^{Photo: Chom Chom}

After a recent trip to Ho Chi Minh City, I decided to take a closer look at the quintessential Vietnamese sandwich born from the country’s French colonial occupation: the bánh mì. The sandwich is simply prepared, with various meats, pâté, melted "butter," spring onions and other vegetables stuffed into a thin-crusted pillow-like baguette. During a day of exploring, we took a brief pit stop at one of the local shops selling excellent bánh mì on the street side of Saigon at the recommendation of our guide for the day, Wendy.

As a baker, there are some important things about the bánh mì that I must make clear. Firstly, a normal baguette and the bánh mì baguette are two different things from a baker’s standpoint. Secondly, some claim that by adding rice flour to your baguette, it makes it lighter. However, as rice flour has no gluten, you will end up with a dense brick if used in a high percentage in your baguette recipe, which is the opposite of what you are looking for in the perfect bánh mì baguette.

Most bánh mì stalls on the roadside get their bread from big central bakeries, and then the stall staff finish the sandwiches at the booth by adding the fillings. If you can find shops with their own baking station, it's a sign that it must be a well-established bánh mì shop, as this kind of small baking structure is a fairly big investment when compared with the items sold (bread and pastries). The average price of a normal sandwich, which comes in a fairly large portion, is about HK$4.60 (US$0.60); when considering profit margins and controlling the cost of ingredients versus the selling costs, it’s a wonder how these shops make their money.

Most often, the flour used in the bánh mì baguette is made of wheat with 10 to 12 per cent protein content, such as the flour from InterFlour Vietnam, which is widely used along the more local "Bông lúa vàng" or "Bình Đông". Another thing people may not realise, is that the bowl of "butter" that is spread on the bread of each serving, is commonly just hydrogenated vegetable fat with butter aroma. Other than being obvious from the taste, I saw the actual cans of fat on the floor, near the counter. The texture of the crust and crumb, the openings on the bread and the colour of the crust were typical of bread over-proofed on steroids (aka emulsifiers, bread improvers, or however you want to call it). Using these chemically-produced agents makes the dough easily workable in machines, extends the shelf life and the volume of the bread, giving the final product the pillow-like texture. Emulsifiers condition and strengthen the dough, resulting in a very solid inner structure of the sponge where the CO2 produced is retained in a perfectly sealed sponge, as opposed to regular dough where the CO2 would eventually escape from the weaker part of the inner sponge.

All in all, even though the Vietnamese bánh mì doesn’t use high quality wheat flour or real butter, it is still insanely good and satisfying. It’s no wonder that the bánh mì is frequently named as one of the best street foods in the world. Bánh mì is part of the Vietnamese food culture, of its heritage and to me, it is in itself a representation of what the country has been through, and of what the country and its people is today: a country full of life-loving and kind people, embracing every day in showcasing to the world how amazing Vietnam is.