of tomatoes. And while coriander added a nice garnish, it only looked good in the beginning but bemused the taste.
So…while we measure our experience with bò sô’t vang in years, it has been around for decades. It has travelled far and long through space and time. If a dish can do that, how can we not love it and follow it?
Photo Credits: Boni Lin
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