Vietnamese grilled coconut and glutinous rice cake with pandan: fragrant, chewy, and caramelised
Origin: Mekong Delta, Vietnam
From the journey of Coconut.
Vietnam's relationship with the coconut palm is most fully expressed in the Mekong Delta: the vast alluvial plain in the country's far south where the Mekong River fans into nine tributaries (the Cửu Long, or Nine Dragons) before emptying into the South China Sea. Among the Delta's provinces, Bến Tre stands apart: it is called the tỉnh dừa; the Coconut Province; and its landscape is defined by millions of coconut palms, their crowns forming a continuous canopy over the canals, water lanes, and flat rice paddies. Bến Tre produces a significant proportion of Vietnam's coconut crop, and its food culture is saturated with coconut in every form: coconut candy (kẹo dừa), coconut jam, coconut milk rice porridge, coconut water drunk fresh from the nut at every roadside stall. The coconut palm arrived in what is now Vietnam from two directions. From the south, the Cham kingdom; whose Austronesian cultural connections linked coastal Vietnam to island Southeast Asia; brought the coconut palm as part of the broader Austronesian agricultural package that included rice, banana, and taro. The Champa civilisation dominated the central and southern Vietnamese coast from approximately 200 CE to the 17th century, and its culinary legacy in Vietnamese cooking is considerable, particularly in the use of coconut milk and fermented fish sauces. From the east, Indian Ocean trade via the Champa coastal network brought further coconut cultivation practices and new ways of using coconut in cooking. Bánh is a broad Vietnamese culinary category encompassing virtually any preparation made from a starchy base; rice, glutinous rice, cassava, mung bean; and the category includes both savoury and sweet preparations, from the rice paper rolls of bánh tráng to the moon cakes of Tết celebrations. Bánh dừa nướng; grilled coconut rice cake; is a popular street food and festival snack of the Mekong Delta: a batter of glutinous rice flour, coconut milk, grated fresh coconut, and pandan extract (from the fragrant pandanus leaf, another signature of Southeast Asian and Pacific cooking) is spooned onto a lightly oiled flat griddle or cast-iron pan and cooked until the exterior caramelises to a golden crust while the interior remains chewy and moist. The pandan gives the cakes their characteristic pale green tint and their haunting fragrance; green, grassy, sweet, almost vanillic. The glutinous rice flour base connects bánh dừa nướng to an enormous family of Southeast Asian and Pacific sticky-rice sweets, from the Japanese mochi to the Filipino puto bumbong, all of which exploit glutinous rice's unique ability to become chewy and stretchy when cooked, a quality that wheat flour cannot replicate.
Bánh dừa nướng is at its best eaten immediately. If making for a market or gathering, keep them warm in a low oven (120°C) on a wire rack; stacking makes them steam and go soft. For a richer version, add 1 tablespoon of coconut oil to the batter. The pandan extract can be replaced with a few drops of vanilla extract for a more neutral flavour, though the pandan version is far more authentic and fragrant.
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