Hue Cuisine - flour-based dishes

Hue traditional food has a wide range of steamed and fried flour-based meals with savoury fillings. Here are three examples, but there are many more varieties.

Banh Beo (steamed ‘fern-shaped’ cake)
Rice flour is mixed with water, salt and fat and cooked for several minutes. During this stage, the chef has to stir the rice flour continuously to prevent it from sticking together. The rice flour is then poured into round wooden moulds or small round cups and steamed for fifteen to twenty minutes. Finally, the chef sprinkles a filling made from pounded shrimps fried with fat and dried onion mixed with salt, pepper and monosodium-glutamate on the surface of pieces of steamed rice flour. Banh beo sauce is a mixture of garlic, capsicum, and fish sauce.Banh Khoai (plain rice flan)
This is also made from rice flour. First, the flour is mixed with cold water, salt, and sugar. When the moulds get hot enough, the chef coats them with fat, then pours in rice flour. The filling, a combination of fried shrimps, lean meat and mushrooms, is added and the ‘cakes’ are steamed. When they’re cooked, the chef adds bean sprouts, covers them with a thin coat of egg yolk, and continues to steam. After several minutes, he folds the cakes in two and flips them over so that they are grilled crisply both two sides. Banh khoai is eaten with fresh vegetables such as fig, unripe bananas, mint, etc., and dipped in a sauce made of ground liver, soybean jam, peanuts, and sesame, and condiments such as salt, capsicum, garlic and sugar.

Banh Loc
The major material for making this kind of cake is kudzu powder. It's a finely ground flour derived from starchy root of the kudzu vine, a leguminous plant originating in China.

The chef mixes kudzu power with boiled water and then squeezes and presses until it’s well-kneaded. After that, he divides the dough into small balls and kneads the balls into thin, round pancakes.

Next, the filling is added to the kudzu pancakes, typically shrimp and fat meat simmered with fish sauce, seasoning, onions, capsicum and sugar. They are then folded to form two semicircular shaped ‘cakes’. These are boiled for fifteen to twenty minutes until they become transparent.

To eat banh loc, you dip it into a sauce made from fish sauce, lemon, chillies, sugar, and other ingredients.