These Vietnamese breakfast treats, from our class at the Morning Glory Cooking School in Vietnam, are very different from my usual breakfast choices, but definitely worth trying…

Bánh Bèo Chén / Steamed Rice-Flour Bowl

Slurpy little rice bowls that can contain an orange shrimp paste sprinkled with crispy pork rinds.

Banh Canh / Crispy Baby Pancake

Crispy fried ‘nests’ filled with a soft gooey pork, and served with a salad and dipping sauce.
Cooking the crispy rice ‘bowls’ in a special pan.

Xoi / Sticky Rice

Sticky savoury rice flavoured with orangy gac (a red fruit), dark purply black beans, white creamy coconut, and yellowy Mung beans, all of them topped with crushed peanuts.  I’m not a big fan of rice in general, it’s too bland and the two bean-flavoured rices weren’t much of an improvement. But the coconut cream rice was yummy and the gac rice was nutty and such a pretty colour! I googled ‘gac, red fruit’ and found that it was this really strange-looking fruit that I had taken several photos of in the Mekong Delta, and that it was of the new super foods that no one has ever heard of. Here’s the ‘Gac’ post.

Tapioca Flour Dumplings

Two different tapioca flour dumplings, which I’m afraid to say were bland and not too impressive. I originally supposed that the whitish ones were filled with potato and the orangy ones with sweet potato but it turned out they were actually filled with mung bean paste (white) and shrimp paste (orange). I was way off! The interesting topping, well worth repeating on other dishes, was made of crispy fried brown shallots and green onions.

Frozen Yogurt with Coconut Seaweed Jelly

The flavour of this ‘seaweed’ jelly was dominantly sweet with only a hint of coconut. However, the jelly had a wonderful texture; melt-in-your-mouth as opposed to rubbery. The yogurt was too frozen to actually taste…

Banh Bot Chien / Fried Rice Flour ‘Cake’

These little ‘cakes’ are fried until crispy and then an egg mixture is added to bind the squares together. Add soy sauce and chile garlic sauce, and a small salad and you have a breakfast made in heaven!

Hoi An Broken Rice with Pork Chop / Com Tam Suon Nuong

The ‘ broken rice’ is the least significant part of this breakfast by my standards; it’s the bit underneath all the rest of the food. The rest of the food consists of a slightly breaded and sesamed pork chop, a salad, an omelette and a dipping sauce. I only had room for the omelette, and can report that it was superb, and full of goodies, but I have no idea exactly what.

Vietnamese Citrus Drinks

Our Vietnamese breakfast was accompanied by a few different citrus drinks. The ‘lemon iced’ tea is pretty similar to home-made lemon iced tea at home, the ‘kumquats and lime juice’ is tart and refreshing whereas the ‘preserved lemon juice’ is sweetish and kind of weird, with a tangy finish.