Mainland Southeast Asia · Volume 39, Broken Rice, Fermented Fish and a City Built on Borrowed Ground
Cơm tấm sườn bì chả
Sài Gòn
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Hands on 30 minutes · Waiting 8 hours
- Researched
- 11 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
The rice a rural poor family's leftover from milling, turned by the city into the plate that names the whole cuisine's identity.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. Marinate overnight, cook 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 4 pork rib chops (sườn)
- 50 g fish sauce (40° protein)
- 20 g oyster sauce
- 20 g grilling sauce
- 20 g honey
- 70 g brown sugar
- 20 g maltose (mạch nha)
- 50 g pork fat or cooking oil
- 20 g shallot, minced
- 20 g garlic, minced
- for garnish lemon, thinly sliced
- 800 g broken rice (gạo tấm), cooked
- 100 g pork skin (bì), boiled, shredded and tossed with thính (toasted rice powder)
- made from 3 eggs and 50 g minced pork chả trứng (steamed egg and pork cake), sliced
- 4 fried eggs
- to serve pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, scallion oil, crisp pork fat (tóp mỡ)
Method
- Combine the marinade: fish sauce, oyster sauce, grilling sauce, honey, brown sugar, maltose, pork fat or oil and shallot, and massage gently into the pork rib chops for around 15 minutes. Lay thin lemon slices over the surface.
- Marinate overnight, covered, in the fridge.
- Par-cook the ribs on low heat, grilling, blanching or steaming, then return them to the marinade, turning repeatedly to absorb flavour.
- Finish on high heat close to serving, turning to caramelise and char the surface without burning.
- Build the plate: broken rice, the grilled rib, bì (pork skin), chả trứng, a fried egg, scallion oil, tóp mỡ, pickled carrot and daikon, and cucumber. Nước mắm chấm: 1 tbsp minced garlic, 1/2 tbsp minced chilli, 6 tbsp sugar, 4 tbsp fish sauce, 2 tbsp boiled water, juice of half a lime, mixed and served alongside.
What a modern chef changes
The marinade's sugar read the same way as any braise's caramel
Rung 1
Method
- Treat the marinade's brown sugar and maltose with the same colour discipline as nước màu, building a small amount of it into a genuine light caramel before combining with the fish sauce and aromatics, deepening the finished rib's colour and flavour beyond what raw sugar in a marinade achieves.
- Cook the ribs sous vide first, low and precise, then finish hard and fast on the grill for char alone, separating "cooked through" from "caramelised outside" into two controlled stages rather than one compromise.
- Dehydrate the pork fat for tóp mỡ at low heat until fully crisp and shatter-dry, rather than pan-rendering it, for a cleaner crunch with less risk of chewy, under-rendered pockets.