♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This week on Milk Street, we travel to Vietnam.

We start with a simple skillet recipe for caramel chicken, then a really easy recipe for Vietnamese scallion sauce, and we finish off with a great recipe for chicken curry.

Stay tuned as we bring Vietnamese cooking home.

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♪ ♪ - J.M., how are you?

- I'm doing great.

- You got back from Ho Chi Minh City not too long ago.

You didn't invite me on the trip, of course, as usual.

- (laughs) - But you went there to cook with a guy called Peter Cuong Franklin.

And one of the things you cooked with him was caramel chicken.

So I guess my question is, going there, did it turn out to be something very different than what you thought before you got there?

- Well, yeah, and, you know, what was interesting was that not only was the caramel chicken different than what I expected, but it had kind of an underpinning that I found across Vietnamese cuisine.

So the first time I really experienced Vietnamese food on the ground, I was actually in a field on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh, and I saw what looked like a field of solar panels, actually, and when I got closer, I realized that it was actually massive nine-by-three-foot sheets of what would become rice noodles.

And they're drying on these bamboo mats in the sun.

The family who was tending to them showed us the whole process.

It starts at 3:00 a.m., ends in the afternoon, and they feed these sheets through these slicers that reduce them into filaments of noodles.

And it was a fascinating process, but what was even more exciting was when they then invited me to stay with them for lunch.

And so they cleared off the patio, we sat on the floor, and they brought out dish after dish-- stir fries, pickled eggs, vegetables, you name it.

And not only was it all delicious, but it all had this very familiar underpinning, which was a balance of sweet and savory, which is exactly what's at play in caramel chicken.

I found that really fascinating because they play off of one another, sugar and fish sauce, which is the classic Vietnamese ingredient that's got a lot of savoriness to it.

So I saw that across Ho Chi Minh every time I ate.

And then Peter explained to me that this is actually part of a broad family of recipes, and the caramel chicken in particular uses-- believe it or not-- a caramel sauce to get that push and pull.

- So you start and make the caramel sauce.

Sugar, a little water, saucepan, and then fish sauce, and what else goes into the sauce?

- So he starts, as you say, making a basic caramel.

I mean, it's no different than we might do to, for a confection.

He starts with white sugar and a little bit of water, although some people use coconut water, and once that's a deep, rich caramel, then he adds lime juice, lemongrass, and, of course, fish sauce.

The result is the opposite of what we often think of with caramel.

We think of it as heavy and dense.

This was light, bright, citrusy, rich, but not heavy.

It was truly wonderful.

- So tell me about Peter, so he, he was born in Vietnam.

He has a restaurant.

Is it, like, a market stall?

Is it a big restaurant?

What is it?

- So he was born in Vietnam, adopted to the United States in the '70s.

Eventually made his way back, after culinary school, to Ho Chi Minh, where he opened up his restaurant, Anan Saigon.

It's kind of buried in kind of this chaotic market.

You wouldn't even know it's there, actually.

It's a beautiful modern space, and what I loved about his cooking is that he has a great deal of respect for traditional Vietnamese cooking, but he doesn't mind also pushing it in new directions.

He's cooked all over the world.

He has a lot of influences to bring to the table.

- Well, I think you and I have found, every time we go somewhere, the idea of a non-changing recipe... - Mm-hmm.

- ...is rare.

- Yes, exactly.

- Like, it's, from family to family, they'll make their hummus or their caramel chicken very differently.

So, it's always evolving, right?

- Right, and, you know, each cook, each chef puts their thumbprint on the recipe in some way, and, you know, you see that in places like India, where curry changes from door to door, never mind region to region.

- So you also did a curry there, as well, I think, right?

- We did, actually, and this was fascinating.

So Peter showed me a Vietnamese chicken curry.

And it's, it's a really good example of kind of the lingering influence on Vietnamese cuisine that other cultures have had.

I mean, you know, there has been Chinese, Japanese, French, of course-- Mongolian, even.

The one I wasn't expecting was Indian.

So apparently, during the 1800s, there was a lot of trade between India and Vietnam.

Some of those sailors stayed behind in Vietnam and married local women.

And over time, a cuisine evolved to create a curry for the Indian sailors that had kind of Vietnamese ingredients and flavors.

So it was a lot less spicy, for example, it used a lot more turmeric, star anise, and, of course, fish sauce.

(chuckles) - Of course-- there's a theme here, somewhere.

- (laughs) - Okay, so we have a caramel chicken and we have a curry, as well.

- Mm-hmm.

- And next time, you'll invite me along.

- Ah, maybe.

- Maybe.

J.M., thank you.

- Thank you.

♪ ♪ - Many years ago, I was in Vietnam and the food was absolutely amazing, but one of the things I, the takeaways was, I used lime juice, fish sauce, and sugar as sort of a base sauce.

I sort of keep it, it's in my pantry all the time.

So caramel sauce is essentially the same thing, except the sugar is turned into a caramel.

But that combination of sort of funky fish sauce with sweet is really a nice baseline for a lot of this cooking, right?

- It is.

This recipe really epitomizes Vietnamese cuisine.

It's, it's all about the balance of sweet and savory and sour and bitter.

And we're gonna make a caramel sauce here, but it's not what you think of when you think of a dessert caramel sauce.

It's very, very dark.

We're gonna take it sort of just to the edge of too far!

- (laughs) - Don't be afraid.

It is a recipe that moves pretty quickly, which is what's great about it.

But you wanna make sure you have all of your ingredients ready to go at the beginning.

So I have almost everything ready.

The only thing I haven't prepped yet is the lemongrass, and in Vietnam, the lemongrass is really fresh, really tender, so you could just mince it up and throw it in.

What we typically get here is a little more dense and fibrous, still really, really flavorful, but we can't really mince it.

Otherwise, we're gonna get bits of that fibrous lemongrass in our dish.

So I'm gonna bruise it instead, so it stays whole, and we can take it out at the end.

It's still gonna flavor the dish, though.

So to bruise it, I use the butt-end of my knife.

Don't be afraid.

- I am, I...

I'm a little concerned.

- And just kind of smash it.

So I'm just gonna set that aside for when we're ready for adding all of our aromatics in, and we're gonna start our caramel sauce.

So I have a little bit of sugar.

Instead of water, we're gonna use coconut water.

We really liked that sort of depth of flavor it added, but it's absolutely not essential.

You can just use water if that's what you want to do.

- I just have to say a word that people who sell coconut water in those aseptic packages for five bucks...

I mean, it's water.

Essentially, yeah.

- It's water from a coconut!

- Okay, okay.

- Has anything new ever come out in, in your lifetime that you're, like, "good idea"?

- After 1969?

No.

No computers, no iPhones.

And don't even talk to me about music after '69.

- (sighs): Oh, boy, here we go.

- Here we go.

- So we get this going over medium-high, and we really are going to take this to a very dark place.

(laughing) - This recipe's all about Lynn's innermost thoughts, actually.

- Once we have the heat going here, you want to stop fiddling with it with a whisk or a spoon.

Instead, we're just going to swirl it around to make sure that it cooks evenly.

This is gonna take four to seven minutes or so, and we're gonna really take it to very dark caramel, because we want the bitterness here in order to get that balance.

So one thing I like to recommend when you're making a caramel sauce is, just use the residual heat of the pan to continue to cook it.

So take it off the heat and just swirl it around.

Gives you an idea of where you're at, but it also continues to cook the caramel.

- And when it starts to smoke, you know that you're getting... - That's exactly right.

- ...near the final point.

- Yup.

All right, Chris.

So this is very dark, as you can see.

This is not what you would typically do for a dessert sauce, probably, but it's got really great bitterness to it.

So I'm gonna take it off the heat and add the fish sauce.

This is gonna go wild when I do.

(pan sizzling) And a little more coconut water.

And then we'll put it back over the heat for a little bit.

Some of the caramel has hardened when I added that liquid, so we're just gonna put it over the heat, over medium, and just kind of melt those bits that may have hardened.

All right, so now we'll add in some of the aromatics.

These are some of those savory flavors.

So I have a little bit of minced ginger.

I have that lemongrass that we bruised.

Some Fresno chilis for a little bit of heat, and then I'm just gonna add a little bit of pepper.

We'll just cook these till you can kind of smell them.

- Well, you can smell the caramel.

- (laughs): Yes.

This actually smells amazing.

Now, if you would hand me that bowl with the chicken.

So we have boneless, skinless chicken thighs here, but this is a such a great recipe, because you can use pork tenderloin with this, you can use salmon.

Both of those will cook right here in the pan.

And that's one of the things we like about it.

You cook the whole thing in this skillet.

It takes less than a half an hour to put the whole thing together.

So I'm gonna crank this up to medium-high.

This is gonna take ten minutes or so.

We just wanna cook the chicken through.

And we want to reduce this sauce here to a glaze so that the chicken is nicely coated.

So we'll come back when this is ready.

- Okay.

♪ ♪ - So it looks a lot different than... (chuckles): When we put it in there, doesn't it?

It's gotten a lot darker.

It smells fantastic.

I'm gonna turn the heat off and we'll take out that lemongrass.

It's done its job.

It can say goodbye.

And then our final element of this type of cuisine is the sour.

So I have a little bit of lime juice.

Now, if you would fill our bowls with some rice... - To do something here?

There we are.

- Thank you.

- Mm.

- Want some scallions on yours?

- I do!

I love scallions.

That's actually my biggest go-to ingredient in the refrigerator.

Always have tons of scallions-- you can put them on anything.

- They are super-versatile.

- This looks great.

I mean, it's obvious, right?

But it looks great.

- It does.

And it's gonna taste great, too.

- Mm.

Wow... that really... Yeah, that's phenomenal.

There's a lime juice, the sour, there's umami, and there is sort of a bittersweet, right, from the sugar.

But it's not sweet.

- No, it's not.

So this has that, that balance that I was talking about-- the bitter, the sour, the savory.

It's all in there, and there's a little bit of heat from those Fresno chilis, as well.

- If you want to take chicken from the supermarket and make it over, right?

I mean, it's a huge makeover.

Vietnamese caramel chicken has sweet, sour, salty, umami, pungent-- it has everything together, and it's really bittersweet, it's not sweet.

You'd think it would be sweet, it's not.

All those flavors in a dish that takes less than half an hour.

Vietnamese caramel chicken is definitely on my rotation for Tuesday night.

♪ ♪ 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 gonna just going to slice them, we're actually gonna chop them.

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

We're actually, wanna 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.

Uh, 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-- 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.

(oil hissing) 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-and-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.

And 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 when 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 are a lot of ways you can use this 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 is, certainly is all-purpose.

And it's so easy to make.

You can do it the last minute.

♪ ♪ Mm.

That's better than Worcestershire sauce, I gotta tell you.

And 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, it 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.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You know, I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about authenticity in recipes, which is an interesting notion, because there was Portuguese influence India, Indian influence in Vietnam, Italian influence in Peru.

Cultures come together and they make up new recipes and things change.

So this is a great example of that.

This is a curry from Vietnam based upon Indian influence in the 19th century, but of course, they had lemongrass and fish sauce and other ingredients which made it uniquely theirs.

- Yeah, all of the flavors are coming in right from the get-go, as opposed to an Indian curry, where you layer in flavors by adding ingredients over time and controlling how much or how little.

Here, we're putting everything in the marinade for our chicken, and then it's going to get flavored right from the start.

The way that we're going to get this started is, we're going to blend our marinade up, and that means breaking down our lemongrass.

Now, here I have three stalks of lemongrass.

Now, typically, when you're working with this, you want to bruise it to get a lot of those oils going from the inside.

However, because we're going to be thinly slicing this and then puréeing it in a blender, any oil that was on the inside of this lemongrass is definitely going to come out.

So don't worry about smashing it to bits.

In fact, all you want to do to start is trim it down to the lower five to six inches or so.

- Now, is lemongrass in our supermarkets, it's sort of made of aluminum?

- (laughs) - I mean, this stuff, I mean, this is... (tapping) This stuff is hard, isn't it?

Like, if you're in Vietnam, it's gonna be more tender, right?

- Yes, it's certainly more tender.

But when we get it imported here, this is what we have to work with.

And, you know, we can get to the tender parts simply by peeling away some of those tougher outer leaves.

So break a lot of those off.

And don't be afraid to start wedging your thumbnail in there to start peeling off some of the tougher leaves, I should say.

- And you're gonna put in a blender, so... - Exactly.

So it's going to get obliterated.

So as you can see, we're not dealing with any of the drier husks of this lemongrass-- there's no bruising.

We just have a nice tender stem to work with.

What I'm going to do is, I'm going to thinly slice this.

And like I said, that is going to help it break down into a purée in this blender.

But you want to slice it as thinly as you can.

So that way, you can break down the fibers.

You see, there are very, very tough fibers running vertically throughout this entire thing.

So if you cut them into smaller pieces, they'll have an easier time breaking down in the blender.

All right, so... Now that I have thinly sliced through all of our lemongrass here, we can transfer it over to our blender.

Now, in here, along with the lemongrass, I have half-a-cup of water and a quarter-cup of vegetable oil.

Or really, any neutral oil will work here.

We're adding in one medium onion that's been roughly chopped.

Also throwing in one three-inch piece of ginger that's been peeled and roughly chopped, as well, four garlic cloves that have been peeled and smashed, and finally, a variety of spices: one teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of black pepper, one teaspoon of cinnamon, two teaspoons of turmeric, and two tablespoons of coriander seed.

Now that I have everything in here, we want to blend this until it is perfectly smooth, and I can't stress that enough.

(blender whirring) (blender stops) And... Just taking a look from the top, not a single fiber in sight, so that means we could go ahead and get this marinating our chicken.

Here I have two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs that have been cut down into one- to one-and-a-half-inch pieces, and this marinade is gonna go right on top.

- Okay.

- Once the marinade's in the bowl with the chicken, just give it a little toss to make sure all the chicken pieces are coated, and then we could go ahead and pop this in the fridge to marinate for anywhere between 30 minutes to a full hour.

♪ ♪ Chris, our chicken has been marinating for 30 minutes, and it went straight from the bowl all the way into our large skillet here.

- So just to clarify, this has nothing to do with the technique used in a traditional Indian curry.

The combination of flavors, I guess you'd say, is curry-like, but it's not a traditional Indian curry.

- It's curry-like, and it's very potent, as well.

- Okay.

- So that's why the marinade's in the pan along with it.

- Oh, it's great.

- Because not only is it flavoring the chicken, it's the sauce, all right?

- Right.

- So we're going to add in two medium carrots that have been thinly sliced.

We're also going to add in five cloves of star anise to bring out that kind of licorice-like flavor, and then we'll fish it out later on, so no one has to break a tooth on it.

We're gonna go ahead and bring this whole combination up to a simmer.

And once it starts simmering, we're going to let it cook down for about six to seven minutes or so until the marinade itself starts to brown.

And that way, we can really develop some more of those deeper flavors and all those spices that are blended in.

The marinade has actually reduced down quite a bit.

And it's actually starting to brown, which is what we're looking for.

You could see it forming that slight film on the bottom.

We wanna go ahead and kick that up into the sauce by deglazing the pan, one of my favorite ways to get all of the flavor.

The way we're going to deglaze this is with a third-cup of water, as well as two tablespoons fish sauce.

We wanna add it in towards the end, so that way it doesn't cook out all the way, but definitely work into the skillet, trying to scrape up any of those brown bits towards the bottom, because that is all locked-in flavor.

We need this to come up to a simmer, and then we'll pop a lid on it and allow it to cook for about five to seven minutes until the carrots are crisp-tender.

After that, we'll pull off the lid and keep cooking it so the sauce thickens up and clings to the chicken.

- Okay.

- That sauce is nice and thick, and it's really clinging to the chicken pieces, so I'm going to finish it off with a little bit of brightness in the form of a quarter-cup of lime juice.

That's gonna go right on in.

Give that a stir and remove this entire skillet from heat.

We don't want to cook down that lime juice and lose its acidity, but what we do wanna lose are all of these hard pieces of star anise.

So definitely fish those out once you add in your lime juice, and sometimes star anise will break down into tinier pieces.

So really dig through and make sure you don't have any tiny cloves waiting around to surprise you in a spoonful.

We should-- ah, ah, there's one.

- Good thing to check.

- Here we go.

So now that we are all set with that, just gonna give this one final stir, and while I'm doing this, if you wouldn't mind serving up some rice, we can go ahead and get started.

Oh, this sauce is something incredible.

Add in a little bit of this.

And those carrots really bring such great color to the game.

So before I dig in, I do want to finish this off with a little bit of cilantro.

That extra flavor really lifts this dish.

- Mm.

Well, you were right about the lime juice.

That is really fresh.

This is really good, I mean, it's totally different than a traditional Indian curry.

- Mm-hm.

- But I think because it has lemongrass, it has big flavors-- ginger, fish sauce... - It all starts right from the get-go, so this dish couldn't be simpler.

And yet it still brings so much complex flavor to the game.

It, you taste each and every spice that's in there.

- So if you want an easy curry you can make in 30 minutes, with all the big, bold flavors, it's a Vietnamese chicken curry.

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

This is superb.

- Thank you very much, Chris.

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- Funding for this series was provided by the following.

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Our U.S.-based customer service team can help find a plan that fits you.

To learn more, visit ConsumerCellular.tv.

♪ ♪ - 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.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪