Ca cơm kho

This is my mom’s recipe for this favorite anchovy dish. Getting recipes from my mom is a bit frustrating because she doesn’t work according to recipe — all of her cooking is about eyeballing measurements and cooking until things look and taste the way it’s supposed to look and taste. She doesn’t recall the temperature of the stove nor does she remember the order or timing of when things are finished cooking. This is what cooking is like in our household — muscle memory and placing spoonfuls of this and that according to taste.

what we do know for sure is that this dish utilizes a cooking technique “Kho” which is unique to Vietnamese cuisine. The two ingredients are sugar and fish sauce — without these two, you cannot Kho. To Kho means to braise something in sugar and fish sauce until the sugar caramelizes. It’s basically a savory caramel dish.

this is what she does, according to her:

Heat up a neutral flavored oil in sauté pan. Add chopped scallions and minced garlic to oil. Once the oil has sufficiently imbibed the garlic-scallion essence, add the dried anchovies and sauté for a couple minutes under medium heat.

Then add 2 tbs of fish sauce and 1/4 cup of sugar per 1.5 cups of dried of anchovies. If you are health conscious, substitute the fish sauce with 1/2 cup of low sodium soy sauce (this is what my mom says, I don’t know if the sodium content is actually less than 2 tbs)

cook until it caramelizes.

then add black pepper and red pepper flakes.

And cook until the fish absorbs all the liquid.

Ta-da.