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A good bánh mì is mostly assembly. The bread should be light and crackly, the pâté smeared on thickly, the mayo generous, the meat layered cold and the herbs and pickles loaded right to the edges. A short blast in a hot oven is what crisps the loaf; the filling goes in straight after. Eat standing up over the sink.
This showstopper from western Chinese cooking combines spices and sauces in a signature style. Deep-fried spareribs are braised until tender, then finished in the oven with a glossy, spicy coating. The combination of chilli bean sauce, hoisin, and yellow beans creates a complex, savoury flavour profile characteristic of the region. The spareribs can be finished in the oven, under a grill, or on a barbecue.
These ribs are comfort food at its best and a moreish way to start a delicious Thai meal. I like to serve them with nam jim jaew or sweet chilli sauce.
Fresh egg noodles tossed in a glossy, sweet-savoury sauce of kecap manis, soy, ketchup, sesame oil and shrimp paste, with pork, prawns, cabbage and bean sprouts. The dish is finished with thin egg ribbons and a scatter of spring onion. Quick to cook once the components are prepped, but rewards a properly hot wok and a sauce mixed in advance.
A hot-water dough - flour mixed with water (just-boiled) - for a tender, slightly stretchy wrapper that doesn't dry out. The filling is the classic family recipe: minced pork and finely chopped Chinese chives bound with soy, sesame oil, ginger and shaoxing wine. Each dumpling rolled thin, filled with a generous teaspoon, pleated along one edge, sealed and shaped. Boiled in batches, with the "three-cup" trick of adding cold water between waves to stop the wrappers blistering. Served with a sharp black vinegar and chilli dipping sauce.
A filling of minced pork and chopped prawn binds with coriander root (pounded with garlic and white pepper into the traditional Thai "rak pak chee" paste), oyster sauce, soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, and a beaten egg. The mixture chills for 20 minutes to firm. Square wonton wrappers go around the filling cupcake-style: filling in the centre, edges pulled up and pleated open around the meat, top brushed with a tiny smear of beaten egg and topped with a thin slice of carrot. Steamed in a bamboo basket over boiling water for 8 minutes. Dip is black soy sauce with sliced chilli and rice vinegar.
Dried shrimp and dried shiitake soak in warm water until plump; the soaking water is reserved. Chinese sausage dices fine; shallots, soaked shrimp and shiitake chop separately. All these flavourings fry together in oil until aromatic. Grated daikon is added with the shiitake-shrimp soaking liquid; cooked for 10 minutes covered until softened. Rice flour whisks with cold water into a smooth slurry; pours into the daikon mixture; cooks for 2 minutes, stirring, until thickened into a batter. Tipped into a greased loaf tin; smoothed; steamed for 60 minutes in a wide pot. Cooled fully, refrigerated, then sliced 1 cm thick and pan-fried in oil until crusted gold on both sides. Served with chilli oil and a dipping sauce of light soy and rice vinegar.
A pork-mince filling with carrot, onion, garlic, soy and pepper rolls tightly into thin spring-roll wrappers, finger-sized. Deep-fries golden in 4 minutes. The wrappers are key, Filipino lumpia wrappers are thinner than Chinese spring-roll skins and crisp differently.
Ganguo, literally "dry pot", is the dry sister of hotpot. Where hotpot is a communal soup simmered at the table, dry pot is a wok composition: each ingredient pre-cooked separately, then everything tossed together at the last moment in a fragrant mala sauce based on Pixian doubanjiang, fermented black beans and chilli oil. The result lands somewhere between a stir-fry, a casserole and a giant heap of bar snacks. The dish is usually credited to Chongqing in the 1990s and exploded into nationwide popularity in the 2000s; it now anchors the menu of countless ganguo restaurants where you point at ingredients on a fridge and they appear minutes later in a single-handled wok at your table. Difficulty for a home cook is low if you accept the rhythm: blanch the vegetables, sear the proteins, then build the final dish from already-cooked components. The trick is restraint with the sauce, generous heat under the wok, and the willingness to commit to a long ingredient list. The recipe is endlessly flexible: lotus root, potato, cauliflower, mushrooms, squid, chicken wings, beef, fish balls, tofu skin, whatever you have, in any combination, totalling 1-1 ½ kg.
Silken tofu cubes are blanched briefly in salted water (firms slightly and seasons). Pork mince is fried hard in oil; doubanjiang and douchi join, cooking to release oil; garlic, ginger, chilli flakes and ground Sichuan peppercorn are toasted briefly. Stock is poured in; tofu is slipped in; gentle simmer for 5 minutes; cornflour slurry thickens. Spring onions and a final dusting of ground Sichuan peppercorn finish.
Chilli con carne is a hearty, flavour-packed stew that celebrates bold Mexican spicing combined with slow-cooked beef, beans, and tomatoes. This version builds deep, complex flavours through toasted whole spices, umami ingredients (marmite and soy sauce), and slow simmering. The result is a comforting, warming dish that improves with time and is perfect for feeding a crowd.
A Bhutanese pork belly braise that leans Sichuanese on the spice rack, the Himalayan border showing in the dish. You cut pork belly into thumb-length strips and start it on its own in a heavy pot to render the fat and brown the meat properly, the rendered juices becoming the cooking fat for everything that follows. Then in go whole dried red chillies, daikon cut into chunks, ginger, garlic, a measure of soy and a generous spoon of Sichuan pepper, and the lot braises gently in the pork's own rendered juices until the radish has gone soft and the sauce has thickened into a glossy red-brown lacquer that coats the pork. The whole chillies sit in the pot still intact, and the cook at the table can choose to eat them or push them to one side. Eaten with red Bhutanese rice, the broth ladled over.
Made popular by Chinese restaurants and takeaways, these are another menu item that have been adapted to have a subtle Thai flavour. You need to plan ahead as the filling must be cold (or room temperature) before rolling your spring rolls. To make these vegetarian, simply leave out the meat.
A pork mince filling spiked with garlic, ginger, soy, sesame oil and finely chopped cabbage is wrapped in shop-bought gyoza skins, then pan-fried on the flat bottom and finished by steaming with a splash of water in the lidded pan. Serve with a soy-rice-vinegar-chilli oil dip.
This classic Thai dish of noodles is both aromatic and lightly spicy, serving well as either a main course or a starter. Pad Thai combines stir-fried rice noodles with tender chicken, pork, and prawns in a balanced sauce of curry paste, oyster sauce, and fish sauce. Fresh herbs, crushed peanuts, and a squeeze of lime complete this iconic Thai street food favourite.
Roujiamo is often, lazily, called the Chinese hamburger, but it is older than the burger by perhaps a thousand years and structurally quite different. The bread is a flat, lightly leavened, sometimes laminated wheat round, with the layered Tongguan style (flaky and croissant-like) considered superior to the softer baijimo. The filling is rich braised pork, shoulder or belly, simmered with rock sugar, soy and warming spice until it shreds under a knife, then chopped fine on a board with raw onion and cilantro and a spoonful of its own dark cooking liquid. The whole assembly is then crammed inside the freshly fried-and-baked bun while everything is still hot. Roujiamo is a quintessentially Xi'an dish, the product of a city that for centuries sat at the eastern terminus of the Silk Road; the bread tradition comes from the Hui and Uyghur Muslim communities of the northwest, while the braised pork belongs to the Han Chinese kitchen. Difficulty for a home cook is moderate to high, the lamination of the bread takes practice, and there are multiple components on timed tracks, but the result is one of the great street foods of China, and the buns and meat can both be made ahead.