Wanderlust Cookbook Challenge: Round 2
Five members of the Wanderlust team have trawled through this season’s offering of cookbooks and road-tested them too – so you know which ones will make the ideal Christmas gift
Note: Recipes at end of the article
1. VIETNAM
Chargrilled Hmong black pig skewers with sesame salt
The Food of Vietnam by Luke Nguyen (£30)
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Ingredients: The Hmong Black Pig pork neck suggested proved a bit too tricky to source – not being available more than a couple of hundred k’s from Sapa – but a pack of diced pork from the Waitrose Essential range proved a tasty and affordable alternative. Everything else on the menu was readily available at my local supermarket.
Prep and cooking times: Preparation was a cinch. I’d barley had time to listen to one track of traditional Vietnamese Dan Bau music – put on to create a suitably Indochina vibe in my distinctly English kitchen – before the skewers of pork were luxuriating in the marinade.
Instructions: So simple my nine-year-old daughter could do it. In fact, she did – while I enjoyed a bottle of 333 and tried to find a Dan Bau track that was listenable.
Final dish: Having never eaten Hmong Black Pig, I can’t really say whether the dish suffered without it. I suspect that the key to this dish is the sweet and sour marinade and it’s interplay with the sesame seed salt. It got a big thumbs up from everyone in our house. And, give or take a banana leaf or two, it looked just like the picture.
Peter Moore
