A popular street food among school children in Vietnam is bánh tráng nướng. It consists of slightly crispy rice paper crackers with all sorts of delicious toppings.
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 emmymade | 2022-01-21 01:00:09 |  248,991 Views |
Crispy Vietnamese pizza in 5 minutes 🇻🇳 Bánh Tráng Nướng
“Some foods are just specific to the street vendors in a certain place and you have to respect that” says Andrea Nguyen the James Beard Award-winning cookbook author. She’s talking about bánh tráng nướng a grilled round rice paper wrapped in egg-and-meat sauce and crunchy toppings. The snacks are most popular among schoolchildren and are sold by vendors who usually park their small carts outside schools with a stack of small brightly colored plastic chairs. “It’s like junk food for kids; adults don’t really eat it” Nguyen says laughing. “That didn’t stop me from doing it though.”
At Nguyen’s favorite Ho Chi Minh City stall the bánh tráng nướng starts with the standard swirl of scallion oil. It’s then garnished with a freshly cracked quail’s egg as a binding agent often followed by a medley of processed foods to appeal to younger customers; some vendors opt for Vienna sausages or even potato chips but at this stall the topping of choice is canned fried potatoes. “I haven’t seen those in years!” Nguyen says with delight. Finally a generous squeeze of sauce – a thick brown sauce made from beef jerky juices though others add a dash of mayonnaise. Freshly grilled over a charcoal fire these “sweet fatty salty hits” are particularly kid-friendly and offer an interesting glimpse into the increasingly global tastes of Vietnamese youth.
After making several excellent versions in Ho Chi Minh City and Da Nang Nguyen tried to recreate the dish at home in California. It didn’t go well. “Even when I tried to make it with my favorite brand of [rice paper] or even brown rice paper it would stick like a charm or warp or sometimes burn.” After further research she discovered that the rice paper sheets sold in the U.S. are made primarily from tapioca flour not rice. “So you have a reversal where there’s more tapioca than rice” Nguyen says. “Some ‘rice papers’ are actually 100 percent tapioca!” As a result instead of crisping up like rice papers made from actual rice tapioca-based rice papers tend to melt and struggle to hold the necessary structure and shape to support toppings. “It’s like chewing on plastic stuck to your teeth” she says.
