Vietnamese Pork Chops with Broken Rice (Cơm Tấm) – Saigon’s Ultimate Comfort Plate

What smells so good? This is cơm tâm, the pride of Saigon street food. If you know, you know. And if you don't, get ready. Today, we're going to bring this magic into your kitchen. So the first thing we're going to have to do is make the pickled carrots and daikon. This is actually a very crucial part of the dish for me because the tanginess kind of helps balance out the saltiness and the sweetness of the meat. I don't have daikons today, so I'm just going to be using carrots. Dissolve the sugar with a little bit of hot water. So I have some hot water here. Kind of mix that together until it's dissolved. Take some white vinegar and pour it to that mixture. As long as you remember to do it a couple of hours before you eat, it should be ready. So we just set that aside for a couple of hours while we work on the other ingredients. So let's make the marinade next. What we're going to do first is actually make an aromatics juice mixture. Let's add some shallots, garlic, and lemongrass to a food processor. And to that, I'm going to just put a little bit of water. Oh my god. Oh, it was the wrong setting. So this step is actually something that I learned very recently from the University of YouTube. We've essentially made a puree of lemongrass, shallots, and garlic. And what we're going to do is just strain it to get the juices. In the past, I used to throw all these ingredients into the marinade itself. But what I found was that it would leave these burnt residues because garlic burns very quickly. And so does lemongrass. And you end up with these chunks that are not super tasty. So we're going to just extract the juices instead and marinate with that. Oh, interesting. So what do you do with all the leftover chunks? Discard it. So right here, I have two different types of meat because I wanted to show you. I have pork chop on the bone. And what I have here is a cut of pork shoulder that I like this cut better because there's a lot more marbling. See that? Do you see all the fat that's running through the meat here? As opposed to something like this, it's a little bit less fat. It might be a little bit drier when you grill it, but it's still really, really good. And I think this is easier to find. So the first thing we'll do is pour our juice in there. First off, it's going to be a little bit of soy sauce, oyster sauce, chicken powder, fish sauce. Our star ingredient, sweetened condensed milk. That's interesting. I think you can use about, let's call it like two tablespoons for this. That is a lot. Well, this is Nulls by Nancy, not Diets by Nancy. Okay, so it is what it is. Five spice powder. Another special ingredient that I'll be using is annatto seed oil. Guys, I don't have measurements. Measure with your heart. Let's get in there. So for broken rice, you can actually go ahead and buy broken rice in the supermarket. But it's really expensive. So I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to work with what I have, which is jasmine rice. And we're going to manually break it. Why do you need to break the rice? I think that the smaller grains actually helps absorb some of that fish sauce flavor as well, which is what makes it so delicious. Did you know that back in the day, the broken rice was actually the broken bits that the farmers couldn't sell? So they kept it for themselves and they ate it. But it rose in popularity when industrialization happened in Saigon and a lot of the poor people started moving to the city. Vendors started selling this as a cheap alternative for some of these workers, and it just became so popular. I love that. It's like a Cinderella story. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to soak this in warm water for about 20 minutes just to get the grains soft enough that we can break it with our hands. Okay, cool. So while we're waiting for our rice to soak, let's work on the jia jing, which is like the quiche, egg loaf piece of wonderfulness that's usually accompanying the gom tam. What I've done is I've soaked some bean thread vermicelli and wood ear mushroom. And you don't want to soak the bean thread for too long, okay? Just a little bit because its job in this quiche is to absorb the liquids. So just dump it into a big bowl. You need to invest in a bigger food processor. No, that is more like dishes to wash. A little bit of shallots. The whites of the green onion, chopped up. Some ground meat. It is said that however much you use in meat, you should also use in eggs, or else you can make a quiche that's very, very loose or soft and it won't hold its shape. So this is actually really important. So like I mentioned to you, this is around 500 grams of ground meat. This, I measured, is also around 550 grams of eggs, right? And the reason why I chose to go a little bit over is because I'm actually going to be taking two yolks out to do something else. I'll show you in a bit. So let's season this. Again, let's use some fish sauce and a little bit of chicken powder, okay? One, two, punch. People ask me how I know when it's enough or not enough. And my answer is that I don't know. It's a gamble each time, you know? Life is short, so let's live on the edge a little bit. But here's an actual more practical tip. If you want to check to see if the level of saltiness is to your liking, you can actually take a little piece out later on once it's all mixed up and microwave it. I don't know. Up until now, I've never had to do that. I kind of just wing it and it's worked out so far, right? Yeah, yeah. Amazing. So this is what it looks like once it's all mixed up. And I can see that the mix kind of holding its shape here, which tells me that when I steam it, it should hold together as well, which is good. So what I've done is I've lined a glass container with some parchment paper. You can do that or you can just oil it as well. But that's a risk that I don't want to take. Why? What's wrong with oil? Because you're going to have a hard time taking it out later and it's going to ruin the shape. And that I know is going to annoy me. So I don't want to deal with that. Let's see if our forecasting was right. So I'm using a steamer to steam this quiche. So what we're going to do is we're just going to leave that. So after about 20 minutes, I've just checked on the rice again. And if you come a little bit closer, you'll see that it's very, very easy for me to kind of crush up the rice with my hands now. Do you see that? Look, broken rice. Wait, how did you break it? Literally just crushing it with my hands. Oh, interesting. Look at my Vietnamese looking colander thingy. It looks legit. Ensure like a nice, even crumble across all the grains. This is so interesting, actually. I don't do this that often, to be honest. Most of the time, I just make gam tam with regular rice and my family doesn't seem to mind. If I order gam tam and they don't have broken rice, I'm quite disappointed. Oh, oops. Well, I mean, at a restaurant, that's the expectation. You want to wash it well because you want to wash off all the starches. So each individual grain can kind of shine through. Uh, yeah, about that. Legit, but not practical. Cook your rice as normal. But the important part is that because we soak the rice a little bit, it's taken in a little bit of water already. So you don't want to use the same amount of water that you usually use. I would say use 70% of the water that you typically use, okay? So we're going to make the fish sauce next. Arguably the most important part of this dish. I have some sugar that I'm dissolving in hot water again. And to that, I'll be adding some rice vinegar and fish sauce. I'll put the exact ratios below. It's pretty good. That's what I thought fish sauce was when I was young. This mixture I thought was fish sauce. It's half sugar, half fish sauce, and half vinegar. I mean, I guess you haven't had it straight from this bottle, right? The pure, the uncut form. This is utilitarian fish sauce. So it's pretty pungent straight out of the bottle. But if you eat the really high quality fish sauces, they're actually really good straight from the bottle. They're called nuoc mam mi. I don't know what it's called in English. But it's like the Louis XIII of fish sauce. Yeah, this is like VS. So I've heated up some neutral oil in a small little pot here. And to this bowl of chopped up scallions, I'm going to add a little bit of salt. And this is for the scallion oil that we're going to be making. Whoa. That looks cool. Success! That was actually pretty cool. Okay, now that our meatloaf quiche is almost done, we're going to be painting the orange egg layer on top. So here's the egg yolk that I've kept from before. These are my free range organic egg yolks. So I'm very proud of how orange they are. It's starting to firm up in the middle. So maybe another 10 minutes. How can you tell that it's done? Stab this knife into the egg to see if it's still wet. And that's how you can tell. And you know, it's firming up. So when it's firm, it's done. Okay. It's not what she said. Do you ever like try to go for a walk or a jog and all you smell is someone's barbecue? Yeah, it's so good. Look at this gargantuan piece. The grill master, Nancy. What's yours? So we're cooking this on medium heat. You want to do that for about 10 to 12 minutes on each side. But you can also do this in the air fryer as well. Like I often do that when the weather's not great. I do it at around maybe 330 in the air fryer and then I'll finish it off at a higher temperature just so you can get that char on it. Pork chops are done. So we're just taking them off the grill now. Wow, look at that. Smells so good. And now for the cherry on top. The sunny side up egg with runny yolk. You want the oil to be really high because you want these crispy edges here. Do you like a sunny side up or over easy? I'm a sunny side up guy. I like a little bit of yolk run. All right. I want to do it over easy. Okay. Wow. This is an impressive looking plate. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but... I hope it tastes as good as it looks because it looks legit. All right, dig in. Here, you start. The meat really took on a nice color, right? I really like that trick of not putting in the garlic and the lemongrass because now you don't get all those burnt pieces. That annatto seed does make a difference. It's quite red looking. It's nice, right? Yeah, it's a nice aesthetic. Okay, let's try the meat. Really nice. Yeah, good flavor. We only marinated it for a few hours, but it soaked through really nicely. Check out the broken rice. How did it cook up? Is it still broken? It's nice actually. I love the scallion oil. I think the scallion oil just makes everything so much better. You can actually put that on anything. Try the quiche. It's so moist. Yeah, that's quite good. The kids will like that. Yeah. I remember when I first met you and we would go to a Vietnamese restaurant. Without fail, you always order gomtang. Always. I think this is my go-to comfort food. I wouldn't say I grew up eating this at home, but anytime that we were treated to go out to eat at a restaurant, we would go to a Vietnamese restaurant, obviously. And I wouldn't want to eat pho. I would just always go for gomtang. I remember when I was younger, my mom would take us to a Vietnamese restaurant. This dish had a really special name. So depending on how many different toppings you wanted, it would either be called Like this right now, what we're looking at is a which translates to three colored rice because you have three toppings. You have a meat, you have this egg, and then you have the egg quiche, right? So that's what I typically get as well. When I used to go to Saigon a lot, did you know that this was considered an after party, late night meal? No, I had no idea. I know, it's so weird because over here, like we just grab a burger or whatever, right? But when I used to go party with my friends at two or three in the morning, there used to be vendors that would sell this and they actually call it or sometimes they call it which is like ghost gomtang. I used to think it was called gomtang, like taking a shower rice. So I've been properly educated that I've been mistaken my whole life. Okay, that's gomtang. Anyways, let's dig in. Yeah, turned out great. Okay, hope you guys enjoyed that. See you next time.