Another world of fascinating flavors awaits adventurous home cooks.

Let’s call it “Product Disorientation.”

We are adrift in the aisles of a grocery store, the shelves of which are lined with hundreds of things in brightly colored packages, but we scarcely recognize any of them.  Dozens of varieties of dried noodles teeter in disorderly stacks. Promising-looking sauces and pickled somethings and exotic spices are piled from floor to ceiling. One aisle seems to be entirely devoted to brands of dried seaweed. Another sports about fifty sorts of soy sauce. Is that a couple of dozen duck eggs on the counter? Even the fruit and vegetable section seems intimidating. What, for example, is this huge, prickly, green thing? Or this bundle of what look like two-foot-long green beans? A huge stack of golden mangoes looks inviting, but what are we going to do with them? If it all sounds impossibly exotic—the sort of thing you’d expect to find in a market in Hong Kong or Hanoi or Jakarta—you’d be right. Except that this one is no further afield than Florida Boulevard. The store is Vinh Phat, a grocery that has been delighting devotees of Asian cuisine—and disorienting everyone else—in Baton Rouge since 1984.

Product disorientation is what makes experimenting with new ethnic cuisines hard for the home cook. After all, it’s difficult to try a new recipe if you can’t even be sure of recognizing all its ingredients. And Vinh Phat, with its thousands of products representing the cuisines of China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and more, is a tantalizing but confounding place to begin the journey.

So we got a guide.

Paul Wong is no stranger to Asian cuisine. True; more than forty years have passed since the owner of Paul Wong’s Chinese & Sushi at the Main Street Market in downtown Baton Rouge moved with his family from China to the United States. But in the intervening years the Wong family kept in close touch with the cuisine of their homeland. The family moved to Baton Rouge in 1969, and brought the city its first full-service Chinese restaurant—M.K. Wong’s Chinese Drive-In on Nicholson—shortly thereafter. Since then they have operated the Chinese Inn & Restaurant in Denham Springs and, since 2006, Paul has been serving Chinese dishes and sushi to the Main Street Market’s lunch crowd. After the busy lunch rush one Tuesday recently, Wong joined us at Vinh Phat to introduce a few Asian culinary traditions to those of us who cook in western kitchens. The dishes he suggested lend themselves to preparation at home without a lot of new tools, while still promising a touch of the exotic into the bargain.

We started with a visit to Vinh Phat’s meat and seafood department, where familiar cuts like chops and ribs are displayed alongside more exotic-looking possibilities such as chicken’s feet and whole fish of various sorts. But Wong reached for a package of spiced pork balls from one of the department’s freezers. “Asian cooks love these,” he observed of the marble-sized meatballs, which are tender, flavorsome, and excellent in a soup or stir-fry. Thus inspired, Wong went in search of other ingredients to make a soup. He pounced on a package of dried seaweed and some green onions. “You soak the seaweed, then drain it, then put it in broth with the pork, and some vegetables, if you like. Easy.”

A couple of doors down from the pork balls, the discovery of whole frozen cuttlefish, or squid, gave our guide another idea. “Squid is great for a stir-fry,” he suggested. Stir-fry squid for a few minutes with garlic and ginger, then onions, celery, carrots, and mushrooms for flavor; and finish it with some oyster sauce. Fantastic.”

Into the basket went the cuttlefish. But once in the vegetable aisle to pick up shiitake mushrooms, garlic, and ginger (“Always look for ginger that’s smooth on the outside, not wrinkled or dried-up-looking”), the sight of bags of leafy green baby bok choy had Wong modifying his stir-fry suggestion a bit. “Take these baby bok choy and cut them in half lengthwise. Boil them in salted water for a few minutes, and lay them on the plate in a star. Then you can serve the stir fry over them. Makes it look really nice.”

These dishes seemed simple enough. But how about something a little more adventuresome? Wong turned to Vinh Phat owner Nam Thai: “OK; you got any thousand-year-old-eggs?” Also known as a “century egg,” this Chinese delicacy is a duck egg that has been preserved in a mixture of clay, ash, salt, lime and rice straw for several months. Completely black on the outside and amber within, the resulting egg develops a pungent cheese-like flavor. Nam Thai pointed us in the right direction and, in short order, my basket was furnished with a box of preserved eggs, a package of soft tofu, green onions and a kind of pickled cabbage that hails from Thailand. “Chop the onion up very fine, mix it with some pickle, then chop the eggs and the tofu up, too, and blend it all together,” said Wong. “This is a great appetizer. When we make this at my house, I’ll eat the whole thing!”

Thus equipped with the ingredients for an appetizer, a soup and a main course, we made for the register, via the tray of mangoes (dessert). The entire bill came to less than thirty dollars.

“Everything you have there, my family would love,” said our guide as we parted ways—he back to his restaurant and I towards home to dust off my wok. These dishes turned out to be quite easy to prepare. Using only a saucepan, a wok, some peanut oil and the purchased ingredients, I managed to produce a three-course feast that, while its presentation might not quite have been up to the standards of Paul Wong’s Chinese & Sushi, was rich, flavorsome, and fun to cook.

 

Vinh Phat Oriental Market
12351 Florida Boulevard, Baton Rouge
(225) 273-1175
www.vinhphatmarket.com

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