Summertime is grilling season and in case you missed it, listen to my chat with Francis Lam on the Splendid Table. Our July 4 episode was all about grilling!
We’re also in sandwich season and my favorites are banh mi and tomato-mayo. The two were born in different places on our planet but they overlap in their reliance on mayonnaise. The synergy between mayo and Maggi seasoning sauce heavily defines the rich umami of a good banh mi. You likely buy mayonnaise but it’s expensive, despite being made of only egg, oil, and seasonings!
I’d love for you to make your own mayo because I have a ridiculously easy, 2-minute method for a Kewpie-style mayonnaise. I call it “Q.P. Mayonnaise” because Q.P. stands for Quick Prep. I’ve never had a bad batch.
My recipe plus a video to show you how easy it is to make are at my website. So, skip the grocery store run and make my 🆓 Kewpie dupe recipe (in the article, you’ll also get links to a master banh mi blueprint and hot dog banh mi recipe).
Grilling and mayo intersects in Vietnamese cooking in the form of rice paper pizzas called bánh tráng nướng (grilled rice paper). After reading about them in Yotam Ottolenghi’s newsletter dispatch, Drew Faulkner asked about the pizzas. They were a wonderment to Yotam’s children, who adored them and couldn’t stop talking about them. Yotam didn’t offer a recipe. Did I have one?
Yes I do, in Ever-Green Vietnamese. Drew looked up the recipe in my book and we discussed the possibility of the pizza being a fun thing for kids and adults alike. Thanks to Yotam and Drew, today’s newsletter features the pizzas!
A beloved modern snack, bánh tráng nướng is sad to have originated in Phang Rang, a coastal city in southern Vietnam with Cham roots. It’s not the same as traditional thick rice crackers of the same name; Viet food terms to confuse.
From Phan Rang, the grilled rice paper “pizzas” trended upward in hipster-ish Da Lat and Saigon (HCMC) where young people literally ate them up. A Neapolitan would scoff at calling them “pizza”, but that’s how many Viet people have described the crispy, chewy grilled rice-paper platforms, which are topped with a mixture of eggy green-onion oil and a choice of savory, crunchy, unctuous, spicy toppings. Like with Italian pizzas, toppings vary endlessly.
I first had rice-paper pizzas prepared by a street vendor in Da Nang, a coastal town in southern Vietnam. It was early afternoon and she had positioned herself near a school. Why wasn’t she near businesses like other vendors I has seen?
The snack is a hit with schoolkids, she told me.
School hadn’t let out yet so I got to spend a while watching her craft my order on a coal-fired brazier. She had all her mis en place ready and rhythmically prepared each one, asking me what toppings I wanted. “The works!” I said. Among her toppings was a hot, salty-sweet sauce and crunchy canned shoestring potato sticks!
I grabbed a little video of her cooking:
The sauce was a byproduct from a beef jerky maker, she divulged. No wonder it tasted so good. Her riotous combo of textures and flavors was superb. My travel buddy, Karen, ate so many that she got a stomachache afterwards. We’re either kids at heart or the pizzas are damn good or both. My vote is both!
What’s fabulous about Vietnamese pizzas is that they’re fashioned from next to nothing but they are so much more than the sum of their humble parts. That’s the genius of street food vendors whose craft needs to be portable, uniquely delicious, and financially viable (low cost).
A leaf fan was part of the lady’s barebones set-up. Over the years of traveling to Vietnam, I’ve seen Viet pizzas as rounds or folded up like a quesadilla or small burrito.
Replicating food that you taste while traveling isn’t easy because of differences in ingredients and cooking equipment. There are countless hyperlocal rice papers in Vietnam that aren’t available in America. And I’m not going to ask you to get a charcoal brazier going to serve 4! After weeks of trying, I got an assist from chef friends. Their tips along with lots of recipe testing and development is how I successfully translated this street food from Vietnam into a doable recipe for your home kitchen.
Below you’ll find:
A versatile recipe for Grilled Rice Paper Pizzas in text and downloadable PDF
Step-by-step photos and instructions to manipulate rice paper into a crispy pizza!
Selection tips for choosing suitable rice paper
Timing and planning tips so you can make a fun group activity around bánh tráng nướng
Let’s grill them up!
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