Pork bánh mì rice bowls
All the bánh mì furniture, none of the bread, and a pickle that takes ten minutes.
At a Glance
Story
Rinse the rice until the water stops going cloudy. What comes off is loose surface starch, and left on it glues the grains together into a single agreeable mass, which is fine under a stew and wrong under a bowl like this one, where you want the grains to stay separate enough to take up the pork juices and the pickle liquid.
Ingredients
- 10 oz ground pork
- ½ cup long grain white rice
- 3 oz carrotsshredded
- 1 Persian cucumberhalved lengthwise and thinly sliced
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 2 tbsp hoisin
- 2 scallionsthinly sliced, whites and greens kept apart
- 3 tbsp full-fat Greek yogurt
- 1 tbsp sambal oelek
- 1 limequartered
- cilantro and mint leavestorn, to finish
- neutral oilsalt, pepper
Method
The pickle and the rice want starting first. Everything after that takes about eight minutes.
- Rinse the rice until it runs clear, drain, then into a pot with 1 cup water and a big pinch of salt. Boil, cover, drop to low, 13 to 15 minutes. Off the heat, fluff.
- Cucumber and carrots with the sugar and the juice of two lime wedges, seasoned. Stir and leave to marinate.
- Stir the yogurt with as much sambal as you want. Season.
- Medium nonstick pan, oil, medium-high. Pork in, broken up with a spoon, then left alone 3 to 4 minutes. Season, add the scallion whites, 3 to 4 minutes more, stirring.
- Hoisin in, 1 to 2 minutes, until the pork is glossy and cooked through.
- Rice into bowls, then pork, the pickle lifted out of its liquid, the spicy yogurt, and a great deal of torn mint and cilantro. Scallion greens and the last lime wedges.
A swap worth knowing: the original tosses the spicy sauce with mayonnaise. Full-fat Greek yogurt does the same job here because it is a cold sauce spooned over at the end, not a coating cooked onto anything.
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