Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Television

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, we traveled to Saigon's District 8, where cooking takes place in doorways, alleys, even on the back of bicycles.

We begin with bò kho.

This is a fragrant beef stew.

It marries local ingredients with French culinary technique.

Then a really easy recipe for Vietnamese scallion sauce.

And then we dive into a simple braised lemongrass chicken with chilies and turmeric that transforms this everyday staple.

So please stay tuned as we get a cooking lesson on the cooking of Saigon.

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- You know, years ago I took the whole family to Vietnam.

We start at Hanoi, worked our way down to Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City, and a friend of mine was actually living in Saigon at the time.

He was working on the water system.

And one of his employees, his wife taught cooking classes, and so I decided to take a class.

So right after lunch, he said, "Meet me outside the hotel," which I did, and he shows up on this little tiny moped, which is how millions-- literally millions-- of people get around in Saigon these days.

Well, I used to drive a taxi in New York back in the '70s and so nothing bothers me except riding on the back of a moped (laughing): is, my God... Because when you got to the intersections, it was like survival of the largest, and the moped was not the largest.

Anyway, we finally, after 20 minutes, got to District 8.

This is an area of Saigon that doesn't have the big avenues.

These are small alleys, back alleys.

You get the smell of ginger, garlic, lemongrass, fish sauce.

It's just a wonderful place to be if you love food and cooking.

And there are people cooking in doorways, in the streets, people go by on bicycles.

One woman actually had a soup on the back above her rear tire in a pot, which was in another pot with charcoal.

So it's just a great place for street food.

So one of the things we decided to do was to cook with people in their homes, not at restaurants.

And the first person we met up with was Nguyên Thi Thúy, who's a literature teacher, and she taught us a recipe for beef stew.

This is a Vietnamese beef stew called bò kho.

Now this is absolutely transformative.

You know, we talk about changing the way you cook here at Milk Street.

This recipe, if you compare it to a European beef stew, tells you everything you need to know about a totally different way of cooking.

The second recipe is a braised lemongrass chicken.

Again, we learned this from someone at home, Pham Thi Thanh Tâm.

And again, we're taking chicken, which almost every culture makes, and we're doing it in a totally different way.

So let's get started with the beef stew, bò kho.

♪ ♪ You know, a few years ago I was in Salzburg during the summer at the Festspiele, which is the music festival.

My wife's mother actually grew up in Salzburg, we go back to see family.

So it was the Berlin Philharmonic.

It was, I think, Mahler's "Fourth Symphony."

And I'm not a big fan of, you know, symphonies.

I'd rather go see the Grateful Dead to be honest.

Anyway, after five minutes I was on the edge of my seat.

It was unbelievable.

And the reason is it was different than any other experience I've had listening to a symphony.

I could almost hear every single instrument.

Now, the recipe we're going to do today is a beef stew.

It's from Vietnam.

A lot of Vietnamese cooking is in fact based on French technique for obvious reasons.

So this is a great example of how you take something that's, I think, more one note-- it's great, it's subtle, a lot of depth-- and turn it into something like that Berlin Philharmonic with lots of notes going on.

It's much more complex.

So you can choose which one you like.

But, here at Milk Street, we talk about change the way you cook.

This beef stew is a great example of change the way you cook because it completely changes your mind about what cooking is.

And with that huge introduction, (laughing): let's go make this recipe.

So this is three pounds of chuck roast.

We love chuck.

We don't like meat from the round, that is the back leg.

This has more fat and a lot more flavor.

Now, if there are big hunks of fat in it, you do want to get rid of those.

The rest of it will probably melt off.

You just want to get rid of it.

I'm just gonna cut between the muscles here.

♪ ♪ So this is a six-inch boning knife that has a rather flexible blade.

It's really good for getting in and taking fat out.

You know, sometimes when you go buy meat, I go to a butcher, I've had moments when there's so much fat you end up with about as much fat as meat.

So you want to be careful.

Again, this fat is gonna melt because we're gonna cook this for two, two-and-a-half hours, and that's enough heat to get the fat and the collagen to melt.

It'll go into the sauce and we'll defat the sauce.

So you also want to trim on the outside.

A little bit of fat on the outside's fine.

But if you get some really hard, or gnarly pieces, it's good to get them off.

You have to know when to stop.

t's like painting, right?

So now we get a bigger knife.

You want pieces that are about an inch and a half or so.

Fairly large pieces.

I'm just going to trim that off here.

Okay, so that's the three pounds of chuck.

And now we'll start the recipe in typical French fashion by sautéing onions.

So we browned the onions.

That's done.

And now we're gonna add garlic, which has been grated, eight cloves of garlic, and three ounces of ginger.

Note the ginger still has skin on it because it'll be coming out of the stew before we finish it so there's no need to peel it.

And we'll just sauté this for a minute or so.

You want to start to smell the garlic in particular.

(sizzling) Next up is tomato paste, very common ingredient.

Tomatoes have a lot of umami flavor and it's really good to sauté tomato paste for just a minute or so.

That'll deepen the flavor.

Now we have chili garlic sauce, a couple tablespoons.

Warning: some of these brands will blow your head off.

There's a huge variance in heat with these.

So, if you're not sure about the brand you have, I would use about half as much or even less.

You can always add some at the end.

We know this brand, we know what we're doing here, wo we're gonna add the full two tablespoons at this point.

♪ ♪ And now that's really the first indication we're in Vietnam, right?

That's one of the... we have the ginger, but the chili garlic sauce.

Now, some other great ingredients.

We have four trimmed stalks of lemongrass.

This is used all the time in Vietnam.

One of the great dishes I had there was steamed clams with lemongrass.

It's just a great flavor.

And we have a cinnamon stick.

Cinnamon is often used in lots of cultures.

A warm spice with a savory recipe.

And then star anise; six of those.

♪ ♪ So now we have a lot of things going on.

We have lemongrass, we have star anise, we have cinnamon, we have ginger, we have chili garlic paste.

All of a sudden, you know, we're not in Europe anymore.

We're in a very different place.

Now things are going to get even more interesting because we're going to use four cups; a quart of coconut water.

Now this should be coconut water that has no additives.

Comes usually from green coconuts.

It's used all the time in Vietnamese cooking.

It's slightly sweet.

It shouldn't have added sugars to the package.

It also has a little bit of salinity, a little bit of sodium in it.

So it gives you that sweetness.

It perks up the flavors a little bit.

And there's a little bit of coconut flavor but not too much.

It's really subtle.

It's one of those things you can use in lots of your cooking.

For example, if you're making rice, you can use coconut water, it's really nice.

And now this is more traditional, of course, we have a couple cups of beef stock goes in.

And finally we add the three pounds of beef chuck that we cut and trimmed.

And now we're gonna bring this up to a boil and then reduce it immediately to a simmer.

And we're going to simmer that just for a few minutes.

The scum, I guess that's a culinary word, will rise to the surface.

And if you don't disturb it, it'll come right to the surface and we can skim that off.

and now we're gonna cook this at a simmer for two, two-and-a-half hours.

You want to get the meat really fully cooked and tender.

♪ ♪ So we've cooked this stew for two-and-a-half hours.

The meat is fully tender.

We've taken out the gnarly bits-- the ginger, lemongrass, star anise, cinnamon stick-- we're not going to eat, and now we want to defat the sauce.

Now the easy way to do this if you are a good planner is to do it the day before, cool this on the countertop on a rack for about two hours, then put it in the fridge.

The next day, all that fat will have turned into a solid on the top, you just take it right off.

If you want to continue now I would just tilt this.

I like a ladle instead of a spoon because it's easy to get it down in there.

And we'll just take some of the fat out.

There isn't really that much fat in this, actually.

I guess I did a good job trimming.

Usually the fat is really the clear liquid on the very top, but I think this is, yeah, this is good to go.

♪ ♪ Now we have four medium carrots, sliced, put that in the pot.

Now we'll get this up to a simmer and we'll cook them just about 15 minutes until they're just tender.

The carrots are done and there are two things to add at the end before we get to the toppings.

Fish sauce, of course.

You know, a good fish sauce, if you get a good quality fish sauce, does not taste fishy.

It just is packed with umami, which is nice.

And then of course lime juice, two tablespoons of lime juice, which would be pretty standard.

Yeah, I'm gonna take a taste of this to see if I need more chili garlic sauce.

I doubt if I'll need more personally.

We'll just see.

(laughing): I need more chili garlic sauce.

I can't believe it.

I must be getting old.

I like a little more spice in my food.

So that had some nice spice but I'm gonna add just a little more.

Just a little bit more.

There we go.

♪ ♪ And this is a very brothy beef stew, of course if you're used to a more European style, which is thicker.

And for toppings you have some choices.

You can use basil or cilantro.

I like basil.

Some white onions.

We didn't pickle these.

These are just white onions.

And as I said at the beginning like the Berlin Philharmonic, lots of different notes here.

And this is just a nice way to finish: the onions, the basil, a little bit of lime as well to go along with the lime juice.

Now, this can be served with rice, it can be served with Chinese stick noodles, rice noodles, or just served with a baguette.

So this is bò kho, this is a Vietnamese beef stew with lemongrass and star anise.

Oh man.

(laughing): That'll wake you up, definitely.

It is so good.

If you're used to a European-style stew, this is a very different way of thinking about, not just a stew, but how to cook.

There's so many different flavors there.

As I said at the beginning, you can almost pick out each and every one, it's absolutely delicious.

♪ ♪ The French may be masters of the sauce, but I have to say in Vietnam, since they do have a French culinary tradition there as well, I think they took it up ten steps above that because it's so fresh, it's so bright.

I much prefer that sort of sauce.

And one of the simplest sauces, of course, is a scallion sauce.

It's simply chopped scallions.

You pour some hot oil on it and it really brings out the flavor of the oil.

We're gonna start with five or six scallions.

You want about half a cup chopped.

We're not just gonna slice them, we're actually gonna chop them.

♪ ♪ So I'm not gonna leave it like this.

We actually want to break them down a little bit more.

♪ ♪ And before we add the oil, we're gonna add a little bit of salt and pepper to this.

Just a quarter teaspoon of salt and about a teaspoon of pepper.

And we're gonna work that with our hands into the scallions.

When you add the hot oil, it does break down the scallions a bit.

You don't want sort of tough pieces of scallion there.

So we've heated the oil, and any kind of a neutral vegetable oil is fine, like a peanut oil.

So now it's shimmering, just starting to smoke.

And we'll pour that over.

(loud sizzling) ♪ ♪ Turn that off.

A lot of people would just use the hot oil over the scallions.

This is also a trick used in a lot of Chinese cooking, like in Sichuan.

We're gonna add three other ingredients which are common.

Tablespoon and a half of ginger.

This is fish sauce, a tablespoon a half, or soy sauce, and a little bit of sugar, which is a common addition to this style sauce.

♪ ♪ So you can't smell this, of course at home, but I can... (sniffs) ...and as soon as that hot oil hit the scallions, you get that fresh grassy aroma.

It's just great.

When the ginger hits the hot oil of course that blossoms the ginger flavor, the fish sauce, the little bit of sugar.

So we'll let this cool down.

And we come back, we'll show you a bunch of ways you can use it because it's really an all-purpose, very quick sauce.

♪ ♪ So the sauce is ready.

Obviously there's a lot of ways you can use the sauce.

We have a grilled steak here.

You can put it on any sort of grilled meats, like chops, you can do it on grilled vegetables, like asparagus or roasted vegetables.

Very often it's served with dumplings.

It's actually just served on rice.

So it certainly is all-purpose, and it's so easy to make, you can do it the last minute.

♪ ♪ Oh... That's better than Worcestershire sauce, (laughing): I got to tell you.

You know, a great sauce has a lot of things going on in it.

This has the ginger, it has the fish sauce, it has a little bit of sweetness to it.

Obviously has the scallions, which give it a little bit of punch as well.

So it's got a whole bunch of stuff going on, and, you know, steak's great, but steak with Vietnamese scallion sauce is a lot better.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - When we traveled to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, we learned from a home chef, Pham Thi Thanh Tâm, how to make this really bright and delicious quick braise.

But the way she taught us involved mincing down lemongrass, which offers a very, very bright flavor.

But the lemongrass that they get in Vietnam is far more fresh and tender.

So they could just mince it down.

Whereas us here in the States, we'll have to do a couple adjustments to ours.

We need to bash it just like we would bash garlic, and then simmer it in with our braise, and then discard it right before we serve.

Now to do that, all we have to do with our lemongrass here is peel off a couple of the outer layers because those tend to be far more drier and leathery.

And that's not what we want in this dish.

And you're really only peeling off just until you start feeling the stalk become a little more tender.

Once you get those outer portions off, you'll want to trim down all of this lemongrass down to about six inches from the root because that's where all the flavor is.

So from here, find your way about six inches up, give it a cut, and that way you could cut the rest accordingly.

♪ ♪ Now from here, as if you were treating garlic, go ahead and rest the flat part of the blade right onto the lemongrass and then use the heel of your palm to crunch down.

(pounding) And if it falls apart on you, that's fine.

But we do want to keep these for the most part together so that way it's easier to find in the braise later down the road.

(pounding) And you'll see as you bash down on the lemongrass, little spurts of its juice are coming up, that's what we want.

We want all these juices to start circulating so that way they could get in our braise.

♪ ♪ So now that we have those nice and crushed up, we could go ahead and get this braise going.

So here I have a large Dutch oven.

And to that I'll add in about a tablespoon of neutral oil.

And we'll heat this oil until it's just starting to shimmer over medium high heat.

Now that my oil has begun to shimmer, we could go ahead and start cooking our aromatics.

So here I have six medium garlic cloves that have been minced down.

And we'll also add to that two Fresno chilies that have been deseeded and thinly sliced.

(sizzling) And finally, to bring some color, here I have some turmeric, which is going to lend a really nice almost neon yellow color.

Now, once our aromatics are aromatic, we could go ahead and add in our lemongrass right on in, and we'll top that off with one cup of chicken stock.

This is low sodium chicken stock.

And we'll also add in two tablespoons of light brown sugar.

And, to counterbalance that sweetness, two tablespoons of soy sauce.

And, finally, let's bring it together with one cup of just water.

And we want to bring this mixture up to a simmer, and once it's bubbling away, then we could add in our chicken.

Now when it comes to our chicken, we are working with bone-in chicken thighs.

But more often than not, when you go grocery shopping, you'll find bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs.

Go ahead and grab those.

All you gotta do is peel that skin off.

We don't want it in our braise because it releases a lot of fat and results in a very greasy dish, and that's not what we're looking for.

On top of that, the chicken skin gets a little soggy while it cooks.

Also not what we're looking for.

But what we do want is the bone-in for that extra boost of flavor.

Now that our liquid has come to a simmer, we could go ahead and introduce our chicken.

So drop it into your Dutch oven in one even layer, but make sure that everything's submerged within the liquid, so that way it cooks through.

♪ ♪ So now that the chicken is in the Dutch oven, we want to pop a lid on it, and allow it to simmer for about 30 to 40 minutes over medium low heat or until all that chicken is nice and tender.

♪ ♪ Our chicken has been braising for 35 minutes now, so we'll take off the lid and be greeted by this amazing aroma.

♪ ♪ So from here, what we want to do is we want to take our chicken out and transfer it over to our serving platter.

And that's because we want to reduce down all of this braising liquid into a nice thickened sauce.

Not thick, like gravy thick, but thickened enough to coat each and every piece of chicken.

♪ ♪ With the chicken out of the pot, we can crank the heat up to medium high, and we'll cook this down until it reduces by half and that should take about 12 minutes.

♪ ♪ Our braising liquid has been reducing and it's gone down by about half of its volume.

So it's at this point we could take out that hardy, fibrous lemongrass.

It's done its job, all the flavor's already in the braise, we don't have to worry about mowing down on this.

So now that our braising liquid has reduced down, we can thicken it up just a little bit by using a cornstarch slurry.

So here I have one teaspoon of cornstarch mixed in with one tablespoon of cold water.

And as always with any slurry, before you add it into any sort of liquid, give it a stir just in case any of that cornstarch kind of settled to the bottom.

Once you give it a stir, you want to whisk it into your braising liquid.

Just to prevent any clumps.

And once it's incorporated, you want to allow this to cook down at a simmer until it thickens just slightly, and that takes about a minute.

♪ ♪ We're not thickening this up to a thick gravy-type status, we're only looking for a little bit of body to coat each and every piece of chicken.

Once it's nice and thick, let's go ahead and remove it off the heat.

And then we could introduce a couple other flavors to brighten this back up.

The first is in the form of two tablespoons of lime juice.

As well as one tablespoon of fish sauce.

Now, this is a really important ingredient to add in because it adds this really deep savory note that doesn't taste like fish.

I promise you, once you add it into the braise, you won't notice anything but a really beautiful savory flavor.

So now from here, we just throw the chicken back in, and we do want to throw it with any juices that may have accumulated at the bottom of our serving platter.

♪ ♪ With everything back in our Dutch oven, we're gonna take our lid, pop it right on top, and we'll allow the residual heat of the Dutch oven to warm everything through.

And that should take about five minutes.

Our chicken's been warming up in that braising liquid for about five minutes.

So now we can go ahead and eat, which is my favorite part.

So I'm going to take out a nice piece of chicken for myself.

♪ ♪ Want to get a little bit of that sauce as well, so, gonna tilt the pan up and get just a little bit of that action.

♪ ♪ And just for one last hit of freshness, gonna top this off with fresh cilantro.

And that's that: Vietnamese braised lemongrass chicken from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

♪ ♪ You can find this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

- That meal.

You sautéed, you seared, and you served, cooking with All-Clad, bonded cookware designed, engineered, and assembled in the U.S.A. for over 50 years.

All-Clad-- for all your kitchen adventures.

- Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to be the first to welcome you to Tel Aviv... - Welcome to Oaxaca's airport.

- Welcome to Beirut.

♪ ♪ (man speaking Hebrew) - (speaking world language) - Bonjour, je m'appelle Chris.

- We call it supa kanja.

It's the word for gumbo.

♪ ♪ - Christopher, you have to make the authentic, original cotoletta alla Bolognese for me.

♪ ♪ - So this is the Eduardo García blender.

- This is the no electricity.

♪ ♪ - Next is dessert.

- That is really good.

♪ ♪ I notice when you cook sometimes, you add a little bit of something, and then you just put the whole bowl in.

- I like to be generous with my food.

Generosity is important in cooking.

- That's true.

♪ ♪ - Can start building bridges, and food is definitely a perfect common ground.

♪ ♪ - This is a generational thing.

It's, it's something that you inherit.

♪ ♪ - Yeah, that was great.

(woman speaking Mandarin) - What was this for?

What did she say?

- You get one more chance.

- Salute.

- How is it?

He's speechless.

- I'm speechless.

That's so good.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪