Pho - mabye the best noodle soup ever

Can't really write about Vietnamese food without mentioning this one, it's my favorite noodle soup dish in the whole wide world!

The broth is a very hearty beef one, subtly spiced with star anise, cloves, cinnamon and ginger. It's poured over rice noodles and thin slices of raw beef tenderloin, barley cooking the surface of the tenderloin, keeping most of it raw. Then everything is topped with raw onion rings, fresh leaves as Thai basil, mint and cilantro. For a perfecting touch, a few slices of chilli and some lime juice.

In "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen" this is one of the most complicated recipes. The broth takes at least half a day to make. Also, marrowbones are really hard to get here and they are unreasonably expensive. I really need to befriend a butcher (anyone?) cause I find that a bit strange considering how much beef there is around. But, after airing those complaints, this is something definitely worth trying out. I think it's something about the combo of the superior home made broth, nearly raw meat, fresh leaves and perfectly balanced tastes in the condiments that makes this a totally sublime dish.

And about the child factor. Keeping it simple, cutting out the toppings, generally works in my household. That means some noodles, some broth and some meat and you're home.

Roasted Chicken with Carrot and Daikon Pickles and Greens

The Viet name of this chicken dish is Gá Rô-ti, revealing a relationship to the French Rotisserie Chicken. This has been my go-to technique for chicken lately because it's got the best "amount-of-work to taste ratio" of any chicken recipes I know of. You just pick out any cuts you like, dump them in a marinade for a while. The one suggested in "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen" contains lots of garlic, soy sauce, salt, pepper, sugar and oil, but you can really use any marinade. Then the chicken is put in a foil clad baking dish and baked in the for 20 to 40 minutes depending of the size of the pieces.

The vegetable chapter in "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen" is the only one I'm not completely happy with. There are not so many recipes and the vegetables used are not generally vegetables I'm very fond of. Daikon is used a lot. I'd love to like it but I just don't understand the East Asian fascination with it. That said, I still give it a chance every now and then to see if it has grown on me. In this salad it's grated with carrot and put into a sweet and sour brine. It's an ok side dish, but nothing I'll be doing again any time soon.

Deep Fried Wontons

Before frying

I don't think that this recipe is especially Vietnamese, these type of wontons are found all over East Asia. The filling is made from ground pork, chopped pieces of shrimp, scallions and seasoning. Then it's wrapped into wonton wrappers and deep fried until the meat inside is done.

What is Vietnamese though is the dipping sauce that goes with the wontons. At least half of the recipes in this book has some sort of dipping sauce on the side. The most simple one is just fish sauce, water and chillies. The more elaborate contain chicken livers, ready made Hoi Sin sauce and a lot more. The dip sauce recommended for these is a middle-of-the-road one. Some fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, chillies, vinegar, garlic and water to dilute with.

Lets just say, this is not for the calorie conscious. Me and my husband shared the whole batch of wontons just the two of us, and I wasn't hungry until in the afternoon the next day...

After frying

About deep frying, I'm not very confident with it, cause I'm scared of oil fires. Actually, my husbands did the deep frying of these beauties. But if you don't have anyone to do your dirty work for you, some pointers for success when deep frying:

• Turn the kitchen fan off 
• Keep a lid on the side as oil fires can only be put out by suffocation, not with water.
• While the oil is warming, keep some bread cubes on the side and toss one into the oil every now and then. When the bread turns golden within a few seconds, the oil is warm enough for start frying.
• If the oil starts smoking, boiling or if you can see a faint blue shimmer over the surface, immediately remove the oil from the heat. This means that it's close to catching fire.

Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen

Next book in line is the Asian cookbook I've probably cooked from the most durintg the last few years - "Into the Vietnamese Kitchen" by Andrea Nguyen.

What's so great about this book then? Well it's basically about the Vietnamese cuisine, which has similarities to both Chinese and Thai cuisine, but it has a fresher feel to it. Vietnamese cuisine is all about contrasts, dishes tend to be spicy but very light at the same time. There are lots of fresh herbs, but everything tends to be dunked into fish sauce based dips, making things more exciting. Also, this book does not shy away from what the French colonization brought to Vietnam in terms of cooking techniques, foodstuffs and tastes, making the recipes even more accessible to a European cook like me.

As extra bonus, the author has a blog at: http://www.vietworldkitchen.com/

Summary - Noodle Comfort by Kentaro Kobayashi

Time to wrap up this little book now. A good resource for anyone who likes noodle dishes but does not want to spend to much time in the kitchen. No made-from-scratch stocks or other purist stuff but some days that's just not an option anyway.

Quick data:
Title: Easy Japanese Cooking - Noodle Comfort
Author: Kentaro Kobayashi
Length: 96 pages
Recipe quality: 3 out of 5
Recipe complexity: 2 out of 5 
Organization: 3 out of 5
Index quality: 1 out of 5 (no index, but a TOC naming every recipe)
Food Porn Vale: 2 out of 5

Pros:

• Easy, quick and very accessible recipes. Anyone can cook these dishes.
• No special equipment needed.
• Great photos of all dishes. Some have step-by-step illustrations.
• All dishes that I've tried (5 so far) have tasted great.

Cons:

• A certain level of Japanese goofiness.
• Translations are somewhat odd, sometimes it's hard to understand the instructions.
• Only about half the recipes are actually Japanese. But many of the non-Japanese ones do have a Japanese cross-overish twist which I find interesting in itself.

Tan Tan Noodles

Again, I'll let the recipe intro describe the dish: "Delicious meaty miso with sweet, sour and spicy sauce, served on top of smooth Chinese noodles". Sounds lovely, doesn't it, except it's a bit odd to describe miso as "meaty", but whatever.

Tan tan noodles is one of my husbands favourite dishes. It's a spicy dish, the noodles are served with a fried spicy minced pork mixture laying in a sesame and chilli spiked broth. In "Noodle Comfort" there are two version of this dish, one where the noodles are served in warm broth and one served with cold sauce. We've tried the cold version, but, after some trial and error, we've found that we like it better when the sauce is heated, to resemble soup.

In our version, the pork is fried quickly with garlic, spring onions, ginger, and sesame oil. The real work lies in the sauce, a miso based mixture containing sesame paste, sesame oil, vinegar, soy sauce, sugar and chilli paste. As we've made this dish a few times and every time the sauce has turned out somewhat different, so now I just keep adding whatever I think it needs until it starts to taste like I remember it from Japan.

In the soupy "hot broth" version the meat mixture is a little more elaborate. The meat is fried with schezuan peppers, shiitake mushrooms, bamboo shots, bean sprouts and sesame paste. Then any type of "soup mix" broth is poured onto the noodles and meat. I'm sure this will turn out great as well, as long as a decent quality of soup mix is used. 

Salmon and Penne au Gratin

One of the recipes in "Noodle Comfort", from the more Western oriented "Pasta" chapter. I thought it might be interesting to see how a Japanese cookbook presents a Western dish to its audience.

Basically, it's penne, tossed in a cream based salmon, mushroom and asparagus sauce, topped with cheese and then baked in the oven. This is something I might cook for myself, but lets take a closer look at the sauce. It is based on cream, garlic, white wind and olive oil. Then there is some parmesan added and curry powder. To most European chefs there is one ingredient mentioned here that does not belong. I decided to keep an open mind and went with the curry powder even though I didn't really believe in it, but actually, it turned out great. Even my son ate it, after I had removed all the mushroom and asparagus pieces from his dish.

Bang Bang Chicken with Noodles

The recipe intro says: "Potently flavoured sesame sauce, combined with the refreshing taste of boiled chicken. Light and luscious, yet rich and delicious".  How anyone would think of describing the taste of boiled chicken as refreshing, I don't know, but apart from that, the intro says it all.

A very easy recipe of egg noodles with pieces of chicken and cucumber in a sesame sauce. Just boil the chicken with some garlic and ginger. Cut cucumber and spring onion into pieces (the cucumber pieces probably should have been more matchstick shaped than I made mine, but I really have a thing against cutting stuff into very small, equally sized, pieces). Then the ingredients for the sauce are mixed together; lots of sesame oil, ground sesame seeds, soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar and salt. The sauce is poured over the noodles and chicken. As garnish, some sesame seeds are sprinkled on top.

The result - a nice noodle dish that tastes a lot of sesame. I loved it, but it was no hit with my son, the sesame flavour was a bit to much for him. I spooned some of the chicken cooking water over my dish to make it more soupy, a nice addition.

Noodle Comfort by Kentaro Kobayashi

This book is totally different from the last two. It's thin, playful and aimed at starter cooks like students or anyone learning his or her way around the kitchen (it's part of a series named "Easy Japanese Cooking"). I got it after a trip to Japan where I was impressed with the variety and pure deliciosness of the noodle dishes available there. This book is originally written in Japanese, originally aimed at the Japanese market, but now also translated into English.

There are 8 recipe chapters with between 3 and 12 recipes in each, being the following:

• Chinese Noodles
• Udon and Soba
• Yakisoba (fried noodles)
• Rice Vermicelli and Naengmyeon (Vietnamese Pho fits into this chapter)
• Ultimate Noodle Experience (I'd guess that these are the authors favourites)
• Pasta (European style pasta dishes, most with a Japanese twist)
• Thin Japanese Noodles (mostly Somen noodles)
• Sides and Sweets

Summary - The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Beranbaum

Quick data:
Title: The Bread Bible
Author: Rose Levy Beranbaum
Length: 640 pages
Recipe quality: 5 out of 5
Recipe complexity: 4 out of 5 
Organization: 5 out of 5
Index quality: 3 out of 5
Food Porn Vale: 3 out of 5 

Pros:

• Very detailed instructions, nothing is left by chance
• A big selection of recipes for lots of different types of breads
• Author has a big forum on her web site, so it's easy to ask around about the recipes if anything is unclear
• Full of information on anything bread related, useful both for novices and bread buffs
• Measurements in both weight and volume
  

Cons:

• A bit overwhelming, most recipes are several pages long
• Made for America, using U.S brands that are not available here
• Some of the recipes are more involved than what I'm used to, i.e. the sourdough is expanded twice, which I've never done before and it puts me off because it takes way to long
• Small quantities (but hey, as long as you read carefully and multiply by need, this isn't really a problem) 
•  

But all in all I think that The Bread Bible is a great resource and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in baking great breads at home.