Text 16720, 107 rader
Skriven 2011-10-18 12:55:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av MICHAEL LOO
Ärende: road trip
=================
-=> Quoting Michael Loo to Jim Weller <=-

 ML> a mug of suds and a gallon jug of pig's feet in front of you
 ML> and a blonde, make that a brunette, at your side.

A brunette who is sometimes a redhead.

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     Title: Using Green Crabs For Bun Rieu Cua -Viet Noodle Soup
Categories: Vietnamese, Crab, Soups, Info
  Servings: 4

           green crabs

When I told Andrea Nguyen about our European Green Crabs, she
encouraged me to use them to make Bun Rieu Cua, a traditional
Vietnamese noodle soup dish that's made with freshwater paddy crabs.
Bun Rieu is one of those soups that is best made in quantity, made
for a group, and made only on weekends when there's enough time for
all the fiddling around that's required.  There's a lot of fiddling
with Bun Rieu.

By way of background, Bun Rieu is not a specific dish, but a
category of soups that typically features a rich broth, some seafood
and/or seafood pastes, cubes of fried tofu, annatto seeds. water
spinach leaves and stems, banana blossom, lots of herbs, bean
sprouts, tomatoes, and often congealed pig's blood.  The seafoods
are typically mixed with ground pork, egg, and seasonings and added
to the soup either as a firm cake or as a loose fluffy mess that
takes on the appearance of egg drop soup.

Bun Rieu Ca means the starring protein is fish, Bun Rieu Cua means
crab, Bun Rieu Oc means snails.

I rarely make it because the best-tasting versions are prohibitively
expensive and require lots of fresh crab, and lots of prep work in
the kitchen.  I dislike the cheaper/easier versions that rely too
much on processed/canned crab pastes and shrimp pastes, and few
guests I might serve it to think highly of pig's blood or banana
blossoms.

To make Bun Rieu Cua as if you are living next to a rice paddy in
the Mekong Delta, you'd put a bunch of live freshwater crabs into a
giant mortar and start beating them to a pulp with a giant pestle.
When the crabs are pretty well busted up, you'd separate by hand
whatever flesh you could divide from the shells, and reserve that
for the soup.  Then you'd pound the shells and any bits of flesh
still clinging to them into as fine a paste as you can manage.  That
paste then gets mixed with boiling water and strained to produce a
broth.

I don't believe anyone in the US does that, and folks just use
VIetnamese style pork broth or chicken broth for the soup, or
(sadly) they use cans of College Inn chicken broth. Occasionally
one finds a Viet who went to a culinary institute and uses
commercially prepared crab base, which is definitely a step up.

And because fresh/pasteurized crab meat is expensive, most Viets
here use too little of it, or they use canned crab meat.  And canned
crab meat in this soup is just such a total fail, it's so
antithetical to the whole idea of Vietnamese cooking.  It's akin to
using canned chicken meat in a chicken soup, why would one go to all
that time and expense and effort and then put canned crab into the
soup?

I'm not willing to pound live crabs into a paste, I'm not willing to
pick through a pile of mashed crab trying to sort out shell from
flesh.  Even Andrea told me to skip the mortar & pestle bit and go
straight to a blender.  So, I'm more than happy to use the green
crabs to produce a very authentic, very intensely-flavored crab
broth.  And then add fresh/pasteurized blue crab meat.

Here is a reasonable Bun Rieu Cua recipe from the Ravenous Couple,
and it resembles what most folks might make at home.

www.theravenouscouple.com/2010/01/bun-rieu-cua-crab-noodle-soup.html

The recipe also has some photographs showing how the hollow water
spinach stems are split; they pull themselves into curls entirely on
their own.  That same little tool can also be used for splitting
scallions.

Their recipe omits congealed pig's blood, cut into cubes, which I
think is fine.  I've no real idea why there's congealed pig's blood
in Bun Rieu, it's not a natural or obvious fit to the soup.  And
they omit banana blossom, which one would only use if feeding a very
large group.  Banana blossoms are huge, and a bowl of soup requires
only a bit of very thinly sliced blossom.  (And FYI, banana blossom
adds nothing to the soup that justifies the expense or all the
effort in preparing it...)


  From: Simon Bao                       
 
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Cheers

YK Jim


... Believe the road goes on forever and the party never ends

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