My Xuyen is a quite famous place in the old Soc Trang province, now belonging to Can Tho city. This land has ancient pagodas with unique Khmer architecture such as Sa Cuoi pagoda with porcelain walls, 700-year-old Tac Hong pagoda, Tra Cuon pagoda...
This place is also a long-standing place of residence of the three ethnic communities of Khmer, Kinh and Hoa, so it has a diverse and rich culture, both intertwined and preserving its own unique identities. Therefore, it is not surprising that this land creates a unique bun such as bun gai du.
For Vietnamese people, vermicelli is vermicelli (can be vermicelli with water, dried vermicelli, or vermicelli with dipping sauce) and garlic is garlic. It is impossible to combine a lemon dish eaten with chopsticks with a hand-wrapped food roll. However, the whole mon ngon gao dai still appears like that.
What's in the bowl of banh canh thu? Of course, they are the main ingredients for both vermicelli and garlic. The noodles and broth are clearly from the noodle dish, while steamed shrimp with peeled shells, boiled pork belly with only fiber, raw vegetables, lettuce, price, grated roasted peanuts, ground pork floss... the whole grain is a ingredient of the salad.
Not to mention, later, to make the flavor more sweet, people added fillings including grated coconut rice and balut. Some places also use pork ribs to replace the pork belly with just cut into strands and chau vang tham tham tham... It is truly rich, easy to eat, true to the culinary character of the West.
So why not roll the salad to eat it alone as usual but "combine" it with vermicelli to make vermicelli soup? The answer is also very simple, this creativity comes from the purpose of making it simple for both the processor and the eater, at the same time turning a snack (sally) into a full dish (sally noodle soup).
Instead of wrapping shrimp, meat and vegetables in a nem leaf (fried cake), put everything in a bowl of noodles, then pour the broth and it's done. To avoid losing the flavor of the garlic dish, people serve an extra bowl of grated soy sauce to diners to dipping in shrimp and meat.
So why not call this bun gdr like pho mixing, bun da but bun gdr? What does the ke nghia here mean or what kind of ingredients are in the bowl of noodles? In fact, this word to is completely meaningless, because it is read incorrectly from the dynamic of and/back, for example and rice with chopsticks.
Therefore, from the original name of bun gon and - meaning bun gon an bang cach and bang dao - this dish has gradually "derdered" with the new name of bun gon da. So, don't confuse this dish with chicken vermicelli or wonder what a piece of banh da is, will it be delicious?
It can be seen in the garlic noodle dish that creates a quite harmonious interaction between different culinary styles from different communities. Bun is a typical dish of the Vietnamese people, role-playing game is a specialty dish of Southern cuisine, and the broth is cooked with fish sauce, a typical characteristic of the Khmer people.
With such ingredients, people will have to find a way to create communication and harmony between them. That String is the flavor of the fish sauce of bun mang, with shrimp paste as the main character. Similar to the bowl of Hue beef noodle soup, shrimp paste is the foundation for balancing the flavors of the ingredients such as beef (du) and pork (am).
Obviously, with light-tasted ingredients such as boiled pork belly, steamed shrimp, raw vegetables - which are characterized by dipping in grated soy sauce to increase richness - the broth must have a similar salty ingredient, which is shrimp paste. The habit of using fish sauce for cooking was a characteristic of Khmer cuisine, then spread throughout the West.
Thanks to that, the bowl of banh gom thit can tolerate all the " trivials" in a "big ass", even "combine" with a pair of very "terrifying" trung cards with the noodles of balut and Vietnamese coriander. Even the rich taste of coconut rice is tolerated.
So, how to cook and eat a bowl of good garlic noodles properly? First, you have to cook water according to standards. The broth is the broth boiled with shrimp, pork and pork stew that is filtered in a squeeze, then seasoned with tamarind, ground pork sauce, sticky rice sauce (the type of wine in the form of ground sticky rice) and fish sauce to taste.
That broth must have the sweet taste of meat bones, a little sourness of tamarind, the aroma of pureed soy sauce, the rich flavor of fish sauce, and the fatty taste of sticky rice sauce. The combination of sticky rice sauce and shrimp paste is quite strange, because it seems like they are mutually exclusive but creates a special flavor between the fatty taste of the sauce and the salty taste of the fish sauce.
In addition, another role of pancakes is to cause water to thicken. An important standard for broth for the saffron vermicelli dish is that it must be very hot, otherwise it will break down, making the "connection" between the ingredients in the vermicelli bowl into an annual melting process that cannot be saved.
After having a pot of standard broth, just put the vermicelli in the bowl and add the meat, roasted peanuts, balut, grilled fish fat cake, chives, green onions, non-yellow garlic, then place a shrimp with red soil in the middle, and fill with hot broth. Finally, pour a small spoonful of grated starch into the garlic flavor.
Bun Thoai Sa Can is served with raw vegetables (sage, banana stems, bean sprouts), herbs (laurel wreath, basil, Vietnamese coriander), fresh chili, and a bowl of grated soy sauce with lemon or kumquat to dipping. It will be a collection that brings different flavors, but has "song in the same voice".
Although bun ga da is still a strange and picky dish, this dish exudes a very "Handsome" style. And during the first cold and healthy days of winter, sitting on the flood watch, the heat and richness of the nutrients of the bowl of banh gom thorn makes people crave to be rich.
