5 easy Vietnamese recipes

Oh my god, it's good. Someone should hire me. I cook for myself three times per day and I mostly eat Vietnamese food which means it takes a lot of time and also ingredients to prepare. But since I'm living in Germany, it's not that easy to find the time or the right stuff to make the food that I want anymore. But I have found a workaround. Here are the list of Vietnamese food that is easy to make and you can easily find in supermarkets in the western countries like in Germany for example. And I'm glad to share with you guys so that you guys can enjoy the food that I love so much as well. Let's go! So to start, I'm going to show you how to make my absolute favorite egg soup. It is super easy to make. I taught my German boyfriend once and he did it perfectly. That's how easy it is. First, we need to chop some shallot. In Vietnam, we call this dish canh ca chua chung. So it's basically soup with tomato and egg. Now, we have to chop some tomato. Please do not use those canned tomato for this. If you can touch fresh potato over here for cheap price, why even go for canned potato at all? Now, let's heat up the pan and fry the onion first. Fry it until the onion turns brown. The onion is smelling very good right now and it's turning pretty brown. Time to put on the tomato. I just add a little bit of water in here so that the tomato gets soft faster. I think it looks good now. We can stop. This is a very important base for many Vietnamese dishes. It normally always starts like this. I cook a lot of it so I can keep it aside and I can use just a little bit of it for each dish. I'm going to show it to you right now. So the first one, the egg soup. Let's go. Get a pot, put some of the soup inside, then put some water into it. So in this video, as I said, we only use ingredients that you guys can find in a non-Asian supermarket. That's why we're just going to use salt and pepper. That's it. But if you want it to be authentic, put fish sauce into everything, okay? Obviously, I'm going to put fish sauce in here too because I have it. But if you don't have it, you don't need to. It's still going to taste good. The next step requires a little bit of speed. You have to crack around two to three eggs inside. Depends on how much you like eggs. I'm just going to put two, I guess. After you crack two of them in, immediately use a whistle, a spoon, a chopstick to mix it gently so that it forms like a nice cube shape. And last but not least, add some green onion to have some extra flavor and color. I'm lazy so I'm just going to chop it with my scissor to save time. If you like coriander, put it in there. It always makes the dish smell super special. Ta-da! I think we're done. It looks really good. Normally, we eat them with rice. But if you don't have rice, I think it could be like an entry dish as well. Or you can mix them with boiled pasta. Do not tell anyone I tell you that. But I think they're going to taste good anyway. Just smells awesome. I have this much of rice left. But I think it's enough to eat with the egg soup already. It's really good. One thing I really like about this dish is that it always tastes the same. It's super hard to mess it up. We also use this as a dipping sauce for salad. We would put way less water here and way more salt and fish sauce so that you can dip the salad in and then it just mixes everything together and it tastes awesome. But I also like the soupy version of it too. Something you should know about us Vietnamese is that we love eating vegetables. I think more than 70% of our dishes is just basically boiled vegetables, stir-fried vegetables, steamed vegetables, things like that. And one of the most popular vegetable dishes I have in Vietnam is this stir-fried cabbage. Okay, let's start preparing it. Okay, now you slide it thinly. I guess around one centimeter thick. Remember the shallot tomato mixture? We're gonna use them again. Just a little bit, this much. Put the cabbage into the pan and turn the heat on. Add a little bit of water so that the cabbage will not be burnt. Season it with salt and pepper again. And if you have fish sauce, use fish sauce. That's it. This kind of cabbage goes extremely well with ginger so we always cook them with ginger. Put the ginger in. Something about Vietnamese cooking that you should know is that we don't like to eat soft vegetables. So we never cook vegetables until they are completely soft. Everything should be a bit crunchy so that it still keeps the taste. And there you have it, stir-fried Vietnamese cabbage. I'm telling you guys this is super super fast. So normally we do eat this as a side dish in Vietnam with rice as well. If you guys don't eat it with rice and you want to use it as a side dish, definitely fine. But don't put so much salt. Let's see how it tastes like. Damn it's good. For me, vegetables should be cooked like this. Super simple, easy and crunchy. I never like to season it too much or cook it too long because I think it's gonna lose all of its original yummy flavor. In Vietnam, we eat a lot of noodles but not the kind of pasta noodles that you guys have over here. Mostly we eat rice noodles or mung bean noodles. My favorite one is rice noodles. Now I'm gonna show you one of the very basic noodle soup that you could make at home. In Germany, even in the German supermarkets, there is always a tiny section that sells Asian noodles. You just need to find rice noodles or mung bean noodles which are glass noodles. Two of them. Only these two, okay? Do not use anything with wheat noodles or something like that. We do not cook that over there. Just need to boil it for like three minutes. Now you have to strain it and then you run it through cold water so that the noodles will not keep getting softer and softer anymore. For protein, you could choose either pork, chicken, shrimp, or beef. You can... or tofu if you are vegan. I think this dish tastes best with pork but I don't have them so we're gonna substitute them with shrimp over here. No matter the kind of protein you're going to use, you have to chop them. Chop them small. Now we have the noodles. We have the chopped shrimp. Put the tomato mixture in there. Now you fry it with the shrimp. Seasoning, salt, pepper, and fish sauce if you have some. Fry it until the protein is completely cooked and do not add more water here at this point. I forgot to tell you guys something pretty important. The secret behind Vietnamese cooking is this. These are I'm gonna write down here the English word here. You can find them in Asian supermarkets so if you want to even go more authentic, buy this and then put it into your soup. It's gonna taste wonderful. It's pretty artificial though. I am shamelessly pretty addicted to it so I put it in almost everything I cook. So the shrimp is fully cooked now. Let's add some water and then you wait until it's boiled. We're going to put in the same kind of herbs like in the egg soup. Green onion and if you have coriander and you can eat them, put them in. It's boiling and I think it's ready. I already transferred my noodle into a bowl. Now you just need to pour this in. So time to eat our noodle soup. Normally we would have some lemon to squeeze in here or um oh do I have chili sauce? I have it. I have sriracha. Those chili sauce I will put a little bit in here. Normally I would add a bit more vegetable in here but I have other side dishes with vegetable already so I'm pretty chill with it. Oh my god it's good. Someone should hire me as a private chef. I am so happy with my cooking skill recently. Very very proud of it. Oh wow. As you can see these three dishes are super easy to make. It took me less than an hour. That was because I was filming otherwise it's gonna took me around 30 minutes for all three of them and they actually taste quite different. It's basically with the same base tomato and shallot but they have very very distinct dish, different taste. The next two dishes is not gonna be like this. It's gonna take a bit more time but it's equally good and it's equally fast as well. I'm not gonna lie when it comes to soup there are at least a hundred thousand different kinds of them in Vietnam and each regions have their own kind of soup that could taste completely different but there is this one kind of soup that is very popular and common in Vietnam and no matter where you go they are kind of similar with similar ingredients. Bone soup. My favorite way of cooking bones is making soup with it and normally I prefer to use pork bones. Remember to buy the one that still have meat in it. Normally that's the one you get over here anyway. If you cannot find something like this you can just use rib instead. I'm gonna transfer them into a pot and then we have to put some water in here. Boil them until they start boiling for around five minutes. Basically you have to wash it with hot boiling water for a while. You see all of these gunk? We don't want them. We want them to go out. That's why you have to boil them before. I just boil it for around three minutes now. Now we're going to drain it and then wash it in cold water. Now we have the clean bone. Put cold water in here and this time we're going to cook for real. If you have a pressure cooker this is the time to use it because it's going to make your job 10 times faster. I'm just going to use a normal pot so it's probably going to take around 30 minutes to boil it. Add some salt in here. Let's move on to our vegetable ingredients. So for this kind of soup we only use the root stuff because they kind of have the same crunchiness level. So here's what you can easily find in the supermarket. Potato, carrot and kohlrabi. This one looks like this. This is a potato that I already peeled very well. Cut them into small size. It's like 1.5 centimeters thick. Oh no, I bought this one for a while now and I think it's turning bad. I don't know if you guys can see it. Mission failed. We cannot use the kohlrabi but some months ago we were growing a pumpkin and this is our pumpkin. We collected it. Time to use it. We have to replace it with something. Oh my god, that's a very good pumpkin. Honey, our pumpkin is doing so well. I'm gonna cook our pumpkin today. Yep, I cut myself. Oh, it's worse. I cut my nail. No, not my beautiful nail. I think the bone is completely cooked and soft. So I'm just gonna put the vegetable in now. Hopefully it's gonna be finished soon. Season it with fish sauce and now put a lid on it. Wait for 10 more minutes. I think I made some mistake here. I should have put the potato inside first, then the carrot, then the pumpkin because as you can see the pumpkin is completely soft now but the potato is still crazily hard but okay. For the herbs, obviously we're going to put green onion inside as well. Coriander if you like but normally I just put green onion and I think it fits super well. Come on, it looks beautiful. You know it's a bit hard to do this with one hand filming and one hand holding the spoon. I do love eating the meat around the bone so I have to get it out and then I'm gonna nom on it and I will not take any judgment. The next dish is probably the food that I ate the most in Vietnam growing up. I think my mom made it almost every single day simply because it is easy to prepare. You can keep it for days and days. You just cook it once and you just keep eating it and there's protein in it and it tastes perfectly well with rice. It's called thịt kho in Vietnam and I think it's breaded pork in English. I'm gonna show you how to make it the authentic way like how my mom do it. Here I have a piece of pork belly. It has to be pork belly. You see there's fat, there's meat, there's meat, there's fat. We need that. Now we're going to slice them into small pieces and each piece should be at least two centimeters thick. This is the mystery that I never understand. This is what we eat in Vietnam as I told you almost every single day and there's so much fat inside and yet my whole family did not gain a single kilogram because of this. Like we eat so much fat actually. Now you're going to fry them. Do not put anything in the pan. Just dry fry them. Is that the word? Because there's fat inside anyway. Remember to stir it constantly. You have to cook it in low heat so that the fat is going out. I don't know if you guys can hear it but German boyfriend is determined to destroy my cooking show today. Let me add my mustard. While waiting for the meat, we need to chop some shallot. Shallot okay. I repeat no onion. Shallot. Now we can add the shallot and the shallot will be fried with the fat over here already. Do not add any extra oil. For the main ingredients, basically you can stop here already but if you want to make it authentic authentic and you can find it in the supermarkets, I highly recommend to put coconut inside. Not the whole one but the coconut meat here. It has to be the super old one not the young coconut and then you bring it home. You crack it open with this. It's gonna be super hot and then get the meat out. But if you're lucky enough maybe in your country, they also sell coconut like this. The old coconut that is already ready to be cooked. Just gonna chop them a bit smaller. Old coconut is fitting so so well with this dish. Now we are going to take care of the sauce. First, we need some water. Fish sauce if you have some. If you don't have it, you can replace it with soy sauce too or oyster sauce. Salt, pepper. It's very important. And mix them all together. Make sure that they are salty enough. Now the shallot and the meat is cooked already. Add the coconut, a spoon of sugar or even more. Wait until the sugar is completely dissolved then you can add your sauce. You cook until the liquid is a little bit sticky like this. It's not just liquid anymore. Since the pork is going to be quite salty and every time we eat something salty and meaty in Vietnam, we always eat them with some sour salad. So I was excited to make carrot and kohlrabi salad. But as you guys see, the kohlrabi is not good anymore. We only have the salad, the carrot left. So let's make slowly carrot salad. Now put it in a lot of sugar so that the liquid goes out and then you wait for around one hour until the carrot gets softer and there's liquid on it. Okay, it's been an hour. Now we have to wash it with clean water so that it's not gonna be super sweet anymore. Season it with some salt and lime. Squeeze it in. Chop a bit of garlic. Now just mix them well and wait for one more hour. But I'm hungry so I'm just gonna eat them in around five minutes. Okay, I have my soup here finally and the bowl is so big. I have to put it separately here so I can normal it later. Normally we eat this with rice like with everything. So you have a spoon of rice, a spoon of soup. Oh my god, you guys, I am so good at cooking. It is really really good. Thank you. The potato turned very very soft at the end. Let's see if the bone is fully cooked yet. If you don't want to see me eating like a dinosaur, it's time for you to look away now. It is soft now. It is fully cooked but I want it to be even softer so that when you touch it, the bone just falls out. 10 out of 10. This is our breaded pork and my side dish is kind of ready here with me. The reason why I really like to have coconut in this dish is that the coconut soaks up all of the yummy chewiness of the whole dish. You can eat so much coconut with rice with this dish. The meat is crazily tender. It fits so well. I'm sorry you guys. I know that when you watch my video, I don't give you the exact gram or spoon of what I put in there but I believe in you guys. I mean I gave you the structure already. All you need to do is just figure out how much you need for things. If you make Vietnamese food, it's mostly about your feeling. You just think that it fits and then it probably will fit. Let's try our salad. I think it is five hours too early to eat it but still it fits very well with the meat. Wow I am so happy with all of the things I cook in this video. This is the most successful cooking video I have ever made you guys. Okay I am super full right now and I think we could end the video here. I truly hope you guys learned something today and maybe you can add something new into your menu the next day. Then let me know how it tastes like under the comment section after you cook it and if you want to have more videos like this in the future. And until then, I'll see you in the next video. Bye bye.