How To Make Vietnamese Pancakes ‘Banh Xeo’ – Marion’s Kitchen

Crispy golden turmeric and coconut
pancakes stuffed with a savoury roast chicken filling,
this is my version of Vietnamese Bahn Xeo.
I’m going to jump in any chance to have pancakes for dinner, why not? These ones are really beautifully crispy
and savoury. They’re so fresh when you’ve got that beautiful Nuoc Cham dressing and
all the herbs and everything. It’s just so good.
Let’s get on to the pancake
batter itself. This is really cool guys, because
it happens to be also gluten free and dairy free, and egg free actually.
If you’ve got anyone that needs those sorts of things, then this is the recipe for you.
Rice flour is what we’re using and now some coconut milk, some water.
For that sunshine golden yellow colour, I want a good dash of turmeric and a pinch of salt.
Just give that a whisk you, should be thinking to yourself, “wow this looks too thin” – that’s when you know
you’ve got it right. Because that really thin batter is going to get super crispy in the pan.
That’s exactly what we want. As with any
crepe batter, I always find a little resting time for about
10 to 15 minutes, tends to help with texture of the pancake in the pan.
While we’re waiting for that, we’re going to make our Vietnamese Nuoc Cham dressing.
Very simple. I just want some fish sauce, some white vinegar, some sugar, some finely chopped red chilli,
and some garlic. Just give that a whisk.
One final element we want here is some lime juice. Just squeeze and push down on that
to release all those juices inside. This
dressing is truly one of the most magical dressings
I think that there is in Southeast Asia. I just love the combination of the tangy, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, it’s everything.
I do always find though that sometimes, I need to adjust according to how sour the lime is or your fish sauce
could be saltier than mine. So always give it a taste.
What you really want here is a very nice balance of all those different flavours
and a little hint of that garlic and chilli at the end.
For the bits and pieces that go inside of your pancake, there are endless possibilities here.
Some of my favourites are prawns, fresh prawns, cooked prawns, pork, a combination of pork and prawns.
I’m just doing a chicken version today.
I love this because I can just pick up a rotisserie chicken or barbecue chicken from my supermarket
on the way home, and get this done which is good. Or leftovers, good for leftovers.
I’ve got chicken, I’ve got carrots, some shredded carrots, some bean shoots here, and
some coriander. Obviously if you’re one of those coriander adverse people, you can leave that one out.
Don’t shout about the coriander below. Let’s get down to the cooking part.
I want a pan that’s around about 22 centimetres in diameter.
I don’t want one that’s too – or you
could make a giant crispy pancake if you want.
The size doesn’t really matter. But if you want three medium-sized kind of pancakes here,
you want a 22 centimetre. A little bit of oil. You want enough oil to cover the bottom of that pan.
We want a particular kind of crispy latticework patten happening on the bottom of our pancake,
we need a little bit of oil to do that.
The other secret here is that, I want this pan and the oil nice and hot.
I really want to hear that sizzle the second we start putting the pancake batter in there.
This might take a little bit of practice first go, but you’ll get it.
Pour some into the centre and start swirling that pan vigorously afterwards.
I’m just going to cover one side of the pancake with all my filling ingredients.
I’ve got my chicken and my shredded carrot, bean shoots and some sprigs of coriander.
The key here is to let this keep sizzling away in that pan, until we get a really crispy crispy outside of the pancake,
and we start to see some nice colour on the pancake as well.
See we’ve got that beautiful pattern there, we don’t quite have the colour yet though.
So I’m going to let it keep going.
The colour is looking good! We can hear that sizzling happening.
I want to fold that pancake over. Cause I’m doing about three here, I’m just going to pop this one on a tray.
So when it’s time to serve up, I just like to pop one of these onto a plate.
Or you can put them all out on a platter, up to you.
You want a little sprinkling of spring onion on top.
The best thing is to serve it with some lettuce leaves and some mint leaves as well.
Let me show you how it goes. You want to cut a piece of that pancake off.
Listen to how crispy that is. Take a lettuce leaf, drizzle over some of that sauce. Plenty of the dressing. Yum.
A few mint leaves. And then you wrap everything up to a neat little bundle, fairly neat anyway.
And then dig in!
Mmm… The combination here guys is so magical. You’ve got the crunchy turmeric flavour of the pancake,
and then those crunchy vegetables, that beautiful dressing which is sweet and tangy and all good things.
And then everything combined with the fresh herbs. Mmm… Tell you what, I just can’t stop eating it.