Name: The Most Underrated Vietnamese Dish (Bun Cha Hanoi)
Uploaded: 2026-03-11T21:37:37.000Z
Duration: 13 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Now, you probably never heard of this one, or maybe you have, but

When I was first introduced to this, we had it as a breakfast in Hanoi and it was incredible.

It is a multi sensory experience, just like some of my favorite dishes.

I don't know what I want, so I order too many things.

If you make this buncha, it comes with so many different things.

It comes with a sweet yet savory hot broth with like a grilled sort of Vietnamese meatball and pork belly and rice noodles and herbs and even crispy spring rolls.

This is like a omakase experience of a dish all in one.

So that being said, let's make this, shall we?

Then we'll make a quick pickle, a simple broth, and

lastly, a little bonus that is typically traditionally served with bun cha.

We're going to start with our meatball base.

And that begins with one stalk of lemongrass.

And you're just gonna beat the out of it.

Take a bowl, you can take the back of your knife and kind of do this, but

I want you to beat the out of this thing.

You can use a meat mallet, really, you can use almost anything to break it up.

I'm actually gonna smash this a little more with a pan.

Now, your family's ears might not work anymore, but

your lemongrass is very close to being finely chopped at this stage.

You're going to remove the dry top because I really only want the bottom half.

This part is sort of a little too woody to go in there.

All right, so now you're going to cut on a steep bias.

The reason we cut on a bias is because that's sort of the way that lemongrass grows.

Once it starts getting hard to cut, you know you're going a little too far into the stem, so I'll stop there.

Then you're just going to take your knife and run it through this and then chop it as finely as you can get it.

I mean, I just started chopping and it's already about 75% of the way there, maybe.

Once that's finely chopped, that's gonna go into a bowl.

You're cut that in half, lengthwise, in half again.

These shallots look absolutely immaculate.

If you want it even finer, you can run your knife through it a couple times after doing that.

All right, I'm gonna add that to my bowl.

Now, four cloves of garlic, also finely chopped.

You wanna make that quick, flat side of the knife that's almost there.

Then you just kind of run your knife through it a couple of times.

And you have finely chopped garlic that can go in here.

Now we have all these lines going this way from the chiffonade.

We're gonna want about a half cup finely chopped into our bowl.

All right, One and a half pounds of fatty ground pork.

You're gonna add all that stuff you just chopped to your pork, along with two teaspoons of ground black pepper, two and a half tablespoons of sugar.

Something magical happens when you add that quantity of sugar and fish sauce.

And what that is is the process of salty caramelization, which is exactly what we want.

Now you're just gonna mix that together thoroughly by hand until not just evenly incorporated, but

I'm picking up, folding it over itself and pushing it back in very quickly.

I almost wanna kind of emulsify that fat with both the liquid from the pork, but

also the liquid from all the vegetables so that it becomes one gluey nice mass.

Now, it's ideal if you let this marinate.

This is essentially like a casing, less sausage.

Let it marinate for at least 30 minutes or ideally overnight.

But first we need to make a little marinade.

So that's gonna be two tablespoons of sugar, two and a half tablespoons of fish sauce.

We're seeing a little reoccurring theme here.

So I'm gonna smash them, and then I'm just gonna chop them up.

And then two green onions, just the whites, finely chopped.

And you're just gonna whisk that together.

Now we have one and a half pounds of a beautiful skinless pork belly.

You really want to find pork belly that has a nice ratio of meat and fat.

also if it's too fatty, it's not that big of a deal.

Okay, so you need the pork belly to be sort of in more manageable pieces.

I want this around two, two and a half inches long.

And you're going to cut it into a quarter inch thick so slices.

You can see how nice of a ratio of meat and fat is.

We almost have a little bit more meat than fat and that's kind of optimal.

When this crisps up, it'll be not only fatty, but nice and juicy and meaty.

Make sure to really massage that in there so it coats every single little piece.

Now again, you can cook this right away, but