Yaaay! Since my boyfriend bought me that Luke Nguyen cookbook, there was one recipe I really wanted to try: black pig skewers with sesame salt inspired by the Hmong tribe's recipe. Then I saw this video where he makes the recipe on YouTube! Luke Nguyen tries to reproduce a Hmong girl's recipe because she doesn't want to share it! And when she tries the copy, she says "It's the same, but different!". I enjoyed the video, plus only in the video and not in the book, he makes a special sesame salt with peanuts and galangal, which I tried to copy! Also the cultural informations are interesting.
You can see the video here:
So here's my simplified version of Chargrilled Hmong Black Pig Skewers with Sesame Salt by Luke Nguyen from the book The Food of Vietnam, followed by my try on his special sesame salt!
(serves 3 to 4)
-300g finely sliced pork (the book uses neck, I had some shoulder in my freezer, also I couldn't find black pig of course)
-2 green onions, sliced, then slighty mashed with a pestle against the cutting board
-4tbsp white parts of lemongrass, chopped finely
-3tbsp fish sauce
-1tsp oyster sauce
-1tsp sugar
-1tbsp honey
-some black pepper
-3tbsp oil
Mix everything except the pork first to dissolve sugar, then add pork and marinate in the fridge for a couple hours to overnight.
If you use a grill, soak your skewers in cold water for 30 minutes before using, if you use a ridged pan like me, it's not necessary. Skewer the thin meat by folding it back and forth. Tips for your meat to cook through: don't put too much meat or pack it too tightly, make the skewers slighty loose, and get the meat out of the fridge 15-30 minutes before skewering it, so it's not as cold and will cook faster. You don't need to use oil since the oil was added to the marinade. Grill until nicely charred! Sesame salt recipe follows!
The meat is served with sesame salt to dip the skewers in, but in the video he makes a more complex recipe:
-roasted sesame
-roasted crushed peanuts
-salt
-black pepper
-galangal powder
So what I did, from what I got from the video, was to crush an equal amount of roasted sesame and peanuts in a mortar. I also made a mix of equal parts of salt, pepper and galangal powder. Then I added the spice mix little by little to the sesame-peanuts mix until it was balanced, to my taste. Personally I thought the galangal taste was too light, so I added some to the final product.
It's worth making to accompany the pork, but if you can't find galangal powder, maybe you can use ginger powder (in smaller amount, ginger is way stronger than galangal). Or you can even just make sesame salt by mixing sesame and about 10% the amount of sesame in salt. You can use white or black or both sesames.
These dumplings are from the same batch I made before, they're delicious, contain veggies, a piece of hard-boiled egg, pork and glass noodles! You can find my post about it here:
http://sunnysdelights.blogspot.ca/2014/04/deep-fried-vietnamese-dumplings.html
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