Jet Tila's Top Vietnamese Recipe Videos | Ready Jet Cook | Food Network

Pork is marinated for the banh mi. I've got my pickles going on. I'm going to make a pâté mayonnaise spread. It's very common to get pâté in banh mi. I like to extend pâté with mayonnaise because I feel that, you know, you get the creamy effect of mayonnaise which hydrates the bread and you get that really nice flavor from the pâté. I start my pickled carrots by shredding them very thin. I'm just simply using vinegar, sugar, salt, cilantro, and I want the flavor of peppercorn and garlic. To marinate and grill my pork, I take shallots, garlic, fish sauce, sugar, and I blend that in a blender until rough. I don't need it chunky. The secret ingredient to my marinade is lemongrass because you get that kind of sour floral notes into the pork. So you slice pork shoulder and you get it into that sugary, funky, herbaceous marinade. So I take the French roll. I split it down the middle. I take my pâté spread. I hit both sides of the bread to get really good coverage. I want some chilies in there, so I'm using red jalapenos, full leaves of cilantro. Now I'm layering in my cucumber ribbons. I follow that up with the pickled carrots. Once the pork is cooked, I load it into the bread and this really is a street food bánh mì. I love the flavor on the pickled carrots. They're like rich and deep and like amazing. That's how talented Jet Tila is, that the pickled carrots on his sandwich are literally my favorite thing of the day. And it's not even like a real carrot. It's like this earthy, delicious umami bomb that Jet decided to just, you know, drop on us like it was no big deal. I'm going to show you how to make hands down my favorite Vietnamese dish, bánh xèo. It's a simple, savory crepe that's light and delicious and crispy. And before we can get sizzling, I need rice flour. I need fish sauce and turmeric. All very important ingredients and we're going to use two of these right now to make the actual crepe batter. Starting with this rice flour. All this is, is if you took jasmine rice or white rice and ground it down into a very, very fine flour. So when you're making a batter, it makes a very, very crispy batter. Next, I am going to use some all-purpose flour. To give it really great color, we're using turmeric. It's considered one of the world's superfoods, but when you dry it and powderize it, it creates this gorgeous kind of mustardy saffron color. Next, a little bit of cornstarch. So this crepe is going to be nice and kind of spongy, but also crispy on the edges. A little bit of kosher salt. And these are my dries and I like to get them all together before we start adding the liquids. Okay, so the wets. Very simple. Good amount of coconut milk. And then finally, to give some bubbles and some flavor, I'm just putting a beer in there. Don't do that at home. That's a trained professional move. Look how beautiful that batter is. That is so gorgeous. Working this together until I get something thinner than an American pancake batter, but thicker than a French crepe batter. All right, because the flour molecules have to hydrate, I'm going to set this aside for 15 to 30 minutes. So one of the hallmarks of bunso is the crepe must have pork in it. And if you're feeling really lucky, a little bit of shrimp in it too. Pork belly traditionally is a really tough cut of pork. I'm going to show you a great way to make this pork very tender very quickly. I like to buy it with the skin off because I can tenderize this pork belly, but the skin is so tough that even with my baking soda trick and boiling, the skin's still going to be a little tough. So make sure to grab that pork belly that has no skin. So the pork belly sliced, I take some water, I bring it up to a boil, and I'm just going to add baking soda. Baking soda coats this pork. It doesn't allow the muscle fibers to bond together, right? It actually keeps them apart. I'm going to let this pork boil for about 10 to 15 minutes. All right, so I'm going to show you how to make nuoc cham. It is that beautifully sweet and tangy spicy dipping sauce that's used for just about all Vietnamese dishes like egg rolls, spring rolls, and it's really really simple to make. So let me do the liquid portion first. I'm going to whisk together sugar, lime juice, water, rice vinegar. So I'm just building that five flavor hot, sour, salty, sweet, savory type of flavor profile. Vietnamese fish sauce. So this sauce is called nuoc cham. Fish sauce by itself is called nuoc mam. I think it's always fun to learn all the terms in the language of the cuisine you're cooking. And now we're going to add chilies and garlic to actually pop this nuoc cham even more. For garlic, I'm just laying my knife flat, pounding it flat, both cloves, and I'm just giving it a nice tight mince. Thai chilies or bird's eye chilies, I've got one to two are going to be plenty hot. So you will be tasting and feeling the spice on this chili. So I'm just going to float that right into there as well. And then I like to kind of add a little bit of mouth feel, some texture, and I'm going to be doing carrots and daikon radish. And the way I like to julienne is to square off the carrot on two sides. I don't really need to peel it. And then I'm just going to slice very thin tiles, like eighth to quarter inch tiles, and then lay those on top of each other. Slice very thin juliennes. So a little bit of the carrots in there. And then daikon, same thing. Daikon is a big long radish. I'm just going to take about a two inch section and then find my nice thin tiles. Nice thin slices now. All right, let's stir this together, take a taste. It's got a really nice sweetness to it. It's backed up by a good amount of salt. And just that kind of earthiness of the garlic is awesome. And I like to cut scallions in half, line up those halves, and I'm just going to do straight sliced scallions. Let's put that on the plate. This is how I like to cut an onion. I square off the top and I just cut the root end off the bottom. I go north pole to south pole and that's when I peel. All right, so these onions are going to sit in the pan and be totally enveloped by the crepe. I could either do slices like so, which are going to kind of mellow and sit in the pan and get nice and sweet. Or if you want as well, you could do what I like to call the leonese, which is cutting along the ribs, always facing the center of the onion. So that'll go under there. All right, I'm going to pull the pork out of the bath and crepe batter is rested. I've got all my mise en place. This is my pan of choice. It's an eight to nine inch coated or nonstick pan. And that's going to really help keep that crepe from sticking, but still create a crunchy crepe. Checking my consistency. Yes, that looks really good. Not too thick, not too thin. And I'm going to add some scallions into there now. So a word about shrimp. These crepes have pork and shrimp suspended in them. I'm using the smaller shrimp today. So if you're using a really large shrimp, like a 21, 25 or jumbo, split them in half lengthwise so they don't crack up your crepe when you go to fold them. All right, let's fire this. So first thing I'm going to do is get a decent amount of oil. All right, so I'm going to start with a few pieces of pork belly. And again, I don't need a lot because I'm going to make a bunch of crepes with this recipe. A good amount of onion. And since the pork is already pre-cooked, I can go ahead and add my shrimp. If you're starting with raw, then let that pork kind of catch up before you add your shrimp because you want all the proteins to kind of be at that same place in cook. So I'm going to let my onions brown up just a little bit for that maximum sweetness. Going in with my batter, I'm going to grab all those ingredients in my batter and suspend them. So I've got the batter in and now I'm going to tilt. And just like making an omelet, guys, you want to spread this batter out so you get maximum coverage on the pan. But also make sure that you're spread out enough so you have a nice even layer all the way through. So this is when I'm going to lower the heat a bit. So as you can see, I've got perfect spread. The bottom is starting to brown slightly but still can lift off. That is the point where now we need to add the bean sprouts and cook the top. And the way we're going to do that is I like to add the bean sprouts in kind of on one side because I'm going to be folding this in half. And then we're going to put a lid on it. And that steam, as you can see, is going to get captured and now steam the top. You hear that? That's the sao, guys. Sao in Ban Sao is Vietnamese for that. So let this sao for a minute. To eat this, we've got a Vietnamese greens plate. We've got the nuoc cham and we've got some rice papers, all right. The practice of wrapping food in parcels of either vegetables or rice paper is a real indigenous Vietnamese practice. Vietnam was ruled by China for a thousand years and then French influence for a while. But this beautiful method of wrapping these in herbs predates all that. So my basic greens plate is this. Green leaf lettuce, mint is easy to find, cilantro is easy to find. I'm using perilla here that kind of has that Japanese shiso flavor and then I'm using a little bit of cucumber. How you do it is up to you but I want you to have at least two or three of these and then I'm going to show you how to eat this with rice paper after I'm done. Speaking of, I think it's time to plate our Ban Sao. Visually what I'm looking for, the bean sprouts have wilted a bit, the crepe is solid but still sliding and I'm looking for a nice GBD, a golden brown and delicious. So now I'm going to bring the Ban Sao here. So what I do is I like to slide it halfway off and then fold it right over just like that. A few ways you can present it, you can either send it thusly on a plate but if you want to decorate and put the greens plate next to it I think it's a really nice touch. In Vietnam on the streets you really see these Ban Sao vendors having like 10-12 pans all going at the same time. It's pretty amazing. Certain parts of Vietnam eat it with the rice paper but it's totally up to you. You could just use veggies but I soak the rice papers in warm water until I feel them just start folding over on themselves. I'll drain and let them carry over on my cutting board. That means I'm going to let them finish hydrating here and then after about 10 seconds you're going to see they're going to be nice, perfectly sticky and ready to eat. Check it out, it's gotten nice, soft, tender and chewy. I usually will take a piece of rice paper, a nice section of the Ban Sao right there ready to go. I'm going to crack off a little bit of the greens. I'm going to lay the Ban Sao right in the middle there. Fold that over into a nice little package. I'll take the Nuoc Cham and if you have your own Nuoc Cham you could do the dip but if you don't want to cross contaminate just do a nice little drizzle. Cheers everybody! The savoriness of the pork and the shrimp married with the crispiness and the cooling of the bean sprouts. Then you've got the herbs, then you've got the crispiness and then the Nuoc Cham. This really is an outstanding Vietnamese experience. Guys I really hope you enjoyed making this with me. Make it at home, take lots of photos, tag us in those photos. Thanks so much for hanging out and we'll see you next time. Now I know some of you are rolling your eyes at the idea of quicker pho but let's do some quick time calculations here. Two days for traditional pho versus two hours. It's totally worth the trade-off and I'm going to show you how to make it. Come on. So for the quicker beef pho I'm using a thin sliced steak cut which is usually available at the Asian markets. If you can't get it thin like this don't worry. Take a nice steak cut, freeze it for about 40 minutes until it's almost frozen, slice it with a nice sharp knife and you're good to go. These are the rice stick noodles for pho. Make sure to buy extra in case you mess up your first batch. Also when I was a kid stocking these shelves they were my favorite things to stock, not like those 50 pound rice bags. So the last thing we're going to need for pho is fish sauce. It might sound a little weird if you're not used to using it but it's such an important ingredient to Vietnamese and Thai cuisine. Make sure you're getting the one that's amber in color and nice and clear. So we're back from the market. Let's start the prep for the quicker beef pho. I'm going to start with vegetables and then move on to making my stock. So I'm going to need onions kind of two ways. I'm going to take the top, the bottom and then I like to peel the onion while it's in half like this. I developed this pho dish because everybody likes to eat pho but no one wants to make the two-day broth. This is a really nice kind of hybrid version where you get the aromatics from all your spices but you're not going to sit there and roast bones and literally wait two days. This pho is really the perfect elixir. You know when the kids are kind of in from school, they're sick, the weather's really cold, there's nothing more comforting or warming than having a nice bowl of noodles and pho broth. I'm cutting the half of the onion paper thin for the top of the pho broth. The idea is that super hot broth is poured over the noodles with the onions on it and these onions kind of melt in but still keep some texture. So the other half of the onion I'm going to use for stock. So I'm just going to rough chop it into large pieces. These onions, onions are making me cry. I'm starting to think about my kids when they're sick. This is so sad. As you can see with the ginger, I've just left the skins on and I'm slicing them into thin pieces to get a lot of surface area for the stock. With the scallions, I'm just slicing them into thin slices with a little bit of a bias for garnish. I'm cutting a lot of garnishes but what's cool about pho is it's kind of like a choose your own adventure dish. You leave all the garnishes out and whoever is coming to eat the pho kind of builds their own pho the way they like it. These are red serranos. They're kind of the perfect chili because they're not too hot. I just cut a ton of these and leave them on the plates and whoever likes heat can go for it. And the last ingredient is going to be lime. I'm just cutting the wedges off the side, kind of leaving the middle seed pot alone and you leave these out for whoever wants a nice shot of lime to make the pho a little sour. Come in, come come really really tight. The first spice is star anise. Looks like a little star, smells like Christmas if you think about it. All these three spices you buy during the holidays for like cider and you never use them again so here's the perfect place to use them. So star anise is there, cloves. Cloves look like little kind of reedy sticks with a little spice ball right on top and then cinnamon. I know you've got a ton of this laying around from the holidays so what I'm going to do is make a really cool satchel. So check this out. In a little plate I've got some cheesecloth. In the middle of the cheesecloth I'm going to lay all the spices in and they're really overwhelming and that's why I'm making a satchel because I can actually put it in the stock and once it's I could pull it out. If I just dumped a ton of spices in the stock it could overwhelm and taste like Christmas beef stock which is not delicious although beef pho is delicious. I'm just wrapping it up into a nice clean little packet. So I like using butcher twine here because I want to be able to tie this off and be able to pull it in and out of the stock. These are really delicious but they can go a long way if you leave them in. So let's build the pho broth. First thing we're going to start with is beef base. I know controversial. Some of you are going to give me a hard time but I need you to trust me. Trust me on this. I'll get you to delicious pho. This is where you're going to save two days of cooking right here. Beef base is exactly as its name implies. It gives you that nice beef flavored foundation. A really quick note on fish sauce. Such a fundamental ingredient in Vietnamese food. Now you know the bottle that's been sitting in your fridge for about a year? It's time to get rid of it because it's probably gone opaque and totally dark like soy sauce. Really fresh fish sauce should be amber and totally translucent in color just like this. A little more salt because fish sauce is definitely on that seafood side. I want to go straight salt to give a clean saltiness to kind of boost up that beef flavor. We want to balance those flavors with a little bit of sugar. Now the aromatics and the aromatics are ginger and onion. I'm going to let this broth come to a simmer for about 40 minutes and let the onions and garlic marry right into the broth. The last step to finish this broth is adding all the spices from the sachet. Be mindful to not over steep these. When these are done you're going to pull it right out and then you're ready to serve the pho. You're going to want to simmer the spices for about 30 to 45 minutes until you just taste all these kind of amazing aromatics. So it's been about 30 minutes. I just want to taste this before I pull the sachet out. I distinctly taste all the spices but they're not overpowering. So it's time for the sachet to go away. So my broth is finished. All the garnish is ready. Let me show you how to build this bowl. We're starting with some rice stick noodles that have been soaked and soft. You can also use fresh rice stick noodles here. I'm going to bundle them into the basket and just give them a really quick dip to cook them. You know if you don't have one of these noodle baskets at home a regular colander or sieve is going to be fine. So just a few seconds in the hot water drain them well and then put right into the bowl. So noodles are in. This is the choose your own adventure part and don't be scared to just do it any way you like it. There is no wrong way. My favorite pho combo is fully loaded meaning every single garnish plus a ton of sriracha and a ton of hoisin. And if you're going to do the rare thin beef make sure you put it on top because it looks really cool there. And don't worry this is so thin that when that hot broth hits it it's going to cook it right away. You want to make sure that your broth is ripping hot because you want it to cook the meat and then really kind of marry all those flavors together. One of my favorite dishes of all time right here. Feel free to do a little more garnish on the top. I like some scallions, some chilies, a little bean sprouts and you are good to go. So hoisin and sriracha it's a total choice situation. Some people like to shoot it in and mix it into the soup or some people like to dip. I'm more of a dipper than putting the hoisin and sriracha inside. I want to pull some of the noodles and build a little nest of noodles into the middle of the spoon. Add your favorite garnishes. Make sure I've got a little onion, I've got some cilantro, all those really fun goodies in there. Then I take the beef and I do a little dipper and make sure it's touching both sauces. Into the spoon gather some soup. There's really nothing more kind of complex yet comforting than a great pho broth. You've got all the flavors from the spices, you've got all these fresh herbs and then the core of it is this delicious tender beef and the beef broth. This really is an amazing dish.