In the Vietnamese kitchen, teacher Andrea Nguyen focuses on vegetarian dishes

Hosted by

Not a traditional coffee cake, Andrea Nguyen's mocha cake, which you can see in the upper left corner, took 30 trials to perfect. The cake in the center is the Spice-Citrus Marble Cake, which is also delicious. Photo by Aubrie Pick.

You can count Good Food among the legions of Andrea Nguyen fans. A prolific cookbook writer and teacher, she's known for her no-nonsense approach and enticing recipes that work. Her sense of humor and deep knowledge of her subject are what centers her website, Viet World Kitchen

Nguyen's latest cookbook is “Ever-Green Vietnamese: Super Fresh Recipes,” which takes a plant-focused look at the food of her home country. 

KCRW: This is an interesting pot for you to stir. Why "Ever-Green"? Why now? And does that mean no animal proteins at all? 

Andrea Nguyen: No animal protein is not how I eat and cook. "Ever-Green" is about my approach to sustainable health, for my own well-being and for the planet. The evergreen part is about enduring ideas in the Vietnamese kitchen, and that is the notion of centering plants on the plate or in your rice bowl.

When you started to approach collecting recipes for the book, did you look for traditional ones that happened to be plant-based? Or did you take traditional ones and evolve them?

I'm taking door number two. When I started this project, my publisher was like, "We can sell a Vietnamese vegetarian cookbook." I said, "That's great, but I can't write that book because I'm not a vegetarian." But I understand the needs of vegetarian cooks. 

One of the questions that's always been presented to me is: “What the heck are you going to do about fish sauce?” When I started on this project, I thought to myself, I need to figure out a way to get around the elephant in the kitchen, so to speak, which is a bottle of fish sauce. So I came up with a vegan fish sauce recipe that I reverse-engineered from very good vegan fish sauce that comes out of Vietnam.


Cookbook author and teacher Andrea Nguyen developed a vegan fish sauce using seaweed and pineapple juice. Photo by Aubrie Pick.

There must be some industrial fish sauce products out there that are created for the vegan market. Why did you go to the trouble of creating a vegan fish sauce recipe yourself? 

There are. The ones that I've tried that come from mainstream markets are so bland and off the mark. And they're expensive. The ones that are available at Vietnamese markets, they're good but they're hard to find for people, and they have certain additives that I don't care for. So I thought to myself, "Can I use ingredients that are pretty much at my disposal to come up with a vegan fish sauce that's a one-to-one swap with regular fish sauce?" And holy smokes, I did.

What are some of the major players in the recipe? Is it a fermented product?

No, it's not fermented. The foundation is seaweed and pineapple juice. It's remarkable because once you go through the motions of making vegan fish sauce, you go, "Oh, wow." Canned pineapple juice has this kind of fermented tang. And once you combine it with seaweed, it presents itself as a briny fermented sauce from the sea, almost like a sea sauce. The salinity comes from salt, a flavor enhancer.

There are so many condiments in your book — not only condiments that we add after the dish is done, but condiments that are used in the cooking itself, like scallion oil. It's the greatest all-purpose condiment. Talk about your recipe for garlicky green onion sizzle that it’s used in.

You gotta have sexy names to catch readers. There's a lot of scallion oil, or green onion oil. We call it in Vietnamese "honma" or "mohan," which refers to fatty green onions, because it's typically made with lard but oil works fine. You would heat up oil and throw a bunch of green onions in there, but I add garlic to it too, as well as some fish sauce. I will add a pinch of baking soda just to hold the green color, and there is chili in there as well. It's a sauce that I keep around. In the book I put it on grilled eggplant.

It's a great summer thing. Once you start cooking with a lot of vegetables, you pay attention to their personalities in ways that you don't otherwise. When I started grilling six slabs of eggplant and eating it on its own with that scallion garlic sizzle, I had this thing of like, oh gosh, eggplant can cook up to this super rich lusciousness, almost like the fat in pork belly.

Vegetarians may not always use descriptors like that for vegetables, but I'm an omnivore. So I looked at that eggplant and I'm like, you know, it reminds me of that. Or a king trumpet mushroom is kind of like the firmness and texture of chicken thighs or chicken drumsticks. It becomes really fun for me as a cook, and I think it's a great way for people to plug into using vegetables in the kitchen without making it seem like it's this strict, arduous thing that you have to be religious about.


Cutting cauliflower into wedges reduces waste for this roasted char siu dish. Photo by Aubrie Pick.

Cauliflower is another great example of that. Tell us about the char siu roasted version that you have.

People have roasted cauliflower in all different ways, but why haven't there been many cauliflowers done char siu style? Then I was like, "I'll do it." It's such a simple recipe, but one of the things I wanted to do with that is to prep the cauliflower in a way where there's minimal waste. I cut them into wedges so you're not just cutting steaks, and then the recipe says, "Just save the other parts for other recipes." My thought was, "What are those other recipes?"

So I cut them into wedges, then the wedges are roasted in this very simple char siu seasoning sauce. The cauliflower releases all of this liquid and it concentrates, it cooks down in the hot oven. I have people swipe the cauliflower through the seasoning sauce as it's concentrating and it sticks to the char siu. Typically with char siu, you're basting the meat with the marinade or the seasoning sauce throughout the cooking process. I didn't want to do that. I was looking at this liquid and I thought to myself, "Just let it cook and it evaporates and kind of does the work for you." So it's very similar and it comes out having this chewy, meaty quality. It's so much fun to make.

It sounds really fun. So let's talk about what your husband calls “The Cake.”

He calls it “The Cake.” My mom just calls it “Vietnamese Coffee Cake.” It's a mocha cake. I started out thinking, "It'd be so great to make Vietnamese coffee cake, but not coffee cake in the traditional American way."


"Ever-Green Vietnamese" brings plants to the center of the rice bowl. Photo courtesy of Ten Speed Press.

A cake that was Vietnamese coffee in solid form.

Right. I thought, "It'd be so great, so easy." But it turns out that when you bake a cake with condensed milk, like a regular layer cake, it's not so easy. I went at least 30 rounds before I got it right. And we were in the middle of a kitchen remodel, so the guys would come around 8:30 or 9 a.m., but I would wake up early in the morning before they got to my house. 

I would plug the stove back in because they had it on wheels and I would bake a test trial of the cake. If it worked out, someone on the construction crew would get cake. My neighbors got cake, too. It is a cake that tastes like Vietnamese coffee, and it's absolutely delicious. That's something that my neighbors and my mother continually ate with no complaints.

The downside to doing this job is if one doesn't eat before, one gets very hungry.

It is the problem when we talk about food and work in food. It is so enticing.

This whole book is just gorgeous. The whole thing is enticing.

Thank you. I worked on it with a legendary editor named Lorena Jones, whom I've known since I started my career in food writing. She recently retired after 30 years in the industry and this was the last book that she edited. We wanted to make a book that was substantive. 

This is the only vegetarian Vietnamese book that I'll ever write. It's a vegetarian or vegetable-centric book that's for everyone. We talk about healthy eating, and oftentimes it is centered on the Mediterranean diet, which I absolutely love, but there are a lot of really healthy, fun things that you can do with Asian cuisines as well. So that's the promise behind "Ever-Green Vietnamese," and I hope it delivers.


Reprinted with permission from "Ever-Green VietnameseSuper-Fresh Recipes, Starring Plants from Land and Sea" by Andrea Nguyen, copyright © 2023. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.


Reprinted with permission from "Ever-Green VietnameseSuper-Fresh Recipes, Starring Plants from Land and Sea" by Andrea Nguyen, copyright © 2023. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.