Nothing’s as good as a dish of banh cuon in the morning. There’s this one stand in the marketplace, and when I’m in Vietnam I eat their banh cuon pretty much every other day. Nothing beats fresh banh cuon warm from the pan.
8D Lucky for me, my mom makes it almost every month, and I get to help her!
For those of you who don’t know, banh cuon (literal translation: rolled cake) is a crepe-like roll with ground pork, minced wood ear mushroom, & sweet onions. The batter is made with a mixture of rice flour, water, and vegetable oil, and it’s a common Vietnamese breakfast dish that’s usually serviced with blanched bean sprouts, fried dried onions, and nuoc cham, a sweet & salty Vietnamese dipping sauce. The roll, when made well, has a soft, silky-smooth consistency and almost melts in your mouth when you bite into it. Then there’s a burst of sweet-salty flavor when you reach the filling. The texture that the minced mushroom adds is nice. You just have to taste it to believe it.
A quick run-down of the process:
- Batter: rice flour, water, bit of vegetable oil. Stir it all together until it is liquidy, like thickened milk. Let it for an hour, stirring occasionally.
- Filling: Ground pork & finely chopped garlic, combined with sugar, just a little bit of salt, and pepper. Marinate for a few hours, then take out and fry in pan with minced onions and wood ear mushrooms until cooked. Set filling aside.
- Process: Heat a pan, medium-high heat. Add a tablespoon of vegetable oil. Pour batter on to form a thin sheet. When it looks cooked, bring the pan off the stove quickly and over a big dish. Plop the pan upside down to get the sheet of rice flour onto the dish. Spoon some filling into the center, fold in two parallel sides over the filling, then roll it the other way. Use a spoon to help, because it may be too hot to touch with your hands! And then slide the roll off your dish into a storage container (possibly lined with paper towels).
Okay. Pictures
The set-up.
The batter cooking on the pan. Looks better than this irl.
We made a lot.
Ready to eat~ *__*
