Welcome to my website. I am the author of ‘Vietnamese – Simple Vietnamese Food To Cook At Home’. I am a photographer and film maker. You can book into my supper club, Vietnamese cooking classes, buy my book, check out my photography and lots more here.
Please follow me on instagram @loveleluu – Thank you so much for visiting x
Best Food Photographer in London
The supper club is held in my home in London Fields, Hackney. It is like a dinner party in the tradition of a Vietnamese feast with homemade Vietnamese food.
Vietnamese food is about the balance of flavours, of sweet, salty and sour – there is no measuring device that can ever match your own taste buds.
Adapted from My Vietnamese Kitchen
How to eat Pho like a Vietnamese:
Breathe in the beautiful scented broth then taste, unadulterated by any condiments. Next squeeze on some lemon or lime and add your favoured condiments and garnishes and mix with chopsticks and a spoon. Pile all the ingredients onto your spoon and slurp away, bringing the bowl to your mouth and drinking every last sip of broth.
You can go without most of the garnishes but using the right type of noodle is very important. It is essential to use flat rice noodles. In Vietnam, you can order extra noodles. Don’t forget, this is a breakfast dish and therefore lots of carbohydrates are required to keep you going for the day.
A choice of garnishes should be on the side with lemon/lime wedges. You should never serve the soup with the lime wedges inside the bowl or put your squeezed pieces into it.
Tear herbs such as sawtooth and basil into the bowl of soup, adding pre blanced or raw beansprouts if desired and fresh chillies to your level of hotness.
Ph? Bò – Beef Noodle Soup
Watch my video on Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube Vietnamese Summer Rolls- Please press the LIKE button on it and leave a comment of what you’d like to see me making next on there too. I would love to do some more filming with Jamie’s FoodTube.
Thanks so much to Jamie Oliver, whom I met at The Big Feastival, when I cooked there at The Big Feastival Supper Club. He suggested that I get myself on FoodTube and made it all happen.
I filmed this one morning when they had 1.5 hr slot for me in one of Jamie’s filming kitchens at Fifteen, off Old Street. It was so cool to have my own food stylist, Jodene Jordan who arranged all the ingredients and props, making sure I had what I needed. (This is usually my job!)
The crew were so encouraging and guiding me of my lines because of course I kept forgetting what I was on about, what I was even doing and getting tongue tied.
I demonstrate summer rolls all the time at my cooking classes but it was another thing talking to camera. I just have to learn that the camera is another person!
Hopefully, if everyone likes the video, they would have me back on there. Jamie told me that he would really like to upload the film of me and him in my kitchen a few years ago.
You can also subscribe to my YouTube Channel here and Vimeo here (where I make more arty stuff)
I will never forget my grandmother cooking every morning and serving steaming hot noodle soup to passers by and regulars at her open house street food stall. I often get glimpses into her children’s memories (my aunts and uncles) of war, poverty, escapism, love and resilience but most of all, the surrender to good food. She loved my mother, her daughter in law because they had in common the desire and hankering for deliciousness.
In times of need, my mother then opened a little bánh mì stall outside our Saigon house in the early 80s, just before we refuged in England. Today, when she can get hold of these amazing soft, yet crispy and crunchy baguettes, we have them filled with barbecued pork, or Vietnamese sausages or shallot omelette stuffed with coriander, cucumber and pickled carrots and mooli; sprinkled with those dangerously fiery bird eye chillies. Heaven in a bite. Heaven in a length of a baguette. Pleasure in every sense.
You can buy these baguettes and fill them up yourself from The Spence Bakery
161 Stoke Newington Church St, London N16 0UH 020 7249 4927
If you need recipes, they are in my book – My Vietnamese Kitchen
If you wish to order a whole bunch of these, you can email me uyenATuyenluuDOTcom, my mum would love to make them!
I loved watching food TV from a very young age and what I remember most as a child is watching Masterchef with Loyd Grossman. He spoke funny but I still loved him and I got to meet him one day in September to show him Canh Chua which is a sweet and sour soup with sea bass (it can be any fish). The irony was that I mother used to make this for us after school for dinner and as we ate it, we watched Loyd on the television.
The soup is the perfect example of what Vietnamese food is all about! Sweet, sour and salty with beautiful combinations of silky texture from fish and crunchy vegetables. This soup has two dishes in one, completing a typical Vietnamese lunch or dinner – to be shared with friends, family and loved ones. You can eat the vegetables from the soup at any time, taking only a few pieces of fish as and when you require it and take the broth into your rice bowl towards the end of grains and drink it all up. It also only takes a few minutes to cook. Everything else is in the prep. It is excellent with fish like hake, cod, haddock, sea bass, sea bream, carp and salmon. It is also great with fish cakes or chicken and you can use whatever herbs you have like sawtooth, dill, basil, mint or coriander. The taro stems are the sponge-like looking vegetables. They are not cooked but added when the heat is turned off so they retain bite and the broth keeps in between the holes which makes for a crunchy and brothy mouthful!
The fish is poached within the soup for stock and flavour to the broth, then removed from the pot onto a dish of fine premium fish sauce and crushed chillies. It is then shared with steamed rice.
You can see the video here, where I cook and explain everything to Loyd.
http://grokker.com/cooking/video/hot-and-sour-soup-with-sea-bass-by-uyen-/529aa08506ed8bc60e0295e2
please “love it” where the heart is so I can go back and film some more with Loyd Grossman. 🙂
I loved meeting Loyd, a kind and approachable gentleman who is ever so professional and encouraging. What a hero he is to me.
The recipe for this soup is in my book, My Vietnamese Kitchen on Page 38.
Here is the trailer for the clip, to view the actual footage follow the link above.
My grandmother passed away this summer. One of the last things I whispered into her ear as she laid unconscious was, come home bà n?i, please feed me bún bò Hu? like you used to. She gently grasped my hands with the little strength that she had left in her and a tear slowly rolled down her smooth shiny cheeks. I remember my grandmother with great fondness, having to leave her side, my favourite place to be, at the age of five, I was devastated and still yearn at a young heart that tore apart. She made bún bò Hu? (a beef noodle soup with lemongrass) every morning and sold it out of our living room. The tables and chairs poured out onto the hot and sweltering pavement of Saigon. I can still remember the citrus perfume of cockscomb mint, lemongrass and lime vapourising the air with its tart pungency. She would sing. Her shrilling voice was high pitched yet eloquent, gentle and kind. She would always dip a good piece of meat into my little mouth. From the moment I could eat solid foods, and from what I remember eating first and foremost was bún bò Hu?, every day, for breakfast.
This soup means the world to me. It holds all the fondness I have for my grandmother and my childhood in Saigon. I dream only to have my grandmother serve me this soup now. For her and for so many women of Vietnam, feeding someone (your family) is how you show them your love. It is always therefore made with so much love and affection with the quest to make the perfect broth, the perfect balance with tales of delicate textures and flavours to quench every taste bud.
As a Vietnamese cook, the ultimate goal is to achieve a good broth. It could be a lifetime’s work to chase after the flavours of childhood. The memory of it is distinct yet far and beyond. You can only go by what you can remember the taste being once it hits your mouth or just try and try over and over, giving the broth as much of your time, patience and love as possible. There are always ways to improve the broth with different techniques. The quest is to find the way, grandma’s way…
I was asked by BBC1 to make this soup, something I got from my grandmother, tell my story of it and host a supper club. The uncanny thing was that my grandmother cooked and served this from her home in the late seventies/ early eighties and now I am doing much the same thing. The short documentary will be aired in the Spring time.
Here are some photos from the shoot.
My kitchen
I spent a whole day shooting the making of bún bò Hu?; shopping at the local shops and interviewing with these guys, Tom & Michael.
Some of my friends came for dinner at the supper club. We also had Bánh ch?ng – a traditional Vietnamese rice cake with yellow bean, pork belly, Vietnamese ham and pickled shallots; make your own summer rolls with crispy pork belly; fried dab with green mango; prawn lolly pops with sugar cane then bún bò Hu?. Thanks to Jenny Brown, we also had passion friut, mango and lime layer cake which was stunning!
You can find the recipe for bún bò Hu? in my book, My Vietnamese Kitchen.
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| pho bo |
In the first of her series of blog posts on how to cook Vietnamese food, guest blogger Uyen Luu shares the basic principles behind Vietnamese cooking.
There is a certain solitary quietness when bent over a steaming hot bowl of phó, slurping away and sucking at noodles. The broth is laced with the fragrant spices of star anise, coriander seeds, cinnamon and cloves, with top notes of fresh spring onions, coriander, basil, saw tooth herbs and lemon.
Vietnamese cuisine is one of the most flavoursome in the world, with many of its basic principles based on satisfying every taste bud. Preparing and cooking Vietnamese food is about fine tuning tasting skills to balance and master sweet, sour, salty, umani, bitter and hot flavours. It is about combining perfect textures, such as silky meat or fish with crunchy vegetables or herbs to satisfy the bite.
Vietnamese food is about accomplishing a perfect balance in taste, in texture and the lightness of being. Many people naturally follow the yin and yang principles in combining ingredients, for example, a soup with hearty ginger to warm up the body is contrasted with refreshing, cool leaves like pak choi to harmonise the feeling in your body. Eating in balance is a major factor in keeping healthy and many believe that food is medicine.
To maintain an equilibrium, plenty of refreshing shakes, like avocado, papaya, pennyswort and watermelon, are drank as snacks, especially in the evenings to freshen the body before bedtime.
Vietnam has taken much inspiration from its occupiers, especially the French. The streets are buzzing with food and its aromas, from barbecued meat-filled baguettes (bánh mì), hot pork pastries, crunchy carrot salads and beef steaks with French fries.
The famous noodle soup, phó, was influenced by French casserole pot-au-feu (pot of fire) – and you find many Vietnamese words reflect French, like pâté, pho –(feu), Bò bít têt (beef steak), pâté so (pâté chaud) or cà rôt (carrot).
Vietnamese people love eating so much that they have a term called “an choi”, which means to eat playfully, or snack. There are many small and light street food portions that you can pick up, eat and go, throughout the day. Sometimes they are even referred to as gifts to the mouth.
There isn’t a starter, main and dessert – there are snacks, meals in one dish and family meals with many plates all served at once. Vietnamese food is all about the love of food, flavour and eating. Or in other words, how food is love.
If you want to try cooking Vietnamese food at home, have a go at Uyen Luu’s Saigon summer rolls.