Good Sandwich, Vietnam!

Similar to the Chilean ham and cheese sandwich that we’re also covering this month, the Bánh Mì is a culinary Frankenstein, a hybrid of a country’s local flavors with the techniques of a colonizing power. This time though, we’re talking about Vietnam and France, respectively. We’re also talking about a sandwich that has far more English-language coverage than I was able to find for the Barros Jarpa. Bánh Mì shops may not be universal enough yet that you’ll see them on every corner in every town, but to apply a standard tongue-in-cheek middle-America reference to it: will it play in Peoria? There does appear to be a Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant there–no bánh mì on the menu at the moment but it seems like they’re within reach, right?

I never had a bánh mì until sometime after we moved to Chicago in 2006. Chicago has a decent-sized Vietnamese population, and while all the bánh mì shops in town used to be clustered within a block or two of Argyle and Broadway, in recent years they’ve spread to other neighborhoods, even downtown, and there’s at least one bánh mì shop we’ve found not too far from us in the south suburbs (though it may be closed now–sad). It’s super easy for me to get a bánh mì these days, and while it feels weird to pay downtown prices for one when you’re used to getting them for about half as much, traveling to Uptown for a sandwich at lunch is generally not doable for us cubicle drones.

Since the move, I’ve become a bit of a bánh mì evangelist, raving about them online and occasionally springing them on friends and relatives when they come to visit. We even make them at home from time to time, and if you’ve read many of my posts on this site you probably know what’s coming next.

Bánh mì are served in small Vietnamese baguettes, which in my experience are a bit lighter and slightly less crusty than their French counterparts. Generally, the sandwich will be dressed with mayonnaise (often a slightly different Vietnamese take on the standard mayo), pickled carrots and daikon radish, cucumbers, sliced fresh jalapeno peppers and cilantro (both leaves & stems).

The classic bánh mì filling is usually a combination of head cheese, ham, and pate, and since this is probably the most common (and usually the least expensive) combination for a bánh mì sandwich I decided to focus on those ingredients. Vietnamese head cheese, in my experience, is stiffer, more cartilaginous than European head cheeses, with a more pronounced garlic flavor, but essentially head cheese is head cheese. It’s meat jello. Vietnamese ham is similar in texture, stiff, while the flavor is much like any standard boiled Polish ham. The pâté is sometimes sliced, sometimes spread on the bread, and can be a major presence in the sandwich or a grace note depending on the proportion.

To recalibrate my palate for this post, I started by buying one of those downtown bánh mì, the Classic from Saigon Sisters in the French Market. Saigon Sisters’ version contains “Vietnamese pork, American ham, French country pâté, mayo.”

Saigon Sisters’ sandwich was fine. If I were to make a complaint about it, I could say that the fillings were unevenly distributed; one end was relatively devoid of filling, and thus a bit dry, while the veggies were all bunched up in the middle. I also did not detect any pate. I don’t want to nitpick though, it was pretty cheap for a downtown lunch and I appreciated it for what it is. I felt like I could do better though.

Making a great bánh mì–a great sandwich–at home means starting with great bread. My go-to bread for these sandwiches comes from a Vietnamese bakery in my old neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, Nhu Lan Bakery, so I used an afternoon errand-running session as an excuse to get back up there and buy some demibaguettes. Of course, while I was there, it would have been silly not to buy some sandwiches as well.

My favorite sandwich at Nhu Lan is their Lemongrass Tofu bánh mì (#10), a completely vegan and utterly delicious option that occasionally makes me think maybe I could survive another experiment with vegetarianism. The tofu is dark from the marinade, well-textured and surprisingly savory, with a flavor built on soy sauce, five spice, and sesame as much as it is on lemongrass. It’s a combination of flavors that melds very well with the mildly sweet, salty and acidic flavors of the pickled vegetables, and is quintessentially Vietnamese, with only the bread to remind one of the French influence.

I couldn’t pass it up, but I also picked up their Original (#8), which is the classic ham, head cheese and pâté combo. I was on the run when I grabbed these sandwiches without time to sit down somewhere and eat them at leisure. Nhu Lan doesn’t really have much of a seating area anyway–there is a nearby park I’ve used previously, but I couldn’t afford the time, so these glamor shots were taken on the passenger seat of my car, snuck in at various stoplights while headed down Western Avenue.

I enjoyed these sandwiches more than the Saigon Sisters version. This is likely due to a range of factors, from the great bread Nhu Lan bakes in house daily, to a simple fondness for this familiar flavor of an old favorite haunt. I think part of it was also because of the coarser julienned slices of carrot and daikon, as opposed to the finer shred you can see in this cross section photo of the Saigon Sisters sandwich.

Flavorwise there might not be much of a difference but texturally, they’re worlds apart. The thicker cut vegetables provide a nice crunch that vitalizes the center of the sandwich, making them as much of a player as the pile of meats. Also, the Nhu Lan version included cucumber, adding a mild but appreciated extra bit of flavor and textural appeal, while the Saigon Sisters sandwich did not.

So for my sandwich, in addition to using the great Nhu Lan bread, the ham, head cheese and pâté, I wanted to use a thicker cut for my daikon and carrots and include a decent cucumber presence. Most of these vegetables are easy to find, and I was able to pick up a daikon radish at my local Indian market.

While the daikon was a breeze to slice, julienning carrots by hand is a pain. Consider a decent mandoline to be on my Christmas wish list. The carrots and daikon went into a dish with a solution of warm water, pickling salt, brown sugar, and rice vinegar and sat for 5-6 hours before I used them. PROTIP: they were even better the next day. The cucumbers were simply sliced into long narrow sections and lightly salted, then refrigerated. The jalapenos and cilantro could wait until I was ready to assemble a sandwich.

Nhu Lan will sometimes have sections of their head cheese for sale in their cooler but there wasn’t any available on my visit. Maybe I should have made my own but my luck with homemade head cheese has not been the best, and as I said, it’s all meat jello anyway. I bought some Scott Petersen brand head cheese to use, and some cheap Polish-style boiled ham. That just left the pâté. I did a quick Google search and found this page with recipes for both the pâté and the mayo that looked good. I don’t have a terrine mold, so I used 3 cheap mini loaf pans instead. For the “whiskey or cognac” I went with what I had on hand, which turned out to be an embarrassingly cheap bourbon that I’m not going to name at this time. (Fine. It was Rebel Yell.) The pâté turned out great, sliceable and/or spreadable, less smooth than I wanted (let’s call it “rustic”) but with a terrific and not overwhelmingly livery flavor.

I would advise that you use fish sauce in that mayonnaise recipe carefully though. The brand I have at home is Tiparos, and while it’s pretty good for the price, it is very salty. The mayonnaise was definitely intense, and I ended up cutting it with another egg and some more oil to try to reduce its saltiness. It’s good, but this recipe makes a lot of mayonnaise, and I have tons left over. I can see deviled eggs and tuna salad in my future. Not such a terrible future at that.

It helps, when I’m making enough pâté and pickles and mayonnaise to fill a dozen sandwiches or more, that I have a family at home who also like to eat occasionally, and we ended up having bánh mì for dinner. My 16yo son was the only one who went the full monty with his sandwich, making it exactly like I had mine. His only comment was, “We must be the weirdest family in town.” In his defense, the only sandwich our town is known for consists of a 1.5″ thick pork chop sitting on a piece of Texas toast, so bánh mì probably would seem pretty exotic to our neighbors. Mindy, my wife, made hers with standard mayo instead of my homemade version, and skipped the pâté, head cheese, and chilis. The 14yo skipped the pâté and chilis but tried the head cheese after I explained to him what it was, and liked it. This surprised us, as he’s not much of an adventurous eater, but he put it in his sandwich and really seemed to enjoy it. The 7yo had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead, surprising nobody.

Mine was a really good sandwich, but balanced way more toward the meat than the typical bánh mì. I figured I could correct that by using more daikon and carrot, and the next morning I made one again.

I wanted to ensure consistent coverage and not end up with a dry heel at one end of the sandwich, so I made sure to go wall-to-wall with each ingredient, starting with the mayonnaise.

Then the head cheese and pâté

Then the ham, carrots, daikon, and cucumber

And finally the jalapenos and cilantro

I wrapped it in parchment paper and tried to tape it shut. Those sandwich guys make it look so easy! But they’re using different paper and/or tape, as I quickly learned that scotch tape will not stick to parchment paper. I had to wrap the tape all the way around the sandwich and halfway around again so it would stick to itself instead. I took the sandwich to work with me, where it spent the morning getting all warm and squishy in my backpack. Here is a cross section of the resulting sandwich at lunchtime:

It held up surprisingly well, and while the bread did have time to absorb not only some of the mayo & pâté but also some of the brine from the daikon/carrot mixture, that just made the bread more delicious. It was still a bit too meat-heavy overall though. I’ll need to find a way to get the bread coverage I want without overwhelming the sandwich. Still, I liked it better than the Saigon Sisters and probably just about as well as the Original from Nhu Lan. (Not the Lemongrass Tofu though. That sandwich is damn near unbeatable.)

Maybe the empty bread at the ends is the price you have to pay to make a well-balanced sandwich. I don’t think so though. I may have run out of time for this post, but it’s not over. Some day, the tastiest bánh mì will be mine.