The Baguette Revolution: Banh Mi, Num Pang, and a Thai Sandwich Challenge

The Humble Baguette. A relic of colonial France, in Southeast Asia adapted into pure magic. The Cambodian Noom Pong, the Laotian Cao Chi Pate, and of course, Vietnam's iconic Banh Mi. When you think of the food of Southeast Asia, sandwiches might not be the first thing to come to mind, but for so many people here, it's impossible to imagine life without this beloved These are dishes with incredible stories, of independence and perseverance and the talent of local cooks, and one that connects today's culture with cooks and kingdoms spanning centuries across the entire planet. It got us wondering, how did Southeast Asia become the home to some of the world's best sandwiches? And since we're in Thailand, what might happen if some of the best cooks here were given the chance to create a version of their own? A Thai-style Banh Mi? It's interesting, for a guy who has a YouTube channel focused on history, authenticity, and cuisine. I once had a restaurant where we sold dishes like Beijing Duck Tacos and Pulled Pork Wontons. I've turned Filipino Sisig into Fajitas, made burgers out of fish and chips, and I feel no shame. Some things are just meant to be adapted. Techniques and components may be intended for one kind of use, but perfect as a platform for so much more. Take the Banh Mi, a French baguette, as much a symbol of that country as anything, anywhere, stuffed with pâté because it's a baguette, and then piled high with everything from pickled carrots and daikon, to Chalua sausage, to grilled pork belly, coriander, cucumber, chili peppers, and more. It's amazing, because it should be. Baguettes are great, Vietnamese food is great, put them together, and you have what might be the world's best sandwich. Maybe in the universe of bread it's not as quote authentic as sitting in Paris having a jambon bourre, but guess what? That's not authentic either, as the French baguette is actually Austrian, or at the very least was introduced by an Austrian baker, who in 1837 brought the technique of steam baking to Paris, and using extra refined flour which wasn't French or Austrian, but Hungarian. The point is, we can tie ourselves in knots thinking about authenticity, but if you go back far enough, pretty much everything is fusion. That's the nature of our flawed world. Since our first cities were built, we've spent so much time invading, colonizing, going to war, and occasionally trading with each other, that food is our complicated legacy. Every dish tells a story. So common is fusion food in our history that the term for it didn't even exist until 1989, because it was just food. At least until we started jamming stuff together on purpose, minus any context. That legacy belongs to a man named Wolfgang Puck, who was just starting on his path towards selling mediocre salads in airport food courts. In 1983, fresh off his fame from writing a best-selling French cookbook, he opened a restaurant called Chinois en Main in California, cooking something he called French-Chinese. By the way, in spite of his French cuisine fame, just like the baguette, Chef Puck is actually Austrian. Anyway, his business would boom, and others would soon follow. Chefs like Roy Yamaguchi, whose own California restaurant opened in 1984, selling Japanese-French-California cuisine, whatever that was, and Norman Van Aken, whose Florida restaurant combined literally everything, and who coined the term fusion food at a symposium in 1989. Since then, there have been ups and downs in the fusion food movement. Beginning in the 2000s with the Bourdain Revolution and appreciating real cuisine, we start to see pushback, and a move away from stuff like wrapping buffalo chicken in spring rolls and calling it a dish… that's also Wolfgang Puck, by the way. But let's remember one important thing about fusion food, at least before the 1980s. And that's the fact that we are the first generation, I mean the first, who can do whatever we want with food. Whatever crazy idea we might come up with, all we need to do is go to the grocery store and get whatever we can think of. That's not how it used to be. For everyone who came before us, when something strange and foreign would arrive, it was a big deal. And no matter the context or the circumstances that brought something, like for example baguettes to Vietnam, it was our responsibility as cooks to play around, to see what might happen if we worked it into our own ancient arsenal. Because why else would we do this if not for the joy of making something nobody's ever made before? And who knows, you might just come up with something that'll change cuisine forever. Before this became a video about fusion food, before we ever thought of trying to create a new concept, this began as a simple idea. See, Bangkok might not be a place known for its own sandwich, but it is one of the only cities where you can find all of Southeast Asia's baguette classics. And we thought why not compare those fascinating specialties, the stuff from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. And if that was going to be our focus, then where else could we start? But with a couple versions of the beloved banh mi. I understand that there are a lot of foods in Vietnam that are, you know, more historic, more interesting, more nuanced than a banh mi. But I have never been to Vietnam without the first meal being this on the street. And I've been to Vietnam at least a half dozen times, every single time, every time I get out of the van from the airport, and just find a banh mi before I even go check into the hotel. That's just my, that's, you know, to me, that's like, you know, that's my moment of recognition of, oh, I'm back in Vietnam, banh mi on the street. Alright, at this point, we still thought we were making a straightforward video about three famous sandwiches. And while that's obviously going to change, we can't get there without first starting here, with the story of the banh mi itself. Because how it came to be is important, but not as important as why. Let's talk about this sandwich. Now, where this story first begins is in Saigon around 1859, when the French would establish their first permanent foothold in Vietnamese territory, taking possession of the city of Saigon. Within eight years, all of South Vietnam was under French control, and with their new territory came settlers, mostly affluent, traders and businessmen and Catholic priests, so almost immediately came a market for fine French foods. Now, given the fertile climate of Vietnam, most products would be farmed or raised there in the new colony. But there was a problem, which is that bread, the most essential of all French staples, relies on wheat flour, and wheat doesn't grow in the tropics of the Mekong Delta. So at tremendous cost, the French would send cargo boats stocked with flour from the port of Marseille all the way to Saigon, a distance of more than 8,000 nautical miles, with a sailing time of around half a year. Needless to say, this made bread a wildly expensive product, and one reserved for the occupiers, not the occupied. But it wasn't just price that kept the baguette from the Vietnamese. The French had a saying, roughly translated to, bread and meat make us strong, rice and fish keep them weak, and enforced an intentional segregation of cuisine to keep their foods only for themselves. This, by the way, worked both ways, which meant the French themselves were forbidden from eating Vietnamese food, hence why you don't see things like spring rolls sold in Paris, unlike, for example, how the British adapted so much of Indian cuisine for themselves. Anyway, this separation would remain intact until the outbreak of World War One, when two enormous German export warehouses in Vietnam would be seized by French authorities, flooding the local market with ingredients previously inaccessible. This included wheat flour, ham, cheese, and also stuff like condensed milk, today primarily associated with Southeast Asia but actually originally French. Now, at the same time, more than a hundred thousand Vietnamese men were conscripted by the French to serve in the war, and were stationed in France, where much to the chagrin of their colonial rulers, they not only developed a taste for the food, but they also saw how well the French lived on the backs of their colonial plunder. So they went home with both a taste for baguettes and an intense hatred of the French. Combined with the affordable wheat flour, the first Vietnamese bakers began making French bread around the end of the 1910s, more than anything out of spite towards the colonists. You say we're not good enough to eat this? Watch us. Their bread would have some differences from the French version. First, Vietnamese ovens burned hotter than the ones in France, with the shorter baking time leading to a thinner and crispier crust and lighter interior. And second, to reduce costs, local bakers would add rice flour to the dough, not much but just enough to stretch the wheat supply further. Now for a long time, these baguettes, first called banh te or western bread, were served in the old French style, not as a ready-made sandwich, but alongside cold cuts, cheese, pate, and butter. In the decades beginning in the 1920s, we'd see a slow shift in Vietnam from these components to things a bit more local, or at least cheaper. For example, mayonnaise replacing butter, and Vietnamese sausage taking the place of fine French ham. The last step in the evolution would take place after the French were finally defeated in 1954, and Vietnam was split into two countries, a division that would see more than a million anti-communists leave the North for the South. According to legend, a husband and wife named Mr. and Mrs. Le began selling baguettes stuffed with local ingredients as a sandwich, first to make it easy for those on the move to eat while in transit, and later around 1958 at a shop in Saigon. Within a year as French laws were overturned, including the mandatory two and a half hour daily lunch break, residents of the city began looking for something fast and easy to eat, instead of home-cooked meals based around rice. And the rest, as they say, is history. So essential is the banh mi in modern Vietnamese culture that the immigrant family that opened this shop doesn't just serve hundreds of their creations on a daily basis, but they even named the family dog after their favorite dish. There you go, you can hear, you can hear banh mi whining in the background. I feel so bad, like, imagine, you know, the dog is across the street behind the, behind the fence at the family's house and keeps barking, and I keep wondering, like, this poor dog cooped up, and then I realized, no, he's barking because his name is banh mi, and every time somebody comes here and they say, let me have a banh mi, he thinks they're talking to him. That's my microphone. How old? Three years old. Oh, he's a puppy still. Good dog. All right, it might be a stretch to say that Vietnamese independence was sparked by the courageous act of baking bread. There were, of course, a lot of factors, but it wasn't nothing. It was the ultimate pushback against foreigners on their land, telling them they weren't good enough, and a fascinating symbol of resistance. But where this really starts to get interesting is that when we look at the entire French colonial map, we see the same rebellion taking hold from one side of the world to the other. And everywhere it turns up, we find examples of a culture adapting their own techniques to the forbidden ingredient. In Tunisia, older steel baguettes would be shredded and topped with a chickpea stew called lablabi. Baguettes cut into pieces and deep fried in batter would become a ubiquitous street food in Madagascar, known as mofo makasaoka. In West Africa, baguettes are so common that it's estimated 10 million are sold each day to the 17 million people in Senegal, where they're baked in mud brick ovens and called tapalapa. And that's not even the highest per capita consumption on the African continent. That belongs to Algeria, where 49 million are sold daily, more than one per person, and more than the 32 million sold each day in France itself. In India's Pondicherry, occupied by the French for 138 years, baguettes would become dessert, cooked with or dipped into a sweet pudding served throughout much of the country called basundi. Napoleon III's invasion of Mexico might have only succeeded in five years of French rule, but that was enough time for us to see the debut of the torta, with the bread called telera, a local take on, of course, a baguette. And here in Asia, it wasn't just the Vietnamese who would make the bread their own. After Saigon-style banh mi sandwiches gained popularity, versions would pop all across the former French Indochina, from northern Vietnam to Laos and Cambodia. And speaking of Cambodian baguettes, well, finally, we've arrived at our second meal. So a long, long time ago, we taped a video in Klongtoi, and there was a vendor who was set up near the market that was, this is Klongtoi village, not the market, but the local neighborhood that was a vendor who sold a Cambodian-style noom pong. That has been gone for a while. I don't know if she moved or if she's just not there anymore, but we have been looking for this for quite some time. Bangkok, if I'm being completely honest, is an unreliable place to get a really good banh mi. You can find a lot, some. However, maybe the best version of anything like that in the city is this restaurant. It's one of only three places that I know of in this entire city that serves Cambodian food, and they're all here in Pratunam. This place has only been open for a year. Their specialty is the noom pong, and it is incredible. Me and Daria came here for dinner for the first time two days ago, yeah? And I'm really happy to be able to work this into a video so quickly. One day, we'll do a whole show here, or at least in this neighborhood, for Khmer food. But basically, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, we have sort of a Cambodian version of a Vietnamese sausage. We have a Chinese sausage. We have pate. We have a couple of different kinds of sauce, some vegetables, some herbs, some onion, and then the greens, the pickles. And I'm going to eat. It's hard to describe this. There's almost a fishy flavor, and I don't know whether that's some kind of a fish paste, or if it's the way they make their pate. It's saltier than what you'd expect from a Vietnamese banh mi. And again, we've had this in Cambodia. Different towns, different vendors, they all make in Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao, they all make their sandwiches in a different way. But yeah, it's delicious, and really, again, it's all about the bread. We might have to sit here and have a few more of these. The weather is not looking good. All right, here's the thing about having a YouTube channel. Filming day is unpredictable. We can work forever making plans and locking in an idea, but since this isn't scripted, there's always the chance for things to go sideways. In this case, we didn't have much room for error. We only had three locations to film. But then came the rainstorm and a ridiculous amount of traffic, and by the time we made it to our last place, the big finish, well, they'd shut down early. So now what? Without the Lao sandwich, this is basically a story about a banh mi, and that would be insane to do in Bangkok, not Vietnam. But we've been at this for long enough that we've learned the secret, which is that if you don't know what you're doing, just keep filming and eventually you'll figure it out. So we headed back towards the city. But since we don't yet have a direction and the traffic is miserable, well, let's take a break and talk about the sandwich. In 18th century London, men of high birth were expected to carry themselves in a manner befitting nobility. But boys will be boys, so a handful of organizations called Hellfire Clubs would open, where the rich could be as debaucherous as they wanted, out of sight of those who paid them taxes. Among the members was a man named John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who one day in 1762, while riding a hot hand at the card table, insisted his cook prepare him something to eat, which he could consume with one hand without interrupting his gambling. So his cook placed a slice of beef between two pieces of bread. Other members saw this and asked the cook for what sandwich was having, and cuisine would never be the same. Now, this might be something of a legend. I mean, there are other contemporary accounts that claim the Earl of Sandwich actually ate this meal while working, not gambling. But regardless, the name would stink. Whatever the truth, the one thing not in dispute is that Sandwich didn't actually invent the sandwich. The idea of using two slices of bread with a filling in the middle was something he'd encountered years earlier during his travels, either while studying in Greece or Turkey, or maybe while on business in the Netherlands, where an almost identical creation was popular in taverns since at least the 1600s, with the only difference being the beef was served on one slice of bread instead of being enclosed by two. The oldest recipe for what we'd now call a sandwich comes around the year 100 BC, when a Jewish rabbi in Jerusalem recorded a meal of two slices of matzah, stuffed with either bitter herbs or a mixture of nuts and dates or figs. Around 300 years later, sandwiches are referred to as commonplace in a book of Jewish teachings, but again, this isn't the whole story. We know that by that same time, the ancient Romans were burning panis quadratus over a fire, basically toasting their bread, and serving two slices with a filling of herbs, butter, and cheese. The Chinese roujiamo is said to date back to around 200 BC, although that's hard to confirm as the first written record comes a few hundred years later. And while we don't know this for sure, historians guess that 500 years before any of that, the ancient Egyptians, the inventors of leavened bread, were serving theirs with a spread of foie gras, goose liver, another Egyptian legacy. Anyway, to bring this back to our story, while the French have been using bread since at least the Middle Ages, we don't actually have proof of its use in sandwiches until the period contemporary to the occupation of Vietnam. It was around the 1860s when the iconic jambon beurre, or ham and butter, was first sold at the Leal Market in Paris, like so many other so-called street foods around the world first meant as a snack for market workers, before spreading by the 1890s to the general public. But even then, the baguette sandwich, instead of the bread as an accompaniment to other fine foods, wouldn't actually become popular among the masses until as recently as the 1930s, first for blue-collar workers who needed something portable to carry to the job site, and finally to all classes after World War II, or barely a decade before on the other side of the world, Mr. and Mrs. Le would sell their first banh mi in Vietnam. And since we don't have a better idea, well, that's where we'll go next, to one of Bangkok's best French bakeries, to sit outside in the gloomy weather and pretend we're in Paris, and to see what the country that brought baguettes to Southeast Asia did with the bread when they started making their own sandwiches. All right, so when we talk about a French sandwich, I think the thing that's most misunderstood for people who haven't been to France or aren't familiar with this kind of thing, when we see a French baguette served overseas, including in Southeast Asia, it's packed with all kinds of stuff. You have this in Paris, it's simple. It's, you know, the classic is what you got, ham, gruyere, or what did you get as your cheese? I think, I don't remember. And that's basically, you had some fresh cracked black pepper and butter. In my case, this is going to be a duck sandwich, which looks like some kind of fruit compote, and pickled onions, and pate, of course. And before I talk anymore, I'm going to take a bite of this. So in a Parisian cafe, what would you have? You'd have your book, your cigarette, your coffee. I guess I should, I guess I should. Somebody should be playing the accordion, right? Instead of the motorcycle, just imagine the sound of the motorcycle is actually an accordion. Maybe a mime. Horace, can you do any miming? Not in like 25 years. Okay, so at least the rain had stopped and we were back to eating. But we still didn't know what this was. We'd had a banh mi, a noom pong, and a smoked duck sandwich, and it was late in the afternoon, the day was getting away from us. And since we didn't know what to do next, we figured, let's just stop overthinking and do something fun for us. And since we've been talking so much about the baguette, which is not originally French, but rather Austrian, I realized I wasn't sure if I'd ever actually tried an Austrian baguette. And as it happens, well, there's one place in Bangkok where we might find one. So since we didn't have any other ideas, well, that's where we went next. All right, so this is a place that we've been going since we pretty much first arrived in Bangkok. It's one of our favorite bakeries in the city. And it was created, it was founded five years ago as Bangkok's first, I believe, Austrian bakery. Today, the food leans more German. But when we're talking about kind of tracing the history of the baguette, this is a huge part of the story. And it doesn't matter how full I am, I'm going to have room for at least a chicken pesto baguette sandwich. The one thing that kind of ties this whole category together, from whatever we've had today, Vietnamese to Cambodian to French, and it's just about the bread ultimately. What you put in the sandwich is, it's interesting that the farther we trace this back, the simpler the fillings get. This is chicken, lettuce, tomato, a little bit of pesto sauce. Yours is ham and cheese. And, you know, again, it's about the bread. And this is bakeries right there. It was watching them make it. So, you know, it doesn't get much fresher than this. You have sandwich all over you. There's something comforting about living in the city, wherever it is here, you know, wherever you're living, finding good bakeries. You know, remember when you were working for one in Shenzhen, right? The whole idea was, you know, you want that sort of the warmth of somebody baking. Oh, it started to rain again. All right, we're going to hide the cameras because it's raining. And let's hope that that doesn't affect our last destinations today. Good bread. So good. In Bangkok in the summer, the rain can come at any time. Fast and heavy and powerful enough to defeat even the most well-intentioned YouTube channel. By now, we'd eaten a bunch of sandwiches, but eating a bunch of sandwiches does not a story make. There was still something missing to tie this all together, and we knew we'd need another day of filming. But as for what to do, well, first we'd need to take stock of where we'd already been. We'd gone from the Vietnamese banh mi to its cousin, the Cambodian noom pad, looked across the ocean to the French cafe sandwich and traced that back to its Austrian precursor. We've covered the story of fusion cuisine, of Vietnamese rebellion, of the birth of the baguette, and even of sandwiches themselves. We could just come back and film at the Lao place and be done with it, just double down on our original idea and have these extra places as a little side note. But there was one part of the story we hadn't yet explored, which was when the humble sandwich would enter the culinary mainstream. And maybe more importantly, why? And as it happened, well, that would be all we needed to come up with a plan. Something quite possibly never done before. As the world reached the 20th century, 138 years after the Earl of Sandwich made his fateful demand for something he could eat while multitasking, the Industrial Revolution was making much of the world seek the same thing. It's true that sandwiches have existed throughout much of history, but for all intents and purposes, the sandwich has an art form, a representative of a country's cuisine, and an iconic part of the global food landscape. Well, that didn't really begin until very recently, when fast and functional became paramount, and what had been a culinary afterthought suddenly, in bread-making countries, became pretty much the perfect food. As crazy as it sounds, pretty much every form of sandwich that are now essential around the world traces back to within the last hundred years. Like the hero, that Greek specialty beloved from the Mediterranean to New York diners, well, that shows up in Athens in the 1940s, influenced by the Turkish Doner Kebab, which itself wouldn't become a sandwich until around 1970. The Reuben, with corned beef and sauerkraut, is actually American, invented by a chef named Reuben Kulakowski in Omaha, Nebraska. Also American is the classic pulled pork, first made in the mid-1900s, though the meat technique goes back to the indigenous people, long before the colonists arrived. The Cuban sandwich most likely takes its roots from the cigar factories of Ybor City, near Tampa, where Cuban immigrants worked in the early 20th century. India's vada pav was first made outside a train station in 1966. Paninis found popularity in Milan in the 1970s, and the Civito, the national sandwich of Uruguay, was invented in 1946. All of these and so many other legendary sandwiches are new, but what isn't new is the stuff inside, between the slices of bread. The fillings are uniquely local, the same stuff or at least the same flavors enjoyed for centuries, and when we needed some way to pack our favorite foods in a lunchbox and take them to work, well wherever there was bread, that would be the solution, and wherever there were baguettes, well that would be the bread of choice. When a country or a culture would take their own traditions and shove them between slices of bread or into a baguette, this wasn't controversial, it wasn't called fusion, remember that term is barely 30 years old, it was simply a way to make whatever flavors were beloved easy to eat while on the go. It never happened in Thailand because there's no bread making culture, but it's not that different from how this country took on Chinese techniques, things like stir fries for the same purpose. Hell, go back farther and boat noodles were a similar idea, a portable snack served in small portions so it wouldn't spill when eaten on the water. What if the French, who did try to colonize Thailand, who only stopped because of border wars and a compromise with the British who held Myanmar, well what if they succeeded? What if history had unfolded differently? Well based on everything else we've seen in this story, there's almost no way there wouldn't be some kind of Thai baguette sandwich. Which got us thinking, what would it look like? Okay, so after not completing the shoot last time, which in the end turned out to be a really good thing, Daria and I were talking off the air about how when we film on Thai food or anything from Southeast Asia, we tend to be okay even after eating all day. These sandwiches just filled me up so much that that kind of steamrolled me, I didn't leave the couch the next day. So I'm glad we didn't finish the shoot with all the other places we had planned. We're back, day two, this restaurant is open, the weather is beautiful, we have our favorite Bangkok Lao-style Khaoji Pate, which we did film once before not that long ago on our video about Vietnamese food in Thailand. So yeah, I cut this in half because I'm going to be smarter with this shoot than I was last time. So Boris, this half is for you. Alright, not to give short shrift to the Lao Khaoji Pate, which is a pantheon sandwich in its own right and the main reason Vientiane has become an annual stop for me and Daria, well, we filmed at this restaurant before just a couple months ago. And anyway, since we started making this video, our mission has changed. Now we're mainly here because they sell some of the best Banh Mi or Khaoji bread anywhere in the city. And we're going to need a lot of it to get through the rest of filming. Obviously, the next part of our mission is going to be to see what we can find for Thai chefs to make us some Bangkok-style Banh Mi, whatever that's going to be. Let's just see where the road takes us because we're already off to a good start. Next door, there's a restaurant with the Shell Chuan Chim, the Thai equivalent of Michelin. The owner just came running over. She said, do you want to film at our place too? She saw the camera. We said, well, it's not a normal shoot, but can you ask your cooks if they're willing to make us a sandwich? And she said, yes, yes, yes. No problem. Just come over. So we already know the first place we're going to film and it's right there. And then after that, we're off to a couple of the best places in the city. So I'm excited about today. I'm going to try my best not to overeat. Look at this. Seafood Pad Krapow. Amazing. Thank you. This is such a random idea. I'm really, I'm really excited now. Seeing the first sandwich come out, I realized what a completely nuts idea this is. And I'm very excited. Pad Krapow sandwich. We have ground pork with basil and chili and then topped with seafood. So there are shrimp and calamari, squid with a beautifully fried egg on top. And if that's the, this is not even a scheduled stop. Well, first of all, it's a really good Pad Krapow. That's a good enough Pad Krapow that I almost want to take it off the bread. Let's put it this way. If you enjoy Pad Krapow, you're going to enjoy this. Put them both down. It's extremely impressive that they came up with this idea in this presentation with no notice. That's actually very impressive. How am I going to get through the rest of the day? I'm very excited to eat. Thank you so much, chef. You're welcome. Thank you guys. Great job. Great work. Thank you so much. This is the team of chefs to put our sandwiches together. You talked about taking this seriously. Thank you so much. You're welcome. The idea of a satay sandwich is not revolutionary. I served a satay taco on a menu that I had in Beijing a long time ago. It's a flavor that works in a lot of preparations, and this is certainly one of them. We have that kick. It's spicy, but it's not too spicy. Really strong flavor from that. There's a lot of coriander, a lot of cilantro in this. You see the chicken satay sauce on the banh mi baguette. This is very good. This is really good. There's a lot of flavor going on there. Probably not the first person who's ever had a Pad Krapow sandwich. Somebody's thought of that before. I'm probably not the first person who's ever had a satay sandwich. That's an obvious idea that, as I said, I even served something similar at one of my restaurants before. I am definitely the first person who has ever had this, which is a 19th century royal Thai curry called Sindhon curry. Even today, that curry is hard to find. Made into a baguette sandwich form is something that has never been done, and I will confidently say that. If you can prove me wrong that somebody else has made this sandwich, I would be very entertained by that. Please tell us in the comments. Boris, your turn to eat. There's too much food. We need to get moving. We have more sandwiches to eat. What we're gonna do today is a combination of the Vietnamese banh mi and also Isan style. Amazing. To me, the components of a sandwich can change, but you need to have a sauce. Otherwise, it's too dry. You need to have a primary component, which in this case is the steak, and you need to have that kind of textural contrast. I just got one of the bird's eye chilies in that last bite. Don't cry. I see another one just waiting for me in this next bite, and here we go. The idea that kind of got us on this is banh mi, noon pong satay, khao jee satay. There is no national banh mi. Banh mi is different everywhere you go. The khao jee is different everywhere you go. Based on ingredients, based on what people like. The khao jee satay in Vietnam is very different from what it would be in Luang Prabang, which is different than it is in Pakse. In Thailand, that's the reason why I kind of started thinking, people are just throwing whatever they like into a baguette, and that makes it a sandwich. Does this work? Does it work with Thai ingredients? And to me, this 100% absolutely works. Steak sandwich. Even green curry can be as well, you know, like make this a little bit thick curry, and then it's like chicken, like beef, or whatever that you like. I mean, if you can do chicken with pesto sandwich, why can't you do chicken with a thick green curry? Exactly. If you can do it, right? But I mean, a steak sandwich, this is a steak sandwich. It just happens to be a steak sandwich with a sauce that makes it a sandwich. Guys, please come in. We're fine. I have one takeaway that I hope that you have watching the channel. If you've been watching us since the beginning, come here. Come here. That's the one thing that I think anybody who has watched this channel for a long time, you've seen how much we like whenever there's an excuse to come here. This is probably my neighborhood to walk around in Bangkok. And Chef Gaz Mookrab is probably my single favorite plate of food in this city. And that's a big statement. But like, I don't even have any hesitation saying that. I'm so excited to see what he can come up with for a crispy pork sandwich. He's disappeared into the back, by the way. I don't even know where he went. He's now like somewhere in the laboratory in back. And at some point, a sandwich will will come out of this. So he he disappeared to grill the sandwich over coals in the back, because that's in Thailand, when you see, you know, these shops that sell loaves of bread, it's usually going to be grilled over coals. I had not even considered that as a technique. All we have, I believe is crispy pork and his homemade chili sauce. So let's see how this is together. What do you think? Really good. Yeah. So that's the story of Southeast Asia's sandwiches. A story about people taking something once forbidden and making it their own. In Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao and across the old colonial empire. A story about what might be the perfect bread. And it's incredible history, both in its own development, and in its role in taking ancient cuisine from all over the world into the modern era. And it's a story about food and how in the hands of the very best cooks, the humble sandwich can be a showcase for flavors, techniques, and even the wildest ideas. Thailand doesn't have its own version of the baguette sandwich. But maybe it should. Maybe everyone should. Because honestly, if everything's already fusion food, well why not have some fun and keep doing what chefs have done since the beginning of time? You never know. You might just create something incredible. Subscribe to the channel for more from OTR, thank you so much to everyone who supports us on Patreon, it really helps to keep us going. Find links below to our Patreon and social media, and we'll see you soon.