Cooking Adventures

We love this recipe with freshly cooked jasmine rice. We often serve this dish with Javanese pickle (see Note 2 below).

Mince 1/2 small onion (or 1 shallot). Heat a large wok, then add 3 Tbsp neutral oil and saute the onion on medium heat until fragrant. Then add 1 lb minced pork and saute on medium heat until pork starts losing its pink color, then add 2 Tbsp fish sauce, 2 tsp bittersweet caramel sauce (mine is homemade), and 1 tsp sugar. Increase heat, stirring until pork crisps up, then reduce to medium. When pork is fully cooked and crisped to your liking, add 2 chopped scallions (green parts only), then turn off heat. Stir and let sit for 5 minutes, then serve with jasmine rice. (Mar. 2015)

Note 1: We often double this recipe, using 1 lb minced pork and 1 lb minced chicken. We cook the pork in one large nonstick pan and the chicken in another pan, using the same ingredients and technique in each pan (3 Tbsp oil, 1 shallot, 2 Tbsp fish sauce, 2 tsp bittersweet caramel, and 1 tsp sugar). Before the final step, we pour the contents of the minced chicken into the minced pork pan and then add chopped greens from 4 scallions. (May 2026).

Note 2: The Javanese recipe is here: https://cookingadventures.blog/2015/03/25/javanese-carrot-shallot-and-anjou-pear-pickle/.

This mince recipe is from Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavors (Ten Speed Press, 2006) and Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day (Ten Speed Press, 2019).