Soaked and Brined Black Beans

It's been a long time

I shouldn't have left you

Without a dope read to munch to...

I've been busy procreating, ukulele'ing, moving, homeschooling (briefly), volunteering, childraising, PTO'ing, adulting, and mom'ing for the last couple of years and this blog has taken a back burner. I've got almost 10 or so recipes sitting in my draft folder but they are still gathering virtual dust. Sigh.


But-- 

I was struggling for a savory bean side dish for a communal burrito potluck for our annual campout. When/if I make beans, I go to animal fat for the flavor boost. Since our Holistic Moms chapter had Muslim families participating, I needed something halal so my go to lard and (Buddhist) duck fat were not going to make the cut. (And I didn't have time to run to the local halal butcher...)

Then I remembered...

Beans, beans the magic fruit, the more you eat....

Kombu which would give me a savory/umami boost as well as help breakdown the indigestibles (toot-source) like oligosaccharides and phytic acid. I am not even going there with the soak-no soak debate. I know what my gut feels like. Which my family has now dubbed mom bombs. Soaking is just better for me.

Along the way, I discovered brining for beans and of course, I am a big pressure cooker proponent. Because: from phrozen to Phở in under an hour is too damn easy. I upgraded to a Kuhn Duromatic 12 qt when I birthed the big little because that's a lot more people to feed and I was tired of having to make two batches of phở with the 6 qt because the bones take up half the pot. I still keep my 6 qt Fissler because I inherited it from my 

bà ngoại | grandmother and it's handy for grains, side dishes, and small quantities.

I pre-date the Instant Pot so I don't have a review or a rave, but believe me I am eyeballing it. I only have to babysit the pressure cooker for less than an hour at most, but the prospect of set & forget it is very tempting because I am very forgetful...)

Anyhow, I cobbled together a recipe from various ideas with Cuban inspiration. And it was like sooooooo good. 
I got rave reviews and recipe requests from folks, so... here's the recipe, Samrana! 
( I made 2.5 lbs for 30+ people including littles which left me with maybe 1/4 of a pot leftover, this is a reduced quantity). 

Some ingredient notes: my kid doesn't like the tannic-ity of olive oil, so I mixed it with avocado oil. I used a little fresh garlic that I had on hand, but mainly I rely on powdered or dried/minced garlic because I have issues with digesting fresh garlic unless it is cooked AF. I wanna say I got the kombu powder from Frontier, but I think they don't carry it any longer. You can substitute dried kombu instead or omit it. Um, I eyeball quantities, so adjust to taste!

We were camping there was no way to pretty stage beans.

BRINE BEANS
1 lb beans (I used organic black turtle beans)
3 tbs of sea salt
4 qts water

Soak 8 hrs to 24 hours. Drain beans.

Ingredients

EV olive oil + avocado oil
1 organic sweet onion, chopped
1 tsp organic garlic powder

1 tsp kombu powder or 4 inch strip of dried kombu

dash of Red Boat fish sauce

1 tsp organic cumin powder

2 bay leaves

2 qts water

chopped cilantro to garnish

Splash a super generous amount of oil in the pressure cooker. Sauté the onions and garlic until translucent. Add kombu powder, fish sauce, cumin and bay leaves and sauté briefly until aromatic. Toss in the beans. Cover with water, lid it, and bring to a boil. Cook at pressure for 4 minutes for soaked black beans (all other beans consult this chart for cooking time). Turn off the stove. Let it depressurize naturally, approx 10 minutes. Taste, add salt or other seasonings as needed. Top with chopped cilantro.

BOOM. DONE. 

Really, that is it. I love my pressure cooker! 

I have NO idea how long this takes in an Instant Pot. I know that it would take 3-4 hours in a VitaClay and that is why hands down, my pressure cooker is my go to because I suffer from the inability to meal plan.

[Full disclosure: I am now an Amazon Associate. Yes, I assimilated. All kidding aside, all my labor is unremunerated. Both as a mom and as cook. Don't get me wrong, I like getting paid in gratitude and sticky kisses from the littles, but it would also be nice to be compensated even a pittance for the fraction of the work I do IRL. I've made enough to buy coffee from individual affiliate links so it really is a bit ridiculous. And alot of the links I have are not remunerated, like Frontier or articles, blogs, etc. So for what it is worth, for less than the price of a cup of coffee, you can support my labor which is vastly undervalued!]

phở đuôi bò | oxtail noodle soup

Making breakfast magic with some pasture-raised oxtail and organic spices...

I completely forgot to get any herbs or steak but it was delish nonetheless.

My real food, real phở recipe over here.

Social history of phở over here.

Phở-natic confessions here.

Ancestral Foodways: My way

I was honored to be invited by my inimitable friend Loan to give a short talk today on the topic of Food & Culture to her Asian American studies class at the U Mass, Boston through the magic of the internet and the Borg technology of google. This is the talk I gave with additional links and visuals.

Ancestral Foodways: My way

It's such a beautiful thing, this musical thing
When I can do it my way and shootin' no blanks
I just refute what you think, a quite unusual thing
Yes it's a mutual thing 'cos it's the root of all things and we aims to be

Blackalicious feat. Lyrics Born "Do This My Way"

My name is Leilani.  I am Vietnamese American mother, childbirth educator & matrescence doula, and writer.  There’s a lot of other things I do and am but that covers the main points.  I’ll be talking to you today about my blog Real Food, Real Pho and why I write it.

MY BACKGROUND

My ma, aunty, big bro & sis, and me

I’m a second/third generation refugee.  My maternal grandparents became refugees for the first time in 1954 leaving North Vietnam to settle in the Central region.  My entire maternal side grandparents, aunties, uncles were sponsored as refugees in April 1975 by my eldest aunty who was married to a US serviceman and living in Honolulu.  My mom was 8 mos pregnant with me at the time.  I was born a few weeks later and we lived there for several years.  My mom owned a mauna pua truck selling siau pau (pork buns), ice cream and candy; nowadays it’s what would be called a food truck and it would be trendy, but back then, it was grey market (not strictly legal) and the city eventually shut them down.

My phamily eventually resettled in San Diego in the 80s because there was not a lot of work in Hawai'i.  It's not paradise when you don't have prospects.  My mom was a single working mom.  We were on food stamps for a number of years.  This was before there were any Vietnamese grocery stores so we ate a lot of american processed food because that is what you could get with food stamps--velveeta, powdered milk, processed food stuff (which means food altered in factories which destroys nutrients, especially the “whites"--white rice, white flour, white sugar).  Even when there was fresh Vietnamese produce and ingredients to be had, american processed food became a regular part of our diet because single mom + three kids = not a lot of time to cook.  We wanted to be like other kids and eat McDonald’s, spaghetti, pizza, soda.  My mom’s cooking too was very fusion which is probably influenced by living in Hawai’i where there is a meld of culture and cuisines; we ate lettuce and greens in our spaghetti.

Eating roasted rice paddy mice
 in the Mekong Delta 2007
f sustainable free range
pasture-raised

When I went to college, I double majored in Anthropology and Linguistics and this is when I first started cooking for myself. I later went on to an intensive doctoral program in Anthropology where I focused on the culture of emerging modern society in Vietnam at a time when the market was opening up from state-owned enterprise to more international capital.  As the years went by, I found myself focused more on community organizing where I lived and left academia to become a research analyst for almost a decade, serving grassroots organizations, indigenous groups all over the US, and for a low wage workers union.

For a long time, my philosophy in life was DIE for what I believe in, this was the value I inherited from my biological father, and it was killing me.  I burned out.  So I quit my job to be at home with my daughter and to learn how to LIVE for what I believe in.

NUTRITION & EPIGENETICS

A surprising fact is that most of the American population is malnourished and dehydrated in spite of eating so much, because of what they are eating (Standard American Diet or "SAD") is nutritionally empty and/or depletes nutrients.  I was no exception.  I was malnourished which is weird to think since I was not underweight or starving if anything I was thick, but there were signs through food cravings which are a way of one's body telling one that one is need something (example: a craving for carbs/pastries is a really a craving for shortterm energy because you don’t have enough reserves of the long term energy like healthy fat & protein), other signs were the vertical ridges in my teeth & nails, all the health issues I was experiencing, but going back to childhood and fetal development, even my tongue tie, my inherited overbite and lower teeth crowding was an indication of at least three generations of malnutrition.

This widespread phenomenon of malnutrition that comes from eating large quantities of "food" instead of malnutrition from the absence of food as in a famine or poverty, is recent in human history.  It's part of the industrialization of food production.  After centuries of extractive agricultural practices or chemical contamination, the soil is depleted of minerals and nutrients.  Food is being chemically altered if not genetically altered in factories. Vitamins and minerals that are destroyed in the processing are being added back synthetically in the form of vitamin fortification that is not bioavailable (easy for body to assimilate) and contributes to a toxic overload for our livers along with environmental toxins.  Processed food is essentially nutritionally empty.  We’re not taught much about real nutrition.  Popular culture references calories.  Calories are meaningless; it’s the nutrients that matter and where they come from matters most.

There’s this emerging branch of science now called epigenetics and it looks at how environment

(toxins, nutrition or malnutrition) can alter the expression of your genes.  An example would be nutrition and dental formation.  There was a dentist named Weston Price  at the turn of the 20th century who noticed increasing problems with cavities and bite and connected it to the rise of industrially processed food like white flour and sugar.  He travelled all over the world and documented the introduction of processed food and its impact on dental health.  In families where they ate native foods, the children had robust facial structure, straight teeth, few to no dental issues.  In families where they ate processed foods, the children had smaller jaws, overbites/underbites, cavities.  In other words, humans are evolutionarily programmed to have straight teeth that can fit into their jawbones.  No animal species could survive if they didn’t have teeth that were functional.  Dr. Price understood that nutrition was critical in bone formation and to optimal health.  He developed a philosophy that can be paraphrased as “eating what your ancestors ate”.  Nowadays, we have the understanding to say the malnutrition from processed foods affected the epigenetic expression of dental formation and it degenerates with each successive generation.

Stress and psychological trauma is also something that can be inherited behaviorally and epigenetically.  Stress affects the sympathetic system--the adrenal glands, hypothalamus, pituitary gland--which generates the fight, flight or freeze response.  Stress is also changes epigenetic expression and is passed on to the next generation in gene expression as well as behavior.  Scientists have done research on the children of survivors of Nazi death camps on behavioral inheritance of PTSD and more recently on the epigenetics of mice exposed to stress; stress/trauma affects the genes that are inherited by the next generation.  Your parents' experiences and reactions to stress predisposes your own sympathetic system and depletes or inhibits your body’s absorption of nutrients.  So my family history means that I have 150 years (+/-) of colonization and war trauma coded in my DNA.  It’s no surprise that my adrenals (adrenal glands make the master hormones that we need to survive) were worn out; so at my lowest, even though driving in traffic typically makes me anxious, I would experience near accidents and not feel anything.  This wasn’t a zen response.  I could feel a click like an ignition but nothing turned on.  My fight, flight or freeze reaction was not happening.  I didn’t get the burst of adrenaline to help me react to a situation and keep myself safe because my adrenals were not functioning.

BURNOUT TO BALANCE

So I burned out.  I had developed systemic, auto-immune issues, that’s when your body becomes so stressed out it attacks itself--for example, allergies, skin issues, diabetes, in extreme cases, cancer.  My adrenals just about shut down,  and I was pretty close to being bedridden.  I had barely out enough energy to drag myself out of bed and sludge through my day.  You ever watch Shaun of the Dead?  It was the first zombie romantic comedy.  The opening montage (minus the peppy music)?  The working dead.  That's what it felt like.  Life was flat.  All the ailments I had were beyond the scope of Western medicine to heal; Western medicine is about masking the symptoms, not getting to the root causes.  I had to heal myself.  And I did.  A huge part of that healing process is FOOD.  Food is my medicine. (I believe medicine is anything that heals your body, mind, and spirit/soul; this can be music, talk story, wisdom, plants, love, spiritual/ancestral connection, and food among others.)

I considered myself a healthy eater up to that point.  We ate mostly homemade cooking with a lot of white rice, fresh vegetables and meat at every meal, some processed food everyday; processed food is anything that did not recently come from the earth or an animal.  We didn’t eat too differently from the way we were raised, lots of stir-fries.  But the lifetime of stress, inherited stress from war/refugee trauma in prior generations, coffee/sugar dependence, and processed foods (donuts!) had depleted my body, weakened my organs & systems.

Something had to change and that something was ME.  No one else could tell me how/why.  I was my own personal health investigator.  Over the last 5 years, I tried a lot of holistic alternative medicine like naturopath, chiropractor, muscle testing, acupuncture, osteopath, yoga, breathwork & meditation, read a lot of articles and blogs, reset my circadian rhythm, and those all contributed, but food and more specifically nutrition is where I experienced the most changes.

Instead of popping a multi-vitamin (which I had “allergic” rash reactions to but were really my liver being overloaded with toxins and passing into the blood stream triggering an histamine immune reaction), I had to replenish my nutrients from eating whole, real foods--food that recently came from the earth and from animals, not from a factory or a lab.

homemade dưa chua
pickled mustard greens

I started off eliminating wheat and dairy, and my seasonal allergies went away.  I went organic and my skin, digestion, and hormones improved.  I gave up alcohol, coffee and caffeine (oh this was hard, no more cà phê sữa đá!) and the migraines and vertigo stopped.  I added healthy fats and my brain function and memory came back.  I eliminated sugar and reduced grains, added more veggies, green smoothies, and my blood sugar stabilized and I lost a little weight and girth (really it's volume from inflammation more than weight).  I drank more water spiked with sea salt, and my skin improved and I could sleep at night without waking up from hormonal surges feeling hot, dry & hungry.  I eliminated additives like MSG or preservatives that are neuro-toxic and my mood stabilized, my stress/anxiety levels normalized, the agitation & anger/irritability reduced and sleeping regularized.  I added homemade fermented foods dense with natural probiotics like sauerkraut, pickled mustard greens, and the ridges in my nails have smoothed out.  I stopped eating processed foods, I even gave up supposedly healthy organic processed foods, the organic blue tortilla chips, the organic gluten-free breads because they were just organic empty calories; I gave up most restaurant food because of the sugar and additives.  There’s the saying you are what you eat.  When I eat processed foods, conventionally grown meat, I get sick.

Local sustainably caught
Chinook salmon

Overall, my body was less inflammed which I can quantify by looking at my white blood count which used to be through the roof and are now in the low end of normal.  Along with the loving support of my family, yoga and deep breathing (which not only changes your brainwaves, but also affects epigenetic expression!), my creativity is re-emerging, and I feel whole again.

THE SOUL OF VINAMESE FOODWAYS: MY WAY

real phở

When I eliminated wheat and dairy, I thought well, I’ll keep it easy and cook Vietnamese/Asian food following the food philosophy of "Eat what your ancestors ate" because my ancestors were not eating macaroni & cheese from a box.  And you think of Asian food and you think of rice, not wheat.  And then as I started reading the labels, I realized how much processing goes into Vietnamese food--not just MSG, but MSG in all its iterations (hydrolyzed wheat protein, "natural flavor", soy protein, etc), wheat derivatives, refined sugar, preservatives (not just banned formaldehyde, but FDA approved preservatives), food coloring.  This is not how my ancestors ate.  So I had to find ingredients that didn’t contain additives, wheat, dairy, refined sugar, minimally processed.  I had to decolonize my diet.

xôi gấc—red sticky rice in a 
traditional Lao steaming pot

I had to learn how to truly make food from scratch using ancestral foodways that maximize nutrition instead of shortcuts that comes from modern living always being in a hurry and on the go, that can be counter-nutritive.  I couldn’t find a single source for recipes/blogs that made Vietnamese food using whole ingredients and ancestral foodways.  Some ancestral foodways I saw my grandparents practice, other things I pieced together from blogs about homesteading or whole foods cooking.  So that’s when I started blogging, to reclaim and sometimes remake ancestral food ways.  

Sprouted brown rice

I’ll take as an example, rice.  I went from eating white jasmine rice every day 1-2 times a day to eating brown rice, then organic brown rice every day to now eating organic brown rice maybe 2-3 times a week and soaking and sprouting the rice 2-3 days to reduce the anti-nutrients like phytic acid which are inherent in all seeds and to leach out the arsenic from soil contamination that is endemic to all arable land all over the world; seeds contain all the genetic information for new life, so they have innate self-defense in the form of anti-nutrients like phytic acid.  Sprouting changes the rice from a seed to a plant and releasing its nutritional value.  Sprouting is an ancestral foodway that has been lost in the translation/export of food.  I could go on about the globalization and misappropriation of "super foods" and the sometimes fatal stripping of foodways and cultural context but I’ll leave it there.  (My blog post on corn gets into this a bit.)

Growing native corn

I am not a professionally trained chef.  Like most home cooks, I came to cooking as a necessity when I started living on my own in college. I learned by calling my mom on the phone, reading cookbooks, recipes and blogs, through tips from friends and strangers, learned through making mistakes.  I cook for my family, I cook for me, for my community of friends.  For me, it started with phở which I grew up eating at family gatherings every Sunday. But I've experimented with all kinds of cuisines from American to Moroccan to Irish.  I've rendered lard, made corned beef by fermenting organic grass-fed beef over a week; I've made pozole by growing, harvesting and nixtamalizing maize (which is a process of alkalizing the kernels to release the nutrients similar to hominy) and stewing an entire hog's head (which is a very gnarly experience.  The snout!  The teeth! The eyeballs!).  Somethings I've made better than others.  A lot of things I've botched.  But more than expertise I’ve found what matters is the ingredients.  Real food, sustainably grown, tastes better and is more nourishing.  It can be costly, but there are frugal strategies, like growing your own vegetables, joining buying coops and buying straight from the farmer (called Community Supported Agriculture).  Organic, grass-feed beef which can cost up to $25/lb at the store, costs $5/lb buying a sustainably-raised whole steer from a local farmer, and then paying the butcher.  It's more expensive than conventionally raised cows, but I don't get boils from the antibiotics and growth hormones that they feed them (not to mention the stress hormones from their living conditions and manner of slaughter). It’s a damn sight cheaper than the thousands of dollars I was spending on health care, supplements, and short term fixes.

MY SOUL FOOD

The soul of my cooking is a love of food and family.  For me, cooking Vietnamese food is the way I remember my grandparents who were self-sufficient, subsistence farmers before the wars and who transplanted here to the US, had a subsistence garden no matter where they lived in the hood and carried on foodways and traditions of cooking from their upbringing.  Cooking is how I honor their legacy, and make it meaningful and present for my daughter. There is a story in each meal, a rich history in the making of it, and quality in the eating of it. Taking the time to make something from scratch using ancestral food ways infuses the food with more flavor, more nutrients, more tradition, and more love.

Vietnamese culture is some 4000 years old give or take.  The cuisine is inflected with the rich cultural and historical influences from several millenia of globalization.  The native palate (fish sauce, hot/sour/salty/sweet), Melanesia/Polynesia from antiquity, over two millenia of influence from countries of that are now called India & China, from the conquest and absorption of the Khmer and Champa kingdoms 400 years ago, Portuguese missionizing 16th c-18th c, and then, the less than 150 years of influence from French colonization, a blip of less than 2 decades of American war, more recently aspirations for japanese/korean modernity.

Conventional Bánh da lợn |Pigskin cake
made with white sugar, food coloring
& flavor extract

My Bánh da lợn| PIgskin cake
Made without additives

Food is constantly evolving.  I don’t claim to cook authentic as it was made 100 years ago by my great grandmother. There were adapted foodways that my grandparents practiced that I eschew like food coloring, karo corn syrup or white rice flour in favor of more nutritious practices.  The results are not like we are now used to eating; the appearance, colors, taste, texture are wildly different. And, I live here in the US, this is my context.  I have a food processor and I use it.  I eat kale with everything even my phở.  I have a family to feed and I don’t always have all day to cook so I do make shortcuts, but I try not to compromise on nutrition.  It’s been a learning process for me to challenge myself where I feel daunted (Bánh Chưng! hog’s head!) and to reinvent.  So this blog is my take on ancestral food ways and LIVING for what I believe in.

From the rooter to the tooter--hog's head broth

It's such a beautiful thing, this musical thing

When I can do it my way
Ain't shootin' no blanks

I just refute what you think

A quite unusual thing, Yes it's a mutual thing

Cos it's the root of all things, and we end.

Q &A from the class (paraphrased)

What is organic? 

Organic is a certification that the food is sustainably raised without the use of toxic chemicals like pesticides, herbicides, and is not genetically modified.  http://www.organicconsumers.org 

Do you use measurements? 

I tend to be a freehand, improvisational cook, even when I am using a recipe.  I eyeball it.  The way I learned from my mom was "use a rice bowl (or handful) full of ..."  or "put as much as you like" so it's very relative.  That also means, sometimes my results are not consistent especially with a new recipe.  But then I also have interesting surprises because I don't stick to recipes, even when I use someone else's recipe.  I do try to use measurements for most of my recipes that I share with folks. 

Are nutrient supplements or vitamins bad for you? 

There are two kinds of vitamins--synthetic and food-based.  The synthetic kind are made in a laboratory from who knows what kind of material; it's not as bio-available and usually you see/smell the excess sloughed off in your waste (i.e. that weird urine color/smell).  Food-based vitamins are extracted from real food in a laboratory.  They are better (and more expensive) than synthetic chemicals.  But the best way to get nutrients is from eating real food.  It's like taking bromelain as an anti-inflammatory supplement when you can eat just eat a pineapple instead.  But if you have to choose a vitamin, choose the food-based one.   

4/8/2014 Another thing about vitamins... medicinal herbs are another great way to get vitamins and minerals that are bioavailable and inexpensive.  Dandelion for example (not a weed, but medicine!) is a good source of iron, calcium and potassium and it supports liver function. Dandelions can be eaten (cooked), taken as a infusion/tea, or made into a tincture with brandy.  I take it ever take this whenever I need liver support in flushing out excess toxins because it helps to support the liver. Also it makes a good post-drinking tonic.  Just saying'.  Nettle is another good one that supports the kidneys/adrenals, is great for allergies (seasonal and other) by helping to flush the histamines, and is a milks analgesic (pain relief).  It has Vitamins A, C, D, K, calcium, phosphorus, iron, sulphur.  You can generally find medicinal herbs at a natural food store or online in bulk or in tea packets.  Try to source it organic.  You could also go out to a meadow where you are reasonably sure they do not spray herbicides and harvest it there (this is called wildcrafting or foraging).

Green smoothies are a great way to increase your vegetable intake and boost your vitamin/mineral intake.  I have one for breakfast every day (chia seed, coconut flakes, flax seed, carrot, cucumber, cooked spinach or kale, blueberries, pineapple, a pinch of sea salt, and sometimes ginger powder,).  I cook my leafy greens because of the oxalic acid and other anti-nutrients/goitrogen in raw greens.

Ăn Ngon Lành|Eat Delectably!

For resources and further reading, check out the resources section in my FAQs.

Have more questions or comments?  I'd love to hear from you.  Hit me up below or email me realfoodrealpho @ gmail.com.

Bánh Chưng | Earth cake for Lunar New Year

Bánh Chưng is a traditional Việt dish for Tết | the Lunar New Year.  Back in the nascent days of Việt Nam's tribal past, legend has it that after defeating the Shang dynasty incursion, the 6th Hùng Vương king (ca. 2300 BC) decided to choose his successor among his sons by a cooking contest; yes, a prehistoric Top Chef competition with the winner being crowned king.  Primogeniture had no valency in pre-Sinic Van Lang; patrilineal confucianism came later.  The winningest son who was 18th in birth order and poor to boot was visited by a nữ tiên | a goddess who advised him to use the simple ingredients of the people, wrap it in banana leaves and boil it.  So he chose gạo nếp | glutinous rice, đậu xanh | mung beans, and pork, shaped it vuông vuông | square creating Bánh Chưng which in ancient Việt cosmology represents the earth.  He also made bánh dày | mochi in the round to represent Heaven.  I know that seems puzzling to imagine the earth as square and Heaven round.

Flying over north VN

Bear with me here as I diverge through my anti-halcyon grad school years.  I took a seminar on the Sacred Feminine in Southeast Asia with Dr. Ashley Thompson who kept emphasizing that there were Indic yonis & lingam all over Southeast Asia including VN which utterly befuddled me at the time (how is a square pedestal a yoni?).  And I finally puzzled out the connection between cosmic geometry and everyday objects; on the geographic level, a rice paddy is roughly square in shape when on level land, a metonymic connection to earth; on the symbolic/metaphoric level, a square set on its corner, is a diamond or rhombus, the universal symbol of the yoni.  Now, thanks to Ashley and the Sacred Feminine (sounds like a great band name) my secret sixth sense to wit is: (sigh) I. See. Yonis. Everywhere. (I'm talking about you, Crystal Vulva Cathedral) which is a damn sight better than seeing lingam everywhere let me tell you.

Linga-Yoni at the Cát Tiên sanctuary,
Lâm Đồng province, Vietnam

To the indigenous Việt cosmology, the vault of heaven is encircles the earth.  Hence  bánh dày | mochi in the round.  (I said, "She was more like a beauty queen from a movie screen.  Dont mind but what do you mean I am the one Who will dance on the floor in the round?")

Aside: bánh tét is a related dish which was purportedly derived during the Nam tiến | the Southern expansion period (17th C VN's version of Manifest Destiny conquest).  It can have the same savory ingredients as Bánh Chưng or alternately contain a sweet mixture of sticky rice & banana.  Significantly enough the Southern region in VN retains more Indic cultural influence via the conquest of Cham & Khmer kingdoms (and more Sinic influence via the Ming dynasty refugees who settled the area).  It is unsurprising that the cylindrical shape should therefore represent the linga, completing the cosmic dialectic.  (Oh, and thanks internet for showing me that I am not the only one to make this connection so you can stop looking at me like I am prurient, all you Việt Kiều.)

biggest Linga and Yoni in Southeast Asia

During my childhood, Ông Bà Ngoại |my maternal grandparents and Ông ngoai in particular would make dozens and dozens of Bánh Chưng the week before Tết.  Ông Ngoại would set the banana leaves in a frame and skillfully wrap dozens of Bánh Chưng (Ohio St, Auburn Dr, 54th).  Then he'd light a small bonfire in the backyard and boil them in a clean galvanized steel trash can.  The cooked Bánh Chưng would be distributed among the Phamily and the community.

I have been wanting to make Bánh Chưng ever since I became a mother to continue the tradition; and once my grandparents' passed, as a part of their legacy, but life got in the way and I was daunted.  This year with my ascending energy, I gave it a go though it was a few weeks after Tết.  I kinda winged it, loosely referring to some instructions I wrote down from my mom and Bach Ngo's cookbook, using what ingredients I had: pork belly instead of shoulder (too fatty, not enough meat), no shallots (hard to source organic ones).  I didn't hull the mung beans because it just seemed like a lot of work and anyway it's just more fiber; I didn't precook them either because of the time and not wanting to cook all the nutrients out.  I struggled with wrapping (darn banana leaves kept splitting when I was wrapping it and my corners were not tight so there was some water that got in).  Then I posted my results on Facebook and got lots of feedback from my aunty Len and my mama (who I let weigh in this post with her advice).  I suggest looking up youtube tutorials on wrapping as I haven't mastered this.  The one drawback is the ones from Việt Nam use fresh banana leaves that have a different texture & length than the ones we can source here.  Frozen banana leaves can be found in an Asian or Latino market (especially the Caribbean ones) and occasionally I've seen fresh banana leaves.

Bánh Chưng

makes three 9x9 inch "cakes"

• 10 cups of organic, sprouted glutinous brown rice (alternately called sticky rice, sweet rice, mochi rice)
• 1 lb organic sprouted mung beans
• banana leaves washed & dried and then blanched
• optional 8 shallots
• 1/4 c. Red Boat fish sauce
• Celtic or grey salt
• 1/5 tsp freshly ground black pepper
• 2-1/2 lbs of sustainably raised pork shoulder or ham, cut into 2 inch cubes
• coconut palm sugar
• optional coconut milk (full fat kind, not the dairy alternative kind)
• cotton kitchen twine
• 24 qt stockpot or pressure cooker
• Bragg's amino acids or Coconut secret amino acids
• lard or coconut oil

RICE RICE BABY 

Soak rice & mung beans separately overnight in filtered water.  Drain the water separately (can be composted).  You may proceed with the recipe from this step or to boost the nutritional value, sprout the grains by  and rinse 1-2 times a day for 2-3 days until the germ sprouts a little tail.

Pulverize shallots, fish sauce, salt & pepper in a food processor, mortar & pestle or with a hand blender.  Add to the pork and marinade for several hours or overnight.

If you do plan on cooking the mung beans, boil them for 10 minutes.

Mama Says: 

cook bean , add salt while cook, add sugar after cook, smashed the cooked bean, add little coconut milk, form to the same size of banh chung, 1" thick, if you want savory, add fried onion, pepper. 

cook sweet rice halfway in batch with salt, this way easy to roll. 

I didn't bother seasoning the beans or parboiling the rice.  Extra steps but my result was plainer so I'd add shallots, more fish sauce & salt next time.

REFUGEE EDUCATION #1 Ba-Na-Na

Wash and dry banana leaves.  The frozen kind are softer than the fresh kind.  According to my mama: "Deep [dip] banana leave in the boiled water To soften it and also sterile the leave, dry the leave both side with paper towel." [2/1/2015 note: Mom also says use banana leaves from Thailand, not the Philippines and to cut off the rib for pliability.]

A traditional khuôn | mold for Bánh Chưng is a square frame with a an interior box like a springform pan.  You can use a 9x9 baking dish as the mold as I did, make a wood one, or DIY one from cardboard as my mama does.  

Mama says: 

use the cardboard cut a long strip and make it to square box, tape it at the one corner to make the mold,1st layer one piece of leave 15" long, 2nd layer 4 pieces of leave center overlap on top the 1st layer, the outside of leave it outside . put the square box on top of the leave not straight side (xeo xeo) tear two strips of banana leave, the width same size of one side of the box, put banana strip crisscross inside the square box, put cooked rice on top the banana strip, pat the rice to make it solid at the base, put cooked bean & meat or what ever!!!,top with another layer of cooked rice pat it down. fold the banana strips to make the square, pull the cardboard out now you already have one small square banh chung, now just fold the outside banana leave, just like gift wrap. tight with string. cook with boiled water for 2.5 hrs it done.

I boiled in a pressure cooker for 3 hours since brown glutinous rice takes longer to cook than white glutinous rice.  Since my pressure cooker is small, I could only fit 1 Bánh Chưng at a time so this was a 3 day cooking process!  (Still not as bad as the time I decided to make a 10-course dinner for my 30th birthday which entailed a 5 page workplan, a week of prep, 10 lbs of pork, and 3 or 4 days of cooking and borrowing a friend's oven for the second roast.  Oh and kalua pork juices charred in the ovens, the nước mấm spilled all over my then-boyfriend, now husband's car causing him to ban kalua pork and fish sauce for a while.  I of course got drunk in relief and exhaustion at the party and ate not much of it.  I don't do such crazy things no more.)

To serve, unwrap the banana leaves.  Slice into wedges if eating so fresh and so warm warm.  The days after, it's customary to fry it so you'll want to slice them for even coverage.  I use a little lard or coconut oil and fry in my All Clad skillet or my enamel coated cast iron.  My aunty Len uses her panini griddle to make the perfectly toasted Bánh Chưng with wedges.

Fried.  Obviously too hungry to do pretty staging & lighting.

It is traditionally eaten with pickled leeks and soy sauce (there's a memory in there somewhere about pickled leeks, Jacqui and Auburn Dr.).  I use Bragg's or when I'm really avoiding soy, coconut aminos or celtic salt.  The Southern way of eating it is with a little sugar.  My stepdad and husband who both hail from the Mekong delta do this and I could never really get into it.

Cooked Bánh Chưng can be frozen and resteamed. Leave it in its banana glory and slip into a freezer bag.  

Tutorials on wrapping and molds:

• Gói bánh chưng bằng khuôn thông minh
• khuôn bánh chưng | earth cake frame tutorial here

Ăn Ngon Lành|Eat Delectably!