Homemade Orecchiette

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I feel as though I have missed out. Born to two food-apathetic Australian parents I’m bereft of a food culture. The food I ate growing up was all about freshness, seasonality and healthfulness, but with no deference to those things that I yearned for: tradition, technique and interest. Maybe this is one reason why I was drawn to Hanoi.

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Recently there was some uproar in Australia about our national dish. Admittedly I don’t know the whole story but I do find the whole idea of national dishes slightly silly. Food is either highly important to a nation, or it isn’t. If the latter is true, then why bother summing them up with one dish? If food is the lifeblood of the culture then each region and area in the country has a different speciality, and picking one dish to represent all these disparate meals is terribly constricting and disrespectful to those regions that didn’t make the cut.

Multi-cultural Australia doesn’t have national or regional specialities. Our regions are much smaller than that. We have special representative dishes by the suburb, street, house, apartment or backyard. But this is just the opinion of someone with no representative meal, no cultural food history and no traditions, unless avocado on toast counts.

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Maybe this yearning for a food culture is a reason why I’m in Hanoi, but it is definitely why I am fascinated by Italian food safari on SBS. Luckily I was able to see a few episodes and had to stop myself from booking the first flight from Hanoi to Rome. It is the tradition, the focus on ingredients and artisanal products as well as the social nature of eating that draws me in.

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In one episode Guy Grossi makes orecchiette, a pasta shaped like a little ear from Puglia in southern Italy. I adore orecchiette, but had only ever eaten the packaged variety, and was interested to see an eggless fresh pasta. So I ignored the lure of fresh coconut cream, rice noodles and limes at the market and bought tomatoes, onions and basil. Later at home I ballsed up the shaping of the dough, but soldiered on and was rewarded with a wonderfully soft yet chewy result. These quasi orecchiette have an altogether different texture and mouth feel to both dried shapes and fresh egg pasta. They are silky with a bite, and take on the flavour of the sauce beautifully: in this case roasted tomato with balsamic and basil.

I do feel left out by being devoid of food traditions and culture, but perhaps really I am the lucky one. By not having any techniques or flavours that are ingrained in me from birth, is it possible that I am more open to new ideas, tastes and methods? I hope so. I may not have grown up surrounded by food, but I am certainly living my life that way now.

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Bun Bo Nam Bo

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When I arrived in Hanoi last November, dusty, exhausted and fat from a quick jaunt around Malaysia, I was ready to be seduced by new flavours and new experiences. It started off well enough with rooftop mojito’s and succulent bun cha, but I quickly had the wind knocked out of my sails. Firstly by a new friend who told me that Hanoi isn’t a wonderful eating city, then I became fully deflated by the realisation that she was, sadly, correct.

Don’t get me wrong, Hanoi has great points and some amazing food, but it certainly isn’t Georgetown, KL, Singapore or Ho Chi Minh City. Maybe I am just being blinded by language barriers, too much choice and such low prices or maybe I’m yearning for some more accessible, better quality international food. Regardless just one thought back to the regular dining options in my price range in Sydney and my mindset shifts, I’m not taking anything for granted here.

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I have professed my love for Bun Cha before, and soon I’ll give you my take on Cha Ca, two local specialities that I adore. But most of the Vietnamese food I ate in Australia is from the South. Fresh spring rolls, grilled pork chop with rice, Banh Xeo, Caramelised fish in claypot and bo kho are all from south of here. Some of these dishes are available in Hanoi, but not readily. One southern dish that has infiltrated the capital is Bun Bo Nam Bo (beef with dry bun noodles southern style, I think).

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It goes in layers a little bit like this: lettuce and herbs, then bun noodles, tender beef and bean sprouts sauteed with garlic and lemongrass, green papaya and carrot pickles, roasted peanuts and crisp fried schallots, all drenched in a thin sweet savoury sauce. Add a good splash of the fiery chilli sauce, and mix the whole thing up well so the sauce, peanuts and fried shallots totally cover the noodles and making each mouthful complex and intriguing.

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This is what Vietnamese food is all about for me. Fresh, explosive flavours and a riot of textures. Light but punchy, tasting best under the blast of a fan, sitting uncomfortably on plastic stools. I actually asked my colleagues recently “do you find these seats uncomfortable too, or am I just a weak white girl with tender glutes?” consensus was that the mini plastic stools hurt everyones bum an equal amount, they just hide the hurt better.

Hanoi mightn’t be the foodtopia I first imagined, but having Bun Bo Nam Bo around the corner makes it much more appealing.

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Bun Bo Nam Bo

Available all over the place, but 67 Hang Dieu is the most famous place. (Not to be confused with Hoang Dieu. Hang Dieu is in the Old quarter on a length of road that changes its name several times, further up it is called Hang Ga and Hang Cot).

This place had ridiculously fluctuating prices. This joint is firmly in tourist city and the white tax here is astronomical. I think they charge westerners by the phase of the moon, I’ve paid from 25,000 vnd to 35,000vnd, although maybe the price is just increasing alongside inflation.

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Browned butter date loaf

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Sometimes plans are well considered and made, executed to a tee and expectations are met. Other times spontaneity rules. Then there are the situations where everything happens by coincidence, this date loaf could be used as a case study for the outcomes of coincidence. No, the browned butter and sugar didn’t have an accidental collision in a mixing bowl, but I do wish that would happen more often.

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Bun Cha

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I’ve spoken about bun cha before, but since then my tastes have changed. I care more about grease level, and I’m none too impressed with enormous portions which I either force myself to eat, or which make me feel ungrateful for leaving loads on my plate. I care more about prices now too. So I often get my bun cha fix locally and pass on the often greasy and disappointing nem (spring rolls).

This place is the best bun cha I’ve found that is local to me. It seems that other expats like the pork patties but shy away from the fatty pieces of pork, so the workers here pre-empt the complaints by serving white non-Vietnamese speakers with a bowl of patties only. I adore the chewy fatty real pork bits and though I don’t know how to ask for them in Vietnamese mostly manage to let them know what I want via interpretive dance.

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The broth here is served steaming hot with fresh and plentiful greens, and there are always bowls of chopped garlic and chilli nearby. I add a big hit of this garlic, a few slices of chilli and ladelful of the chilli garlic vinegar. Give everything you want to eat a good bath in the broth, it is that good.

This small eatery, open at lunchtime, is often full and does a raring takeaway trade to customers who don’t even get off their bikes. Be careful when riding your bicycle past this blaring hot streetside charcoal grill

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How to spot a bun cha joint? A plume of acrid smoke, metal grids sandwiching pork patties and a hungry crowd come lunch time.

Mai Anh Bun Cha
47 Xuan Dieu st
Hanoi.

Bun Cha (+ white tax) 20,000vnd

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David Lebovitz’s Fresh Ginger Cake

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Molasses, yet another long derided, overlooked and misunderstood ingredient in my kitchen. It reminded me of Little House on the Prairie, wholesome for humans and horses both. In other words, not my kind of comestible. Growing up we always had a jar of blackstrap molasses hanging around. It was an essential ingredient in PMum’s revolting morning porridge concoction, otherwise known as her freak-fest. Without going into too much detail, you can imagine my disdain for molasses when my introduction to it also involved wheatgerm, lecithin, yeast, gelatine, coconut oil and cod liver oil, all mushed together into long cooked squidgy oats first thing in the morning. PMum was obviously eating for health, and didn’t foist her breakfast on us, but nevertheless it turned me off porridge and molasses, and horses, for years.

Plus during my research for this here little piece of internet heaven I learned about the Boston Molasses Disaster. In Boston one unusually warm morning in 1919 a tank of molasses burst, the ensuing high speed flood of gloopy sweetener killed 21 people. Drowned by molasses. Utterly terrifying.

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While I was yet to be converted to a molasses lover, I am a die-hard ginger fan. I used to work in a juice bar where I’d mix up a killer ginger and orange juice tonic, almost too spicy to drink, whenever I felt slightly under the weather. My favourite cold weather dessert here in Hanoi is glutinous rice dumplings stuffed with black sesame and coconut swimming in a sweet, hot ginger soup, called Banh Troi Tau. Super fresh, thin skinned ginger often makes an appearance in the markets here, perfect for this famous ginger cake that has been on my radar for a while now. Just one missing ingredient: Molasses, impossible to find in Hanoi.

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I substituted molasses sugar and golden syrup which resulted in a light and airy cake that exploded with spicy tongue-tingling ginger and deep dark sweetness. The seemingly weightless crumb belies the intensity of flavours it carries. No wonder this cake is famous. I’m a molasses convert now.

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