It’s Vietnamese. Banh Mi is a Vietnamese sandwich traditionally made with a wheat/rice flour baguette, so it’s totally in keeping with a rice flour baguette. Banh Mi can have a lot of different ingredients like pulled pork, chicken, and pate, in addition to cucumbers and cilantro. Although Banh Mi is also sometimes also made with pickled daikon, it’s much easier if you just use homemade pickled carrots, which are pretty good on their own.
Ingredients:
For the pickled carrots:
2 medium size carrots
1 tablespoon sugar
1 tablespoon rice, distilled, or honey vinegar
For the rest of the sandwich:
cilantro
chicken or pulled pork
1/2 cucumber per sandwich
1/2 gluten-free baguette
For the sauce:
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 tsp fish sauce (The cheapest on the market is fine.)
dash of cayenne pepper or hot sauce to taste
Optional: Lime juice, if you have it. I didn’t, but it still tasted pretty good.
Kitchen apparati:
knife for spreading mayonnaise sauce and splitting the baguette
plate
small bowl in which to mix mayonnaise sauce
toaster oven for toasting the baguette
Directions:
Three to five days before you make your banh mi, wash and peel the carrots and cut them into small sticks. Put 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1 tablespoon sugar, 3 teaspoons of salt, and 1 cup of water into a jar of some kind. (This is an old, solid plastic sorbet container.) Refrigerate.
When you are ready to make your banh mi, toast the baguette until it’s crunchy. Slice it in half. Wash the cilantro and tear into smaller stems. Wash, peel and slice the cucumber. Tear your chicken or pork into small pieces. Mix the mayonnaise, fish sauce and hot sauce. Taste. Add more of whatever if it’s not quite spicy or anchovy enough. Spread the mayonnaise on one side of the baguette. Add the meat, cucumber, cilantro and carrots. Be impressed with how cosmopolitan you are.
Cost: About $2.50 per sandwich.
In all my gluten-free travels I’ve never seen a gluten-free baguette. What brand do you use?
Dear Christopher,
It’s two posts down, but I’m now going to index it under “baguette.”
Love,
Big sis.