Food Stories is a column in which Best of Vegan community members share recipes from their cultures and personal stories connected to those dishes. Today, Lisa Le of The Viet Vegan shares her recipe for Vegan Bánh Xèo – a crispy Vietnamese savory turmeric pancake filled with deliciousness!
This recipe was featured in Lisa’s profile for the new weekly BIPOC Portraits series by Val and Mani Latifi, where they profile vegan creators and shed light on the unique challenges BIPOCs face in making the decision to embrace veganism. Click here to see the full article.
Banh Xeo is the classic dish my family makes in HUGE amounts for special occasions and parties. Some people call it Vietnamese pizza (I don’t see the resemblance, banh trang nuong is probably more pizza-like), but it’s a savory turmeric pancake that has crispy edges and a lot of variation in fillings!
Typically it’s filled with cabbage, bean sprouts, pork belly, and shrimp, but my veganized version uses fried tofu and konjac-based shrimp! You can add cabbage and bean sprouts, but I prefer to load my banh xeo up with tons of fresh herbs and wrap them in lettuce to dip in my vegan nuoc cham chay.
My family prioritizes a CRISPY pancake so I had to make sure that my version of this dish lived up to that standard. (I’d say this is my family’s recipe, but they don’t measure ingredients ever, so this is what I came up with from observing and testing the recipe multiple times).
Ingredients
- For the pancake batter
- 1 cup 140 g rice flour
- 2 tbsp 18 g cornstarch
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- ½ cup 108 g/125 mL full-fat coconut milk
- 1 ½ cups 325 mL coconut LaCroix (or coconut soda)
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil + oil for the pan
- For the filling
- 2 green onions - finely sliced
- 10 vegan shrimp - sliced in half
- 1 king oyster mushroom - washed and sliced thin
- ½ block firm tofu - sliced thin
- Mung bean sprouts
- For the wraps
- Mustard greens or green leaf lettuce
- Rice paper wraps
- Vegan nuoc mam cham for dipping
Instructions
- In a large bowl, whisk together rice flour, cornstarch, and ground turmeric.
- Add coconut milk, coconut soda (or coconut LaCroix), and vegetable oil and whisk until everything is combined. Stir in the sliced green onions. The batter should be very thin and runny.
- Preheat a pan and prep with 1 tsp of vegetable oil. (Do this before each pancake)
- Pan-fry the tofu, mushroom, and vegan shrimp slices and once fried on one side, flip, then add about ⅔ cup batter into the pan. Swirl quickly to cover the whole surface and a bit up the edges.
- Add a handful of mung bean sprouts on one half of the pancake and let cook for 3-4 minutes until the edges lift off the pan and the bottom is nice and crispy.
- The inside of the pancake should be cooked through, then gently fold in half and remove from the pan.
- Repeat until batter is used up!
- Serve in spring rolls with lettuce, or as lettuce wraps in mustard greens, dipping in the linked sauce above!
Published with permission from The Viet Vegan.
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Recipe and photos by Lisa Le.
