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Vietnamese cakes come in various flavors, shapes, and styles, with sweet cakes like mooncake, banh chay, and green bean cake, and savory cakes like banh run and banh nam. Most are steamed, fried, or compressed and eaten raw. Vietnamese rice cake is a special savory pie made with rice, pork, soy sauce, and beans, traditionally eaten during the New Year. Mooncakes are baked and have inscriptions symbolizing luck, prosperity, health, and good luck.
Vietnamese cake, or banh, comes in a range of flavors, styles, shapes, and purposes. Many of the cakes are sweet, such as the traditional Vietnamese mooncake, banh chay, and green bean cake. Others, like Vietnamese rice cake, banh run, or banh nam, are filled with savory ingredients like pork, prawns, and soy sauce. Most types of Vietnamese cake are not baked like cakes in much of the rest of the world. Instead, they’re steamed, fried, or simply compressed together and eaten raw.
Mooncake, or banh trung thu, is traditionally eaten during the mid-autumn festival celebrated throughout Asia. These small round cakes are baked in fluted tins with Vietnamese letters embossed on the bottom. When the cakes are baked, the baker turns the cans upside down and lifts them up, revealing a cute little cake with an inscription on the top. The inscriptions on this Vietnamese cake often include symbols of luck, prosperity, health and good luck. Vietnamese mooncakes are usually coated in sweet syrup and honey and filled with sweet bean paste, date paste, or ground seed fillings.
An example of a Vietnamese steamed cake is banh chay, or veggie cake. These little steamed rolls start out as a simple, sticky dough made mostly from rice flour and water. The dough is cut into circles and a sweet bean paste, usually made from azuki beans, is pressed into the center of each circle. The circles are gently closed and steamed, in a modern steamer or bamboo basket, until they hold their shape. This Vietnamese cake is often served in a sweetened soup and topped with sesame seeds.
Green bean cake may look like a savory Vietnamese cake, but it’s actually very sweet. This pie is not baked at all, but made with glued, sugared, green string beans. The beans are squeezed into molds with very high compression until they hold their shape. The resulting cakes are usually wrapped in banana leaves until eaten. This process is often done by hand, although Vietnamese manufacturers also make green bean cakes with machines.
Some savory types of Vietnamese cake are banh run and banh nam. Banh ran is typically a ball of sesame seeds, rice flour and some kind of savory filling fried in oil. Fillings can be meat-based, such as pork and shrimp, or plant-based, such as salted beans or pickled vegetables. The second type, banh nam, are thin sheets of rice flour and pork steamed together until they hold their shape.
One of the most important types of Vietnamese cake is Vietnamese rice cake. This is a savory pie that takes a lot of time and a lot of people to make right. Rice, rice flour, ground pork, soy sauce, chopped onions, and beans are often mixed thoroughly and placed inside banana leaves. The leaves are tied around the cake in an intricate weaving pattern. The cake is then baked for several hours. Rice cake is traditionally eaten around the New Year, making it a family endeavor that brings loved ones to heart.
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