Today’s Sunday Special dispatch is short because the real meat of what I have for you is elsewhere.
First, although I’m not one to praise Whole Foods much, I did notice at my local store that there’s still Lunar New Year signage for “fortune foods” like whole fish at the seafood counter. The store is still running sales on Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese condiments — soy sauce, gochujang, and fish sauce, for instance. So, in the spirit of continuing the party, at my website, I assembled 25 recipes to help you further usher in the Year of the Fire Horse. Extend the holiday because that’s what Asian people traditionally do!
If you have a Vietnamese banh chung and don’t know what to do with it, I’ve got you covered with a primer and video! Ditto on pickles, noodles, sweets, and other foods to go along with the must-have Tet sticky rice cake (below, top left and center). Or if you just want to cook up a pan-Asian feast to celebrate the new year, the recipes will give you plenty of options. Head to 25 Recipes for Pan-Asian Lunar New Year Menus.
Second, I created a PTFS recipe index for you to more easily explore and find what you need. The index is one of my 2026 ,Year of the Horse goals!
The index includes all the exclusive PTFS recipes for paid subscribers as well as ones that are available for everyone. Since this newsletter started in September 2022, it has fostered a collection of about 150 recipes — the size of two modest cookbooks or one big one!
None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for your enthusiasm for Asian cuisines and cultures and my approach to them. Thank you! In particular, we wouldn’t have this robust, hardworking collection of recipes and audiovisual how-tos without paid subscribers pitching in. Seriously.
Before this newsletter, I thought my food writing career meant I had to deeply bow to the SEO algorithm gods in perpetuity. Pass the Fish Sauce liberated me and I thank you all for your kindness.
Now head over to the NEW RECIPE INDEX and start looking and cooking around.
Hey there, if you’d like to check out the newsletter recipe archive via an index, you’re at the right place. This listing of over 150 recipes covers the first three years of the newsletter from its inception in late 2022. You’ll find PTFS exclusives and free recipes in the newsletter and on my website.
The recipes are grouped in broad categories but are not listed in alphabetical order within the categories. I’ve done my best to cross list them but this is not a professionally done index.
How to use this index
You have 3 basic options: Browse the entire list from top to bottom, use the search function on your computer (⌘ + F on a Mac; Ctrl + F on a PC) to look for specific terms, or click on a link below to jump to particular categories.
Welcome to the first day of the New Year of the Fire Horse! May the next twelve months shower you with blessings such as excellent health, life satisfaction, and abundant prosperity.
I made a special e-greeting for you and the Viet words say:
Chúc Mừng Năm Mới (say “Chook Moong Nahm Moy”) = Happy New Year
There are many great things about Lunar New Year but for me, the most important one is the idea that the holiday is not just one day. It’s more like a festival that lasts many days, weeks, or even a month, depending on how you want to celebrate. In Vietnam, people slow down for for at least a week to ăn Tết (literally “eat the New Year”) because at the center of the celebration is food. People work so hard during the rest of the year that they go home to visit family for rest, relaxation and special food.
Even though the Year of the Horse officially starts on Tuesday, February 17, you can get into the Lunar New Year spirit for weeks! There’s no need to rush. Just learn how to say Chúc Mừng Năm Mới (pronounced “Chook Moong Nahm Moy”) and repeat it to any Viet people you run into during the Tết season to make us extra joyous.
I’m at my mom’s house now for Tet and she’s asked if we were going to have Mandarin pancakes for something. Yup, I brought two stacks that I’d frozen so we can wrap up Chinese roast duck purchased from a barbecue shop and moo shu — a quick stir-fry full of flavors, color, and textures.
If you’ve ordered moo shu (aka mù xī ròu, 木樨肉), at a Chinese restaurant in America, you know that it can be made with different proteins. The dish originated as a simple stir-fry in Shandong, a coastal province in northern China. Shandong is southeast of Beijing and has a peninsula that pokes eastward. When I was studying Mandarin Chinese, a friend joked you can see Korea from the tip of the Shandong peninsula. Stir-fries are a hallmark of Shandong cuisine.
Moo shu usually contains some scrambled egg that are deftly prepared to mimic the delicateness of fragrant sweet osmanthus flowers (Osmanthus fragrans), a symbol of longevity and nobility in Chinese traditions. In the dish’s name, the characters 木樨 (mù xī) refer to the sweet osmanthus. There are folks who say the original characters referred to wood ear mushroom (木耳, mù ěr) which are also in the dish, but in the main, people explain the characters as referring to the flower.
You don’t have to decide. Both egg and mushroom are constants in my moo shu recipes to add harmonious-yet-varied textures and flavors.
Finally, the third character 肉 refers to ròu — meat, which in China and Vietnam, defaults to pork. Traditionally the dish was prepared with pork, egg, earthy bamboo shoot, frilly crunchy black fungus mushroom, and aromatics and simple seasonings. It was a homey stir-fry that people whipped up to eat with rice.
As moo shu was introduced to the U.S. by northern Chinese cooks, the simple stir-fry got wrapped up in Mandarin pancakes and served as an appetizer. That’s to say, moo shu got the Peking duck treatment! When did it happen?
Thanks to a number of women chefs and entrepreneurs in the 1950s and 60s, urban areas on the East Coast had boundary pushing Chinese restaurants. The movers and shakers included noteworthy Chinese restaurant owners like Emily Kwoh and Irene Kuo in New York City and Joyce Chen in Boston.
Kwoh opened Mandarin East and Mandarin House in the 1950s. Below is a vintage menu from Kwoh’s restaurant with “moo sue juo” (for moo shu rou) but without the pancakes — yet. The New York Times eventually credited Kwoh as being one of the first to serve moo shu with pancakes at Mandarin House.
Kuo opened Lichee Tree in Greenwich Village in 1960 and Gingko Tree in 1966. Joyce Chen operated restaurants starting in 1958. They were all likely monitoring one another’s menus. The first cookbook to include moo shu with the pancakes was The Joyce Chen Cookbook, published in 1962.
Kwoh, Kuo and Chen were talented chefs and business people. Kuo and Chen were on national TV, hobnobbed with celebrities, artists and intellectuals, and they were not Cantonese. Chen was born in Beijing and Kwoh and Kuo were from Shanghai. They favored northern Chinese over southern Chinese food. Like Cecilia Chiang in San Francisco in the 1960s, those East Coast Chinese women were looking to push the Chinese food envelope before Nixon set foot in China in the 1970s! (Chiang opened The Mandarin in San Francisco in 1960 or 1961; though she had Shandong cooks, I can’t find early mention of moo shu on her menu.)
This explains why if you go to mainland China and ask for moo shu pork, you’ll likely get a wonderful stir-fry of rich pork, tender eggs, earthy daylily buds or bamboo shoot, crunchy black fungus and perhaps some other vegetables. Mandarin pancakes are not probably going to be on the side for you to wrap up the stir-fry with a smearing of salty-sweet hoisin-ish sauce.
Go vegetarian with the other moo recipe, if you’re not feeling meaty. Yeah, I load mine up with extra raw veggies. Add roast duck or rotisserie chicken and you can have a wrap party! I sometimes add coarsely chopped cilantro for an herby lift.
But if you like moo shu with Mandarin pancakes, know that it’s legit. Kwoh, Kuo and Chen tweaked moo shu for American diners and over time, the dish became redefined and it became a winning idea. Now it’s part of the Chinese-American food experience. Food evolves.
I developed two moo shu stir-fries for you that are fabulous wrapped up in the pancakes or simply eaten with rice. Below you’ll find:
3 recipes + PDF for: Master Moo Shu Recipe Blueprint + Moo Shu Any Meat (feel free to vary the protein!) + Vegetarian Moo Shu (with a vegan option)
Audiovisual aids: 2 videos plus process shots to help you manage potentially tricky moves
Ingredient guidance and swap tips: Explainers are here for those who want to shop at an Asian market and substitutions are suggested if you just want to use more accessible ingredients
You can plate the Vegetarian Moo Shu with the egg mixed in or on the rim. It tastes great both ways. I couldn’t decide. Yes, there’s a vegan tip below for this recipe too. AND, you can just treat this and the Moo Shu Any Meat as a stir-fry to have with rice.
This culinary deep dive and threesome of Moo Shu recipes were sponsored by paid subscribers. Join us to gain access to these recipes and so many other professionally developed recipes. You’ll also seed new content and enjoy other benefits, including my deep appreciation. I value support at all levels.
Politics and economics aside, we’re in an unusual celebratory few weeks right now that’s filled with human physical achievements (the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics — Ilia Malinin! Yuma Kagiyama! ⛸️ 💥), passion (Valentine’s Day 💘), Presidents Day (civic pride, sales, and a long weekend), and Lunar New Year!
I also celebrated a birthday this past Monday. I turned 57. Rory asked what I thought about that and I said — and this is the truth, “I don’t really think about it.” Thankfully, I still have all my original parts and feel better now than I did when I turned 50 and had to endure perimenopause. Things are alright.
Besides, I have my mom as a role model. By her standards, I’m just getting started. Look at the birthday message she sent me. It’s rad. She’s a 91-year-old who didn’t even email until a few years ago.
Instagram reminded me that I had another birthday to celebrate: Vietnamese Food Any Day was released on February 5, 2019. I thought about the book because my friend said she spotted “VFAB” (sic) in the above Instagram post by actress and author Lauren Graham of Gilmore Girls fame. Lauren’s stack of cookbooks also include works by Ina Garten and David Chang. If you have VFAD, you’re in damn good company! Don’t have VFAD yet? Check with a local bookstore, Bookshop.org, the library, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Target.
💎 Winged victories
Some of you already jumped on the spicy ginger-orange chicken wings and reported great success. doubled the recipe and cooked the wings in a Dutch oven! The sauce didn’t reduce enough but they loved the wings so much they’re going to do a redo! A note on doubling recipes — not just when using my recipes. You always want to use a bigger pan if you want the same cook time as the original recipe. If that’s not possible, just expect a longer cook time because you’re dealing with a larger quantity of ingredients.
If you have VFAD, the chicken wings coated with chile garlic sauce on page 47 is outstanding too. AND, don’t forget the fantastic vegan Roasted Cauliflower “Wings” on page 48; one of the editors at America’s Test Kitchen said it’s in her rotation.
💎 Lava cakes for chocolate lovers
Bake a little something special for your honey for Valentine’s Day — a molten lava cake. My recipe is just for two (2) and you can use regular or gluten-free flour. You can bake them in teacups to get the mountainous shape with ease. The batter comes together pretty quickly too. Here’s the lava cake recipe for you!
💎 Mandarin pancakes follow-up
Susan asked about a gluten-free approach to the pancakes. I don’t have one yet because I’ve not tried a GF flour blend on the recipe; that’s where I’d start. The other suggestion I had for Susan was to offer radicchio, endive, or lettuce leaves instead of the Mandarin pancakes. When I did catering gigs in the 1990s, I made a tasty duck appetizer wrapped in radicchio.
Today, I received a great idea: Duy makes the honey-roasted duck legs from my first cookbook, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen, and wraps the result in rice paper. That is a GRRREAT gluten-free solution to wheat mandarin pancakes!
Additionally, in last Sunday’s post, the Mandarin pancake video summary that I shared didn’t have any audio. Where was my brain?! My apologies. I was trying to cram too much in and was tired after a week of intense book proofreading. So, I added audio to the video so you will have a better sense of what the heck I was doing. Here’s the updated video to go with the Mandarin Pancake Mini Class dispatch. (I also just added a Weee! link to the duck that Costco also carries.)
Support Pass the Fish Sauce! Join us as a free or upgrade to a become a paid subscriber to enjoy 125+ professionally developed recipes, seed new content, and get future class discounts. Thanks for your enthusiasm!
💎 Homemade Peking Duck Master Recipe and Plan for Success
What if roast duck shortcuts and hacks are not your jam? Also in response to the Mandarin pancakes and duck feast dispatch, Sunnie asked about roasting a duck from scratch. Sunnie lives in Europe and doesn’t have an Asian barbecue shop or Costco nearby.
To help Sunnie and any of you want to go the full distance, I put together materials for a Homemade Peking Duck Master Recipe. It’s project cooking that results in a very impressive, glorious meal. I’ve roasted Peking duck over a dozen times and even on the first try, it was darn good — crisp skin and tender flesh.
Lunar New Year is a time for fun cooking projects with family and friends. The end result is wonderful food and company. So, to help you make the most of the Mandarin Pancakes you have and will make, I’ll be offering two simple recipes on Sunday to go with those pancakes. Omnivores and vegans will be happy!
This past week, Super Bowl party wings sales led me to making a batch of wings that didn’t require deep-frying. They’re simmered in bold seasonings and end up tender, rich, and kinda sticky and messy-fun to eat — what we want from chicken wings, yes? If you’re a wing person get the Spicy Ginger-Orange Chicken Wings recipe at my website.
My week hasn’t been filled with Super Bowl preparations. I’ve been working with chef Pim to prepare the book to go to print in early March. We’re at proofreading phase two out of three. Cooking Thai is looking great and the early reviews and endorsements are remarkable. Phew.
I’m also gearing up for Lunar New Year. No matter how spent I am, I feel giddy about starting anew. Tuesday, February 17 will usher in the Year of the Horse. My dad was born in the Horse year so welcoming this new lunar cycle also honors and celebrates my father. My mom, siblings and I are going all in.
We’re gearing up for a mini family feast this coming weekend. Mom is already making bánh chưng (“baan choong”) sticky rice cakes, a must-have for Tết (“teht”), Vietnamese Lunar New Year. For my part, I’ve been practicing and planing an easyPeking Duck with Mandarin Pancakes, which is partly why today’s post arrived late. To guide I’ve created a mini Mandarin Pancake class for you in this dispatch!
Here’s a summary of my pancake practice plus the duckylicious payoff — which will soon be yours to enjoy too!
Why Peking duck for Tết?
Viet celebrations often combine Chinese traditions because the two cultures have rubbed shoulders for millennia. Pho was initially made and sold by Viet-Chinese cooks, for instance. Viet language used to be based on Chinese pictographs and there are many shared words. The border continues to be porous.
Plus, my Mom adores Chinese roast duck, especially when it is served with delicate, thin pancakes slathered with salty-sweet sauce and accented by cooling cucumber and pungent green onion. Unlike doughy steamed buns, Mandarin pancakes are not sweet; their delicate texture and flavor harmonizes well with roasted meats and many other dishes. We set out all the fixings and make our own roast duck wraps, like at a fancy Chinese restaurant but better because we can have plenty and the flavors are extra fresh. Along with Viet dishes on the table, the duck makes for a very tasty Tết celebration.
Why Mandarin pancakes for spring?
Mandarin pancakes go by two names. On a macro level, they belong to the Chinese food category of báo bǐng / bóbĭng 薄餅, which covers a myriad of thin wrappers used to encase or hold food. Spring roll and lumpia wrappers, rice paper, tortillas, pizzas, and naan can all fit into this category.
Many people also know Mandarin pancakes as chūn bǐng 春饼 because they’re a food often enjoyed to mark the beginning of spring — lichun 立春 in Mandarin, lập xuân in Vietnamese. The actual dates depend on astronomical moves so celebrating spring, aka celebrating the Lunar New Year, officially lasts weeks. This year, lichun goes from February 3 to 18.
Friends you’ve got time to add this pancake tradition to your repertoire. Actually, once you’ve mastered these pancakes, you can enjoy them year round. I made so many pancakes to write up this mini class for you that I’m going to freeze a bunch. And I know how well they’ll go with other roasted meats, stir-fries and many other foods!
The duck, sauce, and veggies are super easy. I’ve got shortcuts, hacks, and make ahead tips for you! The pancakes do not require any special ingredients or equipment — just a little skill practice.
Some Asian American cooks use flour tortillas as a sub for Mandarin pancakes, and I was going to for this dispatch but honestly, they’re always too thick and never as good as true Mandarin pancakes! I’ve tried Sonora flour tortillas but super thin ones are very hard to find and they’re not fresh. What about frozen? I’ve never enjoyed the taste of frozen doughy foods from overseas. The flour used isn’t as flavorful. I’ve carted back flour from China and was very disappointed.
Mandarin pancakes are a northern Chinese flatbread. You can use them to wrap duck like I do here, or go for quick char siu pork steak or char siu tofu. Stir-fried and sauteed items like chile crisp yuba skin would be glorious in these Mandarin pancakes. Rory even suggested using Mandarin pancakes instead of flour tortillas!
As I’ve worked through this recipe, I’ve noted insights and recorded videos to help you succeed in this too! Below you’ll find a Mandarin Pancake Mini Class containing:
Mandarin Pancakes recipe in text and PDF + 5 videos to guide your progress toward success + my mishaps and flubs to help you troubleshoot and create
3 Shortcut Roast Duck Hacks + a magical Glossy Glaze for that Chinese barbecue shop lacquered-look
Roast Duck Feast with Mandarin Pancakes recipe + an excellent sauce that you may want to double because it’s just that good
Suggestions for swapping out the duck, including going vegan
Ingredient sourcing and prep pointers in case this is unfamiliar territory
That’s a lot of content but I really want you to try this out on your own terms. Add a salad for a complete meal.
Paid subscribers sponsored the wealth of knowledge packed into this dispatch, which involved days of effort. To get all the recipes below — and many, many others in the archives, plus more to come — join us as a paid, premium PTFS subscriber. I welcome your support at all levels. 🙏 🧧 🧨
Hello there! I’ve been gearing up for this for weeks, buying ingredients and thinking through what I wanted to share with you about a delicious and under appreciated fruit. Galloping toward Lunar New Year on February 17 — the Year of the Horse, I’ll be offering menu and cooking ideas for your celebration.
This time of year, people tend to lean into oranges and mandarins but pomelo is wonderfully complex, multidimensional, and fun. When you peel pomelo, the oils release to pleasantly perfume your hands and the air. The pith is plushy and makes a funny sound when you pull it away from the ball of fruit inside. Better yet is when you bite into pomelo’s flesh, you burst its juice sacs to release its mildly acidic, sweet flavor that carries just a hint of bitterness.
Pomelo is wondrous in many more ways than I’ve described, and nowadays, we’re lucky to have access to many kinds. Depending on where you shop, you can find pomelo grown in America, Vietnam, and/or China, for instance.
Three grapefruits atop three pomelos.
A lucky, healthful, royal fruit
The size of a volleyball, pomelos (Citrus maxima) symbolize many good things. They come into season in early autumn so Viet people often associate their big, round appearance with the Moon Festival, a time for gratitude and family reunions — completeness. When Lunar New Year rolls around, pomelo is further a regarded as a harbinger of prosperity. Many people include pomelo as an offering to their ancestors.
In Chinese, pomelo is yòu 柚, which sounds like the word to have 有 as well as the world for protection 佑. Combine all those homonyms and pomelo is win-win fruit. If you gift someone a beautiful pomelo, it’s like you’re presenting them with good luck.
In Vietnam, it’s more than just about homonyms. The Luận Văn pomelo grown in the central province of Thanh Hoa has deep rose colored flesh and skin. Its unique lucky red appearance and tasty flesh made it worthy enough to have been presented to royalty in the past. Nowadays, the Luận Văn pomelo is sold nationwide as the ‘royal tribute pomelo’; during Tet when people clamor for specialty foods, premium perfect pomelo can sell for as much as $10 each, which is pricey for Vietnam.
And, pomelo is pretty nutritious. It’s loaded with Vitamin C, fiber, antioxidants, and it may even help weight loss, fight anti-aging, and promote heart health. All that said, like with grapefruit, pomelo’s phytochemicals can cause some drug interactions so do be careful.
To kickstart 2026, I gifted myself extra healthful luck by buying three pomelo (called bưởi in Vietnamese)! Along with some grapefruit, our dining table has been full of golden-green orbs of citrus. The pomelos I’ve been buying, whether it’s from Whole Foods or a Chinese or Vietnamese market, are big boys — at least 2 pounds (1 kilo) each!
We eat pomelo as fresh fruit but I also make a Vietnamese gỏi bưởi salad. It’s a very special salad worthy of holiday celebrations and dinner parties. It’s easy to prepare and you can prep most of it in advance. However, you have to extract the pomelo flesh from the segments as clusters of juice sacs to allow pomelo to express its best flavors and textures. That’s what makes the salad unique.
Gỏi bưởi is not a salad of chopped or dressed leaves. Much of the prep is done with your finger to pull apart the juice sacs, which are jewel like. Prepping the pomelo requires about 30 minutes, but one pomelo yields enough to serve eigh people, though you could stretch it over the course of a couple days too! To encourage you, I made a how-to video to guide you along!
Made and served with ingredients sourced from Whole Foods, the farmer’s market, and my garden — just to prove that Viet food is doable! No Asian market required. This rendition with shrimp and chicken was dynamite.
Gỏi bưởi (“goy buoy”) used to be hard to prepare well because good pomelos were not available abroad. That has changed so I went to town to prepare the following for your success:
Detailed Vietnamese pomelo salad recipe (+ a downloadable PDF) that allows you to make it with or without meat
Video tips for prepping the pomelo
A pomelo buying guide so you can gauge the pros and cons between different kinds
A nifty quick way to cook shrimp and chicken breast so they’re flavorful and not overcooked (it’s fab for other dishes like shrimp cocktail!)
Pass the Fish Sauce connects cultures in the kitchen and at the table. The content of every dispatch is sponsored by paid subscribers so pitch in to make PTFS even stronger! In addition to this pomelo recipe and know-how, you’ll have access to a wealth of other recipes, tips, and travel information. No paywall will stand between us! Your support makes a big impact. 🙏
I’ve been digesting all the wonderful comments and suggestions you made in the recent subscriber survey and decided that I’m going to cut down from eight (8) to six (6) dispatches per month. My current pace has been hard to keep up with because I want to ensure quality content for you. Plus, it’s a lot for you to receive in your inbox.
This is what to expect:
Midweek Gems will come out twice a month.
Sunday Specials will remain steady. Most Sunday dispatches will be paid subscriber exclusives but there will be an occasional all-access dispatch that’s free for everyone.
Thank you so much for supporting my work at all levels!
These days, it seems as if the world is in a mad tailspin and full of precarity. While I pay attention to the news from sources I trust, I’m also carving out time to do things that ground me and give me hope.
Even in the depths of winter, thinking about and cooking with herbs me as I wait for the start of spring, the season for regrowth and the beginning of the bounty of flavors to come. One of the food ingredients that a number of you have expressed interest in are the herbs used for Vietnamese cooking so I’m going to share some essentials and a new ‘discovery’ with you.
💎 MVP herb for Vietnamese cooking
When my family first came to America, we were relieved there was cilantro at the supermarket. We enjoyed many herbaceous Vietnamese meals with just cilantro. Later on, when Dad started growing mint, we’d add it when there was enough. Otherwise, it was mostly cilantro. Survey Vietnamese recipes written in Vietnamese and English and you’ll see that cilantro comes up more than any other herb. In other words, you’ll go a very long way if you just have nice cilantro, which you can purchase at many markets.
If you regularly shop at a hardcore Vietnamese market, you’ll have access to a wide variety of herbs. However, in winter, the herb pickings are slim and spotty. To this day, I basically rely on cilantro during the colder months to make Viet food sing.
When you buy cilantro, you commit to a bunch of it but a recipe doesn’t need that much. How do you keep cilantro perky and ready for action?
I find the freshest cilantro at our local indie market or farmer’s markets. When I get it home, here’s what I do: Trim the ends by about 1/2 inch (1.25cm), hold on to the stems (like a bunch of flowers), and then give the bunch a quick wash under running water. Then I spread all the sprigs out onto a clean dishtowel, then roll up the dishtowel to more or less dry the herbs.
Any frail short sprigs get put into a container or airtight bag to be used first. The remaining heartier sprigs go into a tub filled with 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5cm) of water, then I put a flimsy produce bag over the tub and put the tub in the fridge. The cilantro lasts for 1 to 2 weeks and is ready to use whenever I need it. No washing required. I change the water every few days, if I remember!
What’s in my fridge 90% of the time is a tub of ready-to-use cilantro!
Want to grow your own cilantro? My friends Alec and Michelle live in downtown Los Angeles in a loft and have long championed indoor, countertop gardens like the Aerogarden. My brother, Dan, who lives near Fresno and has harsh winter conditions loves those mini hydroponic gardens too.
Most people assume that Thai basil is key in Vietnamese cuisine because restaurants serve it to them as a side for pho noodle soup. Truth be told, it’s only eaten with southern Vietnamese-style pho. Northern-style, Hanoi pho is basically about cilantro and a tiny bit of fresh mint on the side, if you want it.
For that reason, Thai basil is top of mind for many people when the think of herbs in Vietnamese cooking. Winter is not when Asian markets have great Thai basil (húng quế, literally cinnamon basil in Vietnamese). But two weeks ago when the weather was warmish here in California, I surprisingly scored two beautiful bags of them!
I ate some with pho and added lots to a chicken and mushroom pad gaprao (pad ka-prao), an iconic Thai stir-fry that’s one of my favorites. What to do with the rest? I needed to preserve it so I ended up turning some into a green herb oil and experimented with blanching and freezing the rest of the leaves.
I wrote up my experiences so you can play with making herb oil and freezing Thai basil. These two preservation methods are not going to yield you the same experience as the fresh herb. But, the oil and frozen leaves allow you to keep a precious herb for the long haul instead of letting go bad. I’ve used the oil to dress salads and to drizzle on silken tofu, creating what Rory described as a savory sundae! The frozen leaves are good added to noodle soup and the like.
And yes, you can make oil with other herbs. All the details and my learnings are available here:
I’m really happy to have both the oil and the frozen leaves on hand. Here in Santa Cruz, it’s rare to find nice fresh Thai basil, until summer when I can grow my own.
Support Pass the Fish Sauce! Join us as a free or upgrade to a become a paid subscriber to enjoy 125+ professionally developed recipes, seed new content, and get future class discounts. Thanks for your enthusiasm!
💎 2 Viet herb primers
While I have you here, if you’re dreaming about other more ‘exotic’ Vietnamese herbs, check out my Quick Guide to Vietnamese Herbs. For those of you who garden and or want to geek out on great details, head to my Mega Vietnamese Herb Primer.
Winter is citrus season and I have three kinds of pomelo and grapefruit looking at me in the kitchen as I write this dispatch. I’m curious about their flavor differences and how they’ll perform in a dish that’s perfect for Lunar New Year, which is coming up on February 17. That’s what’s in store for this coming Sunday Special.
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