Must experience foods of Vietnam

Vietnamese food is distinct and truly unforgettable. Vietnamese cuisine breathes simplicity and that’s why some of the best dishes in Vietnamese cuisine can be best eaten by the side of the road and it’s just this simplicity with its subtle variations and fresh ingredients that make you just pull a stool at the road side stall. 

In Vietnam, whether food or drink the road side is where the action is and hence my blog is going to mention only some of my favorite but also most frequently found dishes of Vietnam.

Here are the top things I learnt about Vietnamese food:

•        Vietnamese food is all about bun and broth where bun means noodles and broth is just clear soup.
•          All Vietnamese food has rice in some form or the other. It could be in the form of noodles, fried rice or even in pancake form.
•          Their most famous desert is sticky sweet rice in various flavors which give its varying colours.
•        Vietnamese food is best eaten with   chopsticks
•          Vietnamese food includes a lot of greens. The best way to eat the greens is to either have it stir fried or just dip and have it in a broth
•          Vietnamese love their coffee. Vietnamese coffee is strong and is best had cold or hot without milk. Its aroma just wafts through your senses and makes you scramble to a shop for your own cuppa

Some of my most loved dishes of Vietnam are given below:

1. Pho

Pho is the one of the most famous dish of Vietnam.It is a sweet salty noddle soup made of a chicken or beef broth with a sprinkling of herbs and a few pieces of chicken or beef on the top. The fragrant broth has star anise, clove and cinnamon to lend a natural sweetness to the soup and this wholesome meal that can be eaten anytime of the day but is generally eaten by the Vietnamese at breakfast.

The average cost of a bowl of Pho would be approx. VND 20,000-30,000

2. Bun cha for lunchtime:

Bun Cha is a chicken or Pork broth with containing several different ingredients. You have patties of seasoned pork marinated pork belly over a coal fire in a sweet salty liquid medium. There is a bowl of heavy broth with fish sauce, a basket of fresh herbs and greens and a bowl of rice noodle all in given to you separately.  Now you have to just mix all these ingredients together and create your own Bun cha. This dish has a perfect balance of sweet with sour and salty flavors all bundled in one mouthful. The average cost of a bowl of Pho would be approx. VND 30,000-35,000

3. Banh mi

The French bought with them the baguette but the Vietnamese have taken it to an entirely different level. The Baguette is toasted stuffed with meats, pickled veggies and fresh herbs  like coriander and veggies like carrots and cucumber too put together inside the baguette with a spicy sauce to tantalize your taste buds. You can just carry it with you wherever you go. The meat in the baguette can vary from pork to chicken, tuna or even egg. My favorite Banh mi is the Pork Banh mi and you can find the Banh mi at every street corner. You will be pleasantly surprised to see even  the most ubiquitous anonymous mobile cart vendor will make a tasty and lip smacking take away sandwich.

My favorite stalls in the Hanoi old quarter was Vie tling  Banh Mi, Banh Mi 25 and a small road side alley towards the right St Josephs cathedral. But my advice is to just walk along Hanoi and try any street corner vendor for an authentic  Banh Mi experience and I can assure you that you wouldn’t be disappointed.

The average price for a banh mi is VND 10,000- 15,000

4. Salmon Hot pot: A hot pot of Pink salmon is hard to ignore in this cold weather. It is made of salmon or Sturgeon which is fished from the many rivers and lakes in Sapa. Packed with  omega 3 fats, it is the tastiest fish served in a hot bowl of fish broth, rice noodles and greens like spinach and watercress. You can add a spicy fish sauce to spice the soup. It is served innovatively with a portable stove and you can cook the sturgeon on your own in a bowl of hot steamy broth. Once the fish is cooked, you take it out into your bowl so that it’s not overcooked and keep adding the noodles and greens to the boiling water as you require.

It costs around VND 500.000 for a pot which can be shared by 4 people.

5. Rau Muong: Vietnamese love their greens and that’s what keeps them healthy. Morning glory is stir fried green leafy vegetables with some potentially serious amount of garlic and a little fish sauce. It is commonly had along with a drink.

6. Com rang – This is Vietnamese fried rice, similar to Chinese fried rice but using all the local ingredients. What’s distinctly different is the type of rice which is slightly brownish and fatter than normal. The rice and the veggies are stir fried in a fish sauce which gives the rice its distinct flavor.

7. Goi Cuon

Fresh Transparent spring rolls with greens, meat, prawns and noodles. These are small morsels of precooked shrimp or pork with fresh herbs and veggies all snugly bundled up together and covered with thin and almost transparent rice sheets. All you got to do is dunk these little rolls into some hot spicy hoisin sauce and put the whole bundle into your mouth.

8. Barbe que : The Vietnamese  refer to these as BBQ and is pronounced as Be Be Q.  Over the weekends, at every street corner you can find an ubiquitous Vietnamese lady in her traditional hat bending over her unique and tempting selection of BBQ. Be it port or shrimp or chicken or just sausages, barbequed to perfection and laced with a spicy sweet sauce to tingle your taste buds. They make BBQ of fish, prawns, calamaris, pork, chicken, beef steaks, horse meat, scallops, sausages and even eggs. The eggs with their shells on are BBQed to give you a charcoal flavoured boiled egg.  The most different among them all is the BBQ rice in the hollow bamboo stalk. Try it at any small stall beside the street. My favorite place to try BBQ was the Sapa market street which has so many shops by the road each serving a different types of BBQ.

9. Caphe Trung – Vietnamese love their coffee. You can have Vietnamese coffee wither hot or iced and with or without Milk (sua). But Egg coffee is something totally different. It is more of a desert and is usually had in the evening or after dinner. It was created during the days when there was a shortage of milk. But today Caphe Trung is as creamy as it can get. It gets its creamy texture from the egg yolk which is blended to a thick foam and then mixed with strong Vietnamese coffee and condensed milk to give you a wonderfully  rich flavor. 

10. Che or caramel:

This is a desert bowl containing jelly bean, coconut milk, some tropical frut and topped with some ice. It’s just the desert you need to end your scorching hot day. It is filled with tropical fruits like bananas, mangoes etc along with coconut cream, crushed eyes and jellies. You will find this at a corner near the ho kiem lake late at night (aprox 10 pm).  Similar to Che, Vietnamese also create a crème caramel dunked in coconut milk and served on a bed of crushed ice.

11. Bia Hoi

Bia Hoi literally translates in Vietnamese to beer for everyone. And believe me this is the freshest and the cheapest draft you could get anywhere in the world. It is brewed daily in drums beside the road and offered in a jug. Containing just 3 percent of alcohol, it’s served in a jar filled with ice cubes. Vietnam is probably the only place in the world that serves you beer with ice cubes in it. This local fresh brew stays just for a day and is the most refreshing beer I have ever tasted.

I would aptly describe Vietnamese food as soul food as it has all the food in their freshest form. So dig in, enjoy Vietnamese food and be ready to let all the flavors explode in your mouth like a sweet sour spicy bomb.