Canh chua cá

Name: Canh chua cá
Total time: 40 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Vietnamese (Mekong Delta / South)
Ingredients: 600 g Firm fish steaks (catfish, snakehead or basa); 50 g Tamarind pulp; 200 g Pineapple, cut into thin wedges; 2 Tomatoes, cut into wedges; 150 g Okra, sliced on the diagonal; 200 g Elephant ear stem (bạc hà), peeled and sliced; 150 g Bean sprouts; 3 tbsp Fish sauce (nước mắm); 2 tbsp Sugar; 4 cloves Garlic, sliced; 1 handful Rice paddy herb (rau om); 6 leaves Sawtooth herb (ngò gai), shredded; 2 Bird's eye chilli, sliced

Canh nấu me chua dịu với dứa, cà chua, đậu bắp và bạc hà, thả cá vào cuối cùng, rắc rau om và ngò gai — vị của miền Tây.

Nguồn

Công thức của Southern Vietnamese home kitchens · 🏺 Truyền thống · Saigon and Mekong Delta home cooking — sweeter, coconut-led, served with herbs by the armful

Southern Vietnamese home cooking · Mekong Delta — An ownerless home dish with no documented creator. The reference confirms the name meaning sour soup, the origin in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam with central variations, the sourness coming from tamarind steeped in hot water and strained, the pineapple, tomato, bean sprouts, okra and elephant ear stems, the use of Mekong river fish including snakehead and catfish, and the finish of caramelised garlic, scallions and herbs. One correction this book makes deliberately: some sources conflate the names of the two finishing herbs, so they are given here by their Vietnamese names only — rau om (rice paddy herb) and ngò gai (sawtooth coriander) — without botanical claims. Quantities are ordinary home proportions.

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Alissa Nguyen Helen's Recipes (Vietnamese Food)Ang Cooks

⏱ 40 phút🍽 4 khẩu phần🔥 260 kcal🇻🇳 Việt Nam🌶️

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Các bước

Steep the tamarind in hot water for 10 minutes, squeeze it out with your fingers and strain. Bring 1.5 litres of water to the boil with the tamarind liquid, fish sauce and sugar.
Add the pineapple and tomato and simmer 5 minutes. Taste now: the broth should already be clearly sour with a sweetness behind it. Correct it before the fish goes anywhere near the pot.
💡 Fix the balance early. Once the fish is in you cannot stir hard or boil vigorously to dissolve anything without breaking it up.
Slide in the fish and let it poach at a bare simmer for 5 to 6 minutes, until it just turns opaque. Do not stir — nudge the pot instead if you need to move things.
Add the okra, elephant ear stem and bean sprouts and give them 2 minutes only. They should still have snap — the vegetables here are texture, not softness.
💡 Bean sprouts go in with the heat off if you like them raw-crisp. Thirty seconds is the difference between crunch and limp.
Fry the sliced garlic in 2 tbsp oil until golden — 30 seconds, no more — and pour it over the pot, oil included. Throw in the rau om, ngò gai and chilli, and take it off the heat straight away.
💡 Garlic goes from golden to burnt in about five seconds. Have the pan off the heat and moving the moment it colours.
Serve it hot with plain steamed rice and a small dish of fish sauce with chilli for dipping the fish into. It is a soup to eat with rice, not before it.

💡 Mẹo

Cooked entirely without the fish, using vegetable stock and salt in place of the fish sauce, this becomes a fine vegan soup — the tamarind, pineapple and herbs are doing most of the work anyway.
Sourness is the whole identity of the dish. If it tastes flat, add tamarind, not salt.
Prawns instead of fish work well and cut the cooking time to almost nothing — add them at the very end and pull the pot as soon as they curl.