Mainland Southeast Asia · Volume 39, Broken Rice, Fermented Fish and a City Built on Borrowed Ground
Bánh xèo miền Nam
The Mekong Delta
Illustration
- Time
- 30 minutes
- Researched
- 11 sources cited
A large, shatteringly crisp rice pancake, and a genuine correction to what this dish's own reputation gets wrong.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. Batter rests 15 to 30 minutes, cooks in batches.
Ingredients
- 300 g rice flour
- 1/2 tsp turmeric, for colour
- to taste spring onion, thinly sliced
- 1 egg (traditionally duck egg)
- 75 ml coconut milk
- 150 ml water
- 150 g pork, sliced thin
- 100 g shrimp
- 150 g bean sprouts, 75 g mung bean bean sprouts, mung bean
- to serve lettuce and herbs, to wrap
- to serve nước chấm (see Rung 4, above), to dip
Method
- Whisk the rice flour, turmeric, spring onion, egg, coconut milk and water into a thin batter. Rest 15 to 30 minutes, allowing the rice starch to fully hydrate.
- Heat a wide, sloped-side pan well, add a little oil, then sear the pork and shrimp briefly.
- Ladle in the batter, tilting the pan to spread it thin and wide, the Southern version made three to four times larger than the Central-region pancake.
- Scatter over bean sprouts, cover briefly to let the pancake steam through, then uncover and cook uncovered until the edges crisp and lift from the pan.
- Fold in half, serve with lettuce, fresh herbs and nước chấm to wrap and dip.
Notes
A genuine correction, worth stating directly: turmeric and coconut milk are often assumed to be the Southern batter's defining marker against the Central version, but the sources behind this chapter found the opposite pattern, turmeric more strongly associated with the Central-region batter. Size and a more pronounced sweet-sour-spicy dipping sauce are the better-documented Southern differentiators, and this chapter states that plainly rather than repeating the more common but weaker claim.
What a modern chef changes
The batter's crispness treated as a controllable variable, not a fixed recipe
Rung 5
Method
- Reduce the added water in direct proportion to the coconut milk used, deciding deliberately between a richer, softer pancake and a shatteringly crisp one rather than defaulting to one without noticing the trade-off.
- Blitz the batter fully in the high-power blender before resting it, for a smoother hydration than hand-whisking achieves.
- Dehydrate the bean sprouts and a portion of the mung bean garnish beforehand, scattering them in at the very end for an extra textural contrast against the pancake's own crispness.