Vietnamese Cooking Lesson
- Ellen Stanton
- Mar 5, 2017
- 3 min read
As my Christmas present, my boyfriend treated me to a Vietnamese cooking lesson. This class is held by the lovely Uyen Luu, who has worked closely with Jamie Oliver and developed incredible dishes bursting with delicious flavours. Alongside her mother and sister, Uyen taught the class of 10 a variety of their traditional meals, allowing us to be inspired by the Vietnamese culture.
The class went on for 4 hours, whereby we were given demonstrations of meal preparation including the creation of spicy sauces and cooking various meats. Having never really experimented with Vietnamese cooking, I was intrigued by Uyen's description of combining a perfect balance of sweet, salty and sour flavours, which is known in the culture to ultimately balance one's health.
Our first meal involved creating these delicate Summer Rolls (above). Uyen showed us how to prepare the rice paper by wetting it and then filling it with a big bunch of amazing herbs such as coriander, mint, lettuce, perilla and garlic chives. Prawns and pork belly were also added before we carefully wrapped these beauties up. What completed this dish has to be the hoisin and peanut sauce that we could dunked our rolls in - utter perfection!
In between our courses we prepared the 'dinner' by adding sea bass in one pot of coconut water along with garlic, shallots, chillis and coconut caramel (this stuff is insane!) and allowing it to slow cook for a few hours. We did the same in another pot containing pork belly and quals eggs.
One of the many dishes we were lucky to try was this noodle soup, otherwise known as Pho. Essentially, Pho is a scented broth packed with nutritious vegetables, chicken and noodles. The image on the right shows the bowls before the flavoursome chicken broth was poured in. No, I was not ashamed when I drank the broth from the bowl at the end...slurp. Interestingly, this is a breakfast dish in Vietnam.
We also tried another breakfast dish - congee. Uyen explained that often there is left over rice and in Vietnam people tend to cook this in the morning as a sort of porridge. It is associated with soothing the soul, so is a great dish when you are feeling under the weather.
My favourite dish of all has to be bánh xèo (left: cheeky snap of me cooking bánh xèo). This is a Vietnamese street food, sort of like a crêpe, filled with prawns, pork, spring onions and beansprouts. The thing that made me love this dish was that the batter is made using coconut milk and this flavour was INCREDIBLE. We were taught the traditional way of eating it, which was to rip off some lettuce leaves, wrap up a piece of the crêpe and finally dunk it in a chilli vinegar dressing that Uyen's mother taught us to make.
After hours of experiencing the most amazing meals, we finally reached the big feast. The table was laid with our slow-cooked sea bass and pork belly, as well as a crispy fried snapper, baked sea bass, spinach and tofu soup and a tofu and tomato stir-fry.
The meal was completed with a mango and tapioca pudding with coconut milk.
Yesterday was such a wonderful experience, I couldn't have asked for a better present. Uyen has some incredible recipes and I am really looking forward to trying them at home. Her book is available to buy and her website has many of her recipes on there too.
Thanks for a lovely day Uyen x
