Bún Thịt Nướng (Vietnamese Grilled Pork Vermicelli)

I love Vietnamese cuisine for its fresh flavours - loads of fresh herbs and veggies. My first introduction to Vietnamese cuisine was a bowl of Bún Thịt Nướng in a small eatery along the alley near Queen Street, Brisbane with some friends after school. It was love at first bite, and when I was in Vietnam in 2012, I had the chance to explore more Vietnamese dishes, the traditional way.

Bún Thịt Nướng, a grilled pork dish with vermicelli noodles, remains one of my favourite Vietnamese dishes. It's like a bowl of noodle salad, and there's tons of flavours within the dish - the tangy pickled daikon and carrots, the slightly spicy and garlicky dipping sauce, the aromatic scallion oil, the saltiness from the roasted peanuts, the herby fresh mint leaves and not forgetting the star of the show, the marinated pork. Sigh. I'm craving for a bowl for it as I type...

 Bún thịt nướng

I tossed the pork slices into the marinade and left it aside for the flavours to develop. When I removed the bowl from the refrigerator, wow, the smell of the marinated meat (almost) made me drool in anticipation.  And when I was frying the meat, woohoo, *whistles*, the kitchen smelt oh-so-fantastic. I couldn't wait to put everything together.

Although I'm not a big fan of mint-flavoured stuff, I love fresh mint. I stuff tons of it into fresh Vietnamese spring rolls, or throw them into my fruit soda drinks when I happen to have some in the house. And of course, I used loads of it in the noodle salad here. The first day I made these, I used too little mint leaves (see first photo of blog post), thus when I made it again for the next day's lunch, I doubled (or more) the amount of mint. Yums.

The recipe yielded quite a huge amount of meat, so I used some of it to make fresh Vietnamese spring rolls. It was essentially the same ingredients for Bún Thịt Nướng, (plus sliced red cabbage), wrapped in rice paper. No one in my family is a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine (like huh!), so I basically cooked and ate it all by myself. Oh well, that means more yums for me then, I'm certainly not complaining.

Bún Thịt Nướng

Vietnamese marinated pork (recipe here - I omitted the lemongrass cos I'm not a fan of it)
Vietnamese pickled carrots and radish (recipe here)
Rice vermicelli, cooked and drained in a colander
Bean sprouts, lightly cooked and drained well
Vietnamese nước chấm (recipe here)
Scallion oil (recipe here)
Crushed roasted peanuts
Fresh mint leaves

Place everything (except for nước chấm) in a bowl.
Serve the nước chấm on the side (I like to pour the sauce over the dish and toss it all together. But the dish stays fresh longer when the sauce is not mixed in, so only add the sauce when you are consuming it).