Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Sticky Rice Dumplings with Mung Beans, Pork and Shrimp (Banh It Tran)

I had forgotten how much I love Vietnamese food!  It is so flavorful.  These dumplings are made with a bland rice dough wrapped around mashed mung beans, pork, shrimp and garlic scapes (!) seasoned with sugar, salt and fish sauce.  The best part is a magical sweet-sour-hot sauce that gets drizzled over the dumplings right when they come out of the steamer.  It's made with rice vinegar, fish sauce, sugar, chile peppers, lemon juice and green onions.  The rice dough soaks it right up and it makes the other flavors in these dumplings simply pop.

2 comments:

Alyse said...

I've been reading about garlic scapes lately. I never thought of eating them but then I realized you can eat the green part of onions, so why not garlic, too.
I wish my farmer's market had garlic. I'd try some.

Deborah said...

They are SO GOOD! They are hard to come by though and only available for a few weeks of the year. I believe this recipe called for shallots and garlic, of which I had neither, but the scapes stepped in perfectly.