Beef Jerky Hot Red Package Asian Looking Design

Kho Bo Cay, a beef hasty from Song Que in the Eden Center in Falls Church, looks peppery hot. Simply its flavor is on the sweet side, with a bit of residual heat at the cease. (Deb Lindsey/FOR THE WASHINGTON Postal service)

To anyone who has pulled back the protective wrapper on a rubbery Slim Jim after a late-night run to the convenience store, the 21 plastic bins within the Phu Quy Deli Please at the Eden Heart in Falls Church building must seem every bit alien as fermented fish sauce to an A.one. man.

Each of those 21 bins is filled with jerky made past Vua Kho Bo, a California-based dried snack visitor whose proper noun translates into, more or less, the "male monarch of beef jerky." There are pieces of dehydrated beef flavored with chili flakes, curry pulverisation, lemon grass, saccharide, blackness pepper, orangish juice and barbecue seasonings. There are jerkys cutting into cubes, sliced into strips or even shredded and laced with cashews. One might be the burnt-orange color of leaves in autumn, another could be as cerise as ripe September apples. Some are every bit dry as cinnamon sticks, others as chewy and sticky as candy-coated bacon. One or two are downright fuzzy, every bit if someone made jerky out of Fozzie Bear.

All of them, collectively, fall nether the deliciously addictive, difficult-to-define category of Vietnamese jerky. I say "difficult to ascertain" considering the more I learn about the (mostly unsmoked) Vietnamese subset of the jerky industry, the less I seem to sympathise it. Charles Phan, the James Bristles Award-decorated chef and owner of the Slanted Door in San Francisco, theorizes that the chewy cured beef has its origins in Red china, whose influence has been felt on Vietnam for centuries. Phan even has firsthand show: His father, who fled Communist Communist china for Vietnam in the early 1950s, used to brand his own jerky.

"He wasn't very good," Phan recalls. "He didn't make money making beef jerky."

Based on his own observations, Phan says the jerky found in Vietnam is, by and large, produced past families of Chinese origin and is "so close to the stuff I've seen in Hong Kong." Interestingly plenty, Vietnam native Kim Nguyen, proprietor of Phu Quy, tells me the owners of Vua Kho Bo are Taiwanese, though the company is producing snacks largely for a Vietnamese market. Or, perhaps more accurately, for the Vietnamese American market, considering many of Vua Kho Bo'south products would probably never be found in Vietnam and tend to downplay the heat compared with the jerky back in Nguyen's abode country.

"In Vietnam, ours is a little bit spicier and not as sweet every bit Chinese and Hong Kong" hasty, says Nguyen. "We like fish sauce. They like soy sauce. The soy sauce is a little bit sweeter."

The takeaway here, for me at to the lowest degree, is that the line between the dissimilar jerkys found in Asia is maybe more malleable and less rigidly nationalistic than for other foodstuffs. Frankly, I'll leave that discussion to food anthropologists with more fourth dimension on their hands. I adopt the simple pleasures of sampling widely at Phu Quy, where Nguyen will ply you with equally many samples as your palate can handle. This is a smart business practice. Her hasty is not cheap, which may explain why the deli's name roughly translates into "wealthy" and "successful," because you demand to be one or both to shop here regularly.

Her "French beefiness hasty," a moist and spicy diversity prepared with flank steak, runs $27 a pound. Her "crispy curry beef jerky," desiccated strips of surprisingly sweet meat, are even pricier at $29.50. But most of the jerky at Phu Quy is in the $23 range, such as the tantalizing barbecue-like black pepper beef jerky or the hot fruit flavored beef jerky, a mild, sweet variety made for cutting into strips and sprinkling over the iconic Vietnamese green papaya salad.

Over now eatery in Falls Church, a brusk bulldoze from the Eden Center, chef Luong Tran prepares two kinds of house-made jerky for his green papaya salad, which is no ordinary appetizer. It's modernist art on a plate, a tangle of shaved, pale-green curls of papaya accented with colorful twists of maroon beef jerky and blackened beef-liver jerky, all sprinkled with a soy-based dressing infused with more of the liver jerky flavour. Not to put too fine a point on this, just the two jerkys make the salad, providing chewiness, yes, but as well sweetness and heat and an ironlike blast of liver to contrast with those crunchy, neutral strands of papaya.

Though perfect as a office actor in a green papaya salad, jerky's true calling comes every bit a solo deed: a hand-held snack, whether over a few beers at the bar or as a mid-afternoon repast between classes for students. "With the [hot] temperatures in Vietnam, yous can employ it whatever fourth dimension," says Binh Nguyen, owner of Present. "It'south a nice dry food that you can pack. It doesn't get bad."

Kim Nguyen of Phu Quy (no relation to Binh) says men — yes, it's almost ever men — will driblet by her store and pick up a pound or then of jerky before wandering over to one of the watering holes buried deep inside the Eden Center. Information technology may seem an atypical treat to back-trail their beer, at least to Americans accepted to their salty snacks of peanuts, pretzels and popcorn. But Kim Nguyen equates jerky, at least the spicier ones, to Buffalo wings. It's the heat that drives a drinker's lust (and a bar manager's nodding approval to let customers bring the nutrient inside).

"It makes you drink more," Kim says.

That, in part, is what drives my current interest in Vietnamese jerky. (Not the inducement to drown myself in suds, simply as a recurring option in my ain snack rotation during this, the elevation of the sports-watching season.) Sure, I could just drive over to Phu Quy and purchase a couple of pounds of jerky, only between the price, the fuel and the stress of navigating through Washington's soul-crushing traffic, I'd prefer to make my own at dwelling house.

There are certainly plenty of recipes for Asian-style jerky at your fingertips, many buried deep in the bowels of the Internet. But two new cookbooks offer more home-style recipes to test your skill at jerky-making. Canadian food writer Naomi Duguid has included one in her latest attempt, "Burma: Rivers of Flavor" (Artisan), suggesting y'all fifty-fifty effort your hand at air-drying the spice-rubbed meat for a few days. The one I tested was tucked into Phan'south debut cookbook, "Vietnamese Home Cooking" (Ten Speed Press).

Phan's version of beef jerky calls for, essentially, braising summit round in a soy-water-scallions mixture before cooling the meat, slicing information technology and blanket the thin slices in a cooking liquid comprising fish sauce, water, soy sauce, honey, garlic, roasted chili paste, Thai chili peppers and crushed carmine pepper flakes. Despite the heavy presence of peppers, the resulting slices are decidedly savory and umami-rich, not spicy. Nor are they dehydrated and satisfyingly chewy. They remind me more of Korean bulgogi than Vietnamese jerky. Still, they are, without question, succulent and delicious.

Am I disappointed with Phan's interpretation? On some striving-for-actuality level, sure, but then the chef tells me he prefers to gustatory modality the beef in his jerky, not drown the meat under heat, aromatics and sugar. He likewise mentions that his jerky perfectly complements his green papaya salad recipe, which comes with a "very spicy" dressing. He seems to be implying that I should non judge his chef-driven jerky in the context of those commercial strips available hither in the States.

I'll take to ponder that as I nibble on my pound of Vietnamese hasty from Phu Quy.

RECIPES:

Charles Phan'southward Beef Hasty

Grilled Dried Beef (Thit Bo Kho)

Spice-Rubbed Hasty

Phu Quy Deli Delight 6799 Wilson Blvd. No. seven, Falls Church building. 703-536-6106. Song Que 6769 Wilson Blvd., Falls Church. 703-536-7900. Present 6678 Arlington Blvd., Falls Church. 703-531-1881.

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/chew-on-this-jerky-fans/2012/10/15/7a54d3c0-13c3-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html

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