Phuong’s passion for food extends t

[lynk2510]

The school offers a three-hour course centered on Saigon’s lighter, contemporary cuisine. But I opted for the expanded four-hour class that included a chef-guided shopping trip to Saigon’s huge Ben Thanh Market, which is situated in the center of a roundabout with multiple roads leading to it. The barn-like building had wide open doors on all sides that lead to warrens of produce, fish and meat stands. Shoppers also can find coffee beans, knock-offs of expensive watches and handbags, and the stinky Durian fruit. Chef Tran Vinh Phuong, my instructor, met me at the door with good news. I was getting a private cooking lesson since no one else signed up. “You’re going to be busy since you’ll cook everything,” he cautioned. Most days students break into groups, each handling different parts of the meal.



First stop was the booth with water spinach, a brilliant green vegetable with huge hollow tubes and very few leaves. Phuong sniffed it, touched it and checked the color. When an eel leaped from a wide bucket behind us into a second bucket two feet away, no one in the market flinched. Instead, the vendor calmly carried it back to its original home. Next, we purchased fresh night-scented lily stem, another type of leafy green, which tastes like celery and is used to flavor soups. Stand by stand, we purchased everything needed for our three-course lunch, including okra, bean sprouts, tomatoes, tamarind pods, kumquats, Vietnamese basil, mustard leaves and long red chilis. Phuong had purchased shrimp and pork belly earlier, and his cupboard already contained plenty of nuoc mam, the fermented fish sauce used to season almost everything. When we returned to the school, we immediately started to prepare the first course: Sour soup with prawns. The sour flavors come from tamarind steeped in boiling water. But the soup has sweetness, too, gathered from fresh pineapple and a bit of sugar. The fish sauce provides a touch of saltiness. It was fairly easy to make and I liked the taste. I felt confident as we moved to the water spinach salad. We ran a splitter tool through the stems to widen the tubes and then tossed them into ice water to keep them crunchy while preparing the dressing. That mixture, made with kumquat juice, sugar, chili and fish sauce, tasted much like a salty tangerine. Finally, it was time to make a Vietnam pancake, one of the country’s signature foods.



This rice-flour crepe is usually stuffed with pork, shrimp, steamed mung beans and bean sprouts. We added a bit of sautéed pork belly to complement these flavors. Phuong made the cooking process look easy, folding the finished pancake like an omelet and slipping it out of the wok. If you happen to be dexterous — like Phuong — after the pancake is removed from the pan, you slice it and wrap it in mustard, lettuce and mint leaves. The pieces are then dipped in a mixture of fish sauce, lime juice, sugar and chili sauce. My wraps were too fat and kept falling apart. I was too hungry to keep trying, so I dipped the omelet slices, grabbed a bite of greens, and propelled them toward my mouth.



Phuong’s passion for food extends to his childhood flavor memories. He loves the contemporary Vietnamese cuisine of Hoa Tuc, finding it “unusual and tasty.” But it’s very different from the food he grew up eating in the central coastal city of Quy Nhon, where his uncle and father prepared special holiday dishes. His favorite dishes include noodle soup with pork stock and raw slices of jellyfish added just before serving, or deep-fried fish cake wrapped with crispy rice paper, raw vegetables and fresh leaves. “But I also like to cook the foods of Hoa Tuc for my family,” he said. “Especially my father, who is surprised when I use kumquat juice instead of lime in dipping or dressing sauces.” Thoroughly exhausted after matching Phuong course-for-course during a three-hour cooking marathon, I walked back to the Bong Sen Hotel, headed
[Only admins are allowed to see this link]