Dumplings, Bánh Xèo & Lemongrass Chicken | Vietnamese Cooking Guide

In Vietnam, any meal you have has to have a plate of herbs. This one is called Morning Glory, but it's delicious. Oh, so spiky. It's a durian fruit. If your pockets are deep enough, then try one. Pig's intestine. Sounds good, eh? Noodles in Asian food, there is an enormous variety. Never be scared. The only way you're going to find out is if you try it yourself. If you see something unfamiliar, just pick it up and try and make something from it. In an air fryer, you're going to get crispy skin at the top. Some of this stuff is way more simple than you think it is. My name is Nam Nguyen. I'm Vietnamese and I grew up in London. When I was growing up in my teens, Hackney and the London Fields kind of area was very dominant on the Vietnamese community. There's still a lot of Vietnamese and Asian shops around here and plenty of restaurants, especially on the Kingsland Roads, which opened up in the 90s. We're about two minutes away from the Vietnamese shop that we're going to visit. We're going to meet the owner, find a few different ingredients, just explore the whole place. And later, I'll show you how to cook a few traditional Vietnamese dishes. This is a good place to start because in Vietnamese food, any meal you have has to have a plate of herbs. Coriander and mint. A variation of the coriander. In English, it's called sawtooth coriander. On the edges of the leaf, you can see kind of like a sawtooth grape. The lotus root, slicing it really thin on the mandolin and then frying it so you have it as like a lotus root crisp. This is sliced up banana blossom. You just add it in the same way as you would add bean sprouts into a soup. This one is called cha lo, which is ham steamed in banana leaf. If anyone likes coconut juice, roasted coconut juice is delicious. This section here is all about celebration. They'll have these at a funeral and they'll burn this just as an offering for afterlife for their loved one. Rice cakes. This one can go in the oven at 180 Celsius for two minutes. It will be puffed up and it's a cracker. So normally, we would have a green papaya or green mango salad with some prawns or chicken. Make a little dressing from fish sauce, lime and chili. Crack some of this, just put it on top and just eat it. It's delicious. One of the dishes I get asked about all the time and I hate the pronunciation that people give me. People go faux. It's faux, like F. There's always around four or five spices. Black cardamom. This is really smoky star anise. Cassia bark. This one is cinnamon, but cassia bark is better. It gives you a better earthy kind of taste to it. Oh, it's so tight in there. Rice flour for my pancakes. Oyster sauce, soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil. And then always a nice chili oil as well. Like this brand is quite nice. You can eat that on anything. I even put it on like pizza toast with an egg. Pomelo. Dip it in a mix of salt and chili flakes. It works with a lot of sour kind of fruits. The taste is completely different to the smell. In Vietnam, when you're going along the roads, you smell this weird like kind of bin smell. It's just this fruit that's sitting in a basket on the side of the road. You're not even allowed to eat this on a bus because it's been banned. One piece like this is 30 pounds. Enjoy it if you get to try it. She's on holiday. Do you know what he said? He said I have to work to pay for her to go on holiday. Just come back from the shop with all the ingredients that we bought. I'm going to go through a few of the ingredients that we have already just so you can actually see it. This one here is shisho leaf or perilla. This one is Asian basil, which has got a really nice aniseed kind of flavor. Normal coriander and then sawtooth coriander is here. I've got lemongrass, which is very dominant in a lot of Vietnamese dishes. Bean sprouts, cucumber, and then this one is a pickled carrot with coriander seeds. The first thing we're going to be making is banh xeo, which if you translate is sizzling pancake. The basis of it is rice flour and a little bit of tapioca flour. You also add turmeric in there, coconut milk, a bit of water. So you want a loose crepe batter. With the prawns, I have already peeled them, de-shelled them, and de-veined them. I saved one prawn. It's a black tiger. You can cook it whole in the shell, but a lot of people never de-vein it. So you want to go into the little vertebrae, poke straight through, and then you just drag. The vein comes out. This prawn has not eaten anything, which is quite nice. It's clean. So first thing in is oil, spring onion. Once you start smelling the spring onions, you can put all your prawns in. Once the spring onions start charring a bit, add bean sprouts. Then you add the batter. You can fill in all the holes, tilt it, move it around, and then you want to put a lid on. So the prawns are charring at the bottom, then it's steaming at the top. So you're going to get two layers of flavour in there. It should only take about two minutes. It might be stuck a little bit. Fry it away. Add a little bit of oil onto the edges. This is what's going to crisp it up. Then I add a little bit more bean sprouts, because I like the soft texture of it when it's cooked, and then I like the little crispy texture when it's finished as well. Once it's crispy enough, you can flip it over. You can have some cucumber, perilla leaf, coriander. This sauce here, a Vietnamese dipping sauce called nuoc cham, which is a base of fish sauce, vinegar, lime, chilli, garlic, and sugar. It just gives you the kind of balance of sweet and salty. So some pancake. Excuse the hands. I'll put a bit of cucumber, some herbs, some coriander. Some carrot. Oh, you want lots of this sauce. The next dish I'm going to be doing is lemongrass chicken. This is something that you find on every corner on every street in Vietnam. This is the lemongrass chicken here. I've marinated it. I've got the chicken from the butcher, prepped it down, cleaned it. You can cook it on a normal charcoal barbecue. You can do it in a pan, in the oven. Today we're doing it in an air fryer. Everyone has their own variation of a lemongrass chicken marinade. In the lemongrass marinade, it's my little secret because everyone's got their own way, but the basis of it is lots of garlic, onion, lemongrass, brown sugar, or you can use a honey. There's also fish sauce in here, turmeric for a little bit of the colour, and oil just to blend it out. Lemongrass is super fibrous. Cut the top of the root off, place the blade on the lemongrass, and you just whack it. So all the way down. Chop it up. Same with everything else. Put it into a blender, blend it up. Marinating, I would say at least one day, but the longer the better. So chicken's almost ready. It just popped up. In the air fryer, you're going to get crispy skin at the top and it's still juicy. You can serve it on its own, just like that, with some salads. Usually, I put this in a baguette with all the pickles, the chillies, everything, and then traditionally it's with noodles and a generous, generous, generous amount of fish sauce to go with it. I actually really love, with this, it's a little peanut sauce. So this one I make myself. Put ginger, I put the fish sauce, which has chilli, lime, garlic, and I cook it up with peanut. So lemongrass chicken is one that you should try. The next, we're going to make dumplings. I'm using wonton skin, but you can use any that you like. You can have frozen. You can obviously make it yourself, but the ones from the shops are pretty nice themselves. So the first, you just make a mix of flour and water. Have a bowl of water. It's going to prevent all the meat and everything sticking to your fingers. So the filling that I'm doing here is pork, prawn, and Chinese chive. I also like to throw in a bit of shallots and some garlic. The pork is minced, but the prawns, you want to hand mince, because you don't want it to completely fine. It's always nice when you bite into a dumpling and you get this little nugget of a prawn inside and it just bursts out a little bit of juice. That's really tasty. Place it in the middle. I do diamond, wet the top two edges that you're going to fold onto and fold over whilst you hold the filling. Press down the two edges together and prevent any air pockets. That's what it should look like. I'm going to fold one side in, wet the edge on the opposite side and fold the other edge over and you get a nice little pocket there. Can I say here's one I made earlier? I kind of always wanted to say that. Sometimes I'll make 10, 12 dumplings for myself to eat and they're all different shapes. This one is more kind of, I don't want to say it, but like an Italian pasta sort. Blasphemy. These ones I'm going to steam, but I like to fry at the bottom so you get a little crispiness. It should only be a gentle sizzle. Whilst they are all cooking, I'm going to show you my little dumpling mix. Roughly three quarters soy sauce to one quarter vinegar and it's got my homemade lemongrass chili oil and what I would usually do is put fried shallots in there. Once it's browned, turn the heat up because you need it super hot now. So once the water hits the pan, it's going to create a steam and that's what's going to steam the top and the rest of the dumpling itself. But be careful, it's going to splash and be a bit smoky. Once that hits, then you turn it down back to low and then just let it steam out. So whilst that's steaming, I'll just finish off my sauce for the dumpling. I'll slice some ginger and the ginger soaked in all that sauce. It is delicious, it's good for you, it's going to help with all your cold and your digestion. When you feel your dumpling, if it's still a bit soft and mushy, it's not cooked yet. When it's got a bit more firmness to it, it's going to be cooked. I'll get the steamed ones and three of the fried and that's it there. So you've got your dumplings. The first thing you do, a small nip at the top, that's going to release some of the liquid, it's going to release some of the steam, then you can put the whole thing in your mouth. I hope what I've done today and the dishes I've cooked today would give you a little push to go out and try it yourself. If you go into the shop and you're unfamiliar with something, buy it, do a little research and try and make something from it. Never be scared, that's the only way we discover new things. What do you want to try first? Let's go fish stick, yeah? You want a raw one? Yeah, cheers. Someone also bought money for blessings in the afterlife.