Vietnam’s national delicacies in the flat world

Indeed, such traditional products are encroached by imported brands from other countries.

A question is raised that if Korea is well known with their kimchi, where is Vietnamese pickles on the map of culinary world? What would our local firms and our food artisans react when our traditional food have lost a goal on our home ground?

Art.1: Eggplants, leek pickles, and fermented bean paste – are they fading away?

Summer in the North of Vietnam is harsh. Sunlight directly burns the streets up and the air is muggy. People tend to be dehydrated and tired. To cheer up the meals, there are always sour soup and pickled eggplants to increase the taste.

When winter comes, the air is chill and dried. It will be great if a meal has roasted fatty pork and pickled mustard served with fresh cooked rice.

During Tet holiday, Vietnamese must have bánh chưng, bánh tét (traditional sweet rice cake), which are made from good sweet rice and filled with green beans and pork belly. To lighten this type of “heavy” food, picked Chinese onions are a great choice. Peeled onions are fermented in salty water until their sharp and pungent flavor partially fading and an onion carries all salty, spicy, hot, and sour flavors. Such a great side dish for bánh chưng.

“Silent beauty”

Pickles produce is special side dishes that have run from generation to generation in traditional daily meals of Vietnamese. They are also improvised to become more diverse and abundant.

Pickled produce – folk side dishes running from generation to generation in Viet Nam.

Original or traditional-like dishes always have their places in daily meals. They have their own silent beauty, which can please from the king to the beggar.

Ha Minh Quan, a 30-year-old engineer who used to study abroad then he got married and settled in New Zealand, shared his honest feelings, “Once I used FaceTime to talk to my parents in Vietnam and I saw a delicious pickled mustard dish in the middle of the slaver. And I was suddenly mouthwatering. And I felt a hint of aroma; a sour and pungent taste poked at my nose. Sometimes I just long for a real pickled eggplant but there is just sweet and sour white eggplant here. No, that’s not enough.”

However, those side dishes are quite picky. Cuisine is an art; you can’t just force a rural pickle to date classy dishes and expect a happy ending.

Minh Nhat, Master Chef Viet Nam 2014, has amazingly succeeded in his business because he knows how to lead folk cuisine to meet modern values to create special taste for his food.

He opened a chain of bread stores and started to build up his brand. Chef Minh Nhat shared a tip to “raise” his customers, which is tiny but as important as other main ingredients: chili sauce.

“A good bread can’t be completed without chili sauce. And if that chili sauce is special enough, it should stay in long-term-memory area and be coded. Later, if the nose just catches this typical smell of the chili sauce, the brain will decode and shape other flavors as spicy, aroma, and tasty. The brain also stimulates the taste to recall all special ingredients in the bread”, analyzed Minh Nhat.

No pain no gain

Once the path was shaped, chef Minh Nhat had started to focus on the bold point of his bread - chili sauce – while maintaining the quality of other ingredients. His chili sauce is all home made with a constant recipe.

“In the north of Viet Nam, there are so many types of chili with different spicy levels, smell, and flavors. To create my own chili sauce, I combine the scent and red color of sweet chili with spicy bird chili with a certain ratio. However, because it’s home made without any preservatives so it’s easy to get spoiled. Have to keep it in cool temperature and use it within short time”, said chef Minh Nhat.

People from the 1960’s or 1970’s must remember their subsidy period, when their spare meals always had had pickled eggplant or pickled mustard but nowadays, those frugal dishes have been losing their original taste.

Sweet and sour mustard pickle, a recent tasty trendy dish.

Ms. Le Thi Nga, about 50 years old, owns a well-known kiosk of pickled produce in Long Bien district (Ha Noi Capital). With her 20 years experiences, she sells around 100kgs per day and her customers are almost frequent and local citizens.

According to Ms. Nga, fine pickled eggplant should have yellowish color, little withered, little chewy yet crunchy, salty, and sour enough while pickled mustard should be bright yellow, aromatic, crunchy, sour and salty to taste.

“My customers have complained that pickled stuff is not as good as the one they had years ago. It’s true. Because people have used too many fertilizers and chemicals on their plants, the fruits or leaves are obviously affected”, honestly said Ms. Nga.

With wholesalers, Ms. Nga directly bought whole crop from farmers so that she could ask them to her produce clean in certain time after fertilizing. Usually, she waited until the worms coming out then harvested the whole crop. Therefore, her pickled products are always nice looking and aromatic.

“Pickling is easy but to make sure that pickled produce stay good and tasty in different picky weathers of the north is not simple. Eggplant must be washed and drained and mustard leaves must be in good condition before pickling. Otherwise, final products will be spoiled. Even though we make mass amount of pickled products but I always wash produce myself”, said Ms. Nga.  

By Vietnam+