Hoàng Lan

The northern province of Lạng Sơn is not only well known for its specialties such as roasted duck, but also the deep-fried duck nuggets, locally known as bánh áp chao.

The Chairman of Lạng Sơn Province’s Culture Heritage Association, Hoàng Văn Páo, said the dish is supposedly originated from China, arriving in Việt Nam’s northern region, including Lạng Sơn, over a hundred years ago.

It was cooked by the Tày and Nùng ethnic groups in the region as a special cake within the province and it was them who gave it the name áp chao since those early days, explained Páo.

Lạng Sơn resident Nguyễn Thị Thanh, who has been selling the cake for more than 30 years, said each step of making the cake requires meticulous care and each seller has her own special recipe to tempt the foodies.

Thanh said her recipe includes sticky rice and ordinary rice, soaked in cold water for four to five hours before grinding the two into a wet dough.

The dough is then mixed with soybean powder and taro threads, those being the indispensable ingredients to make the cake, because they give help create the special fragrance and make the cake even softer, said Thanh.

“I choose the best duck breast, cut it into pieces and soak it with the spice, broth mix, seasoning powder (consisting of five ingredients including cinnamon, seed of anise-tree and seed of sweet basil), salt and pepper,” said Thanh, adding that she sells the cake year-round, but her busiest time is from late autumn to winter (from November to March each year).

Housewife Nông Thị Vui in Lạng Sơn’s Cao Lộc District said almost all of her neighbours make the cake as an afternoon snack in winter days.

”It helps to warm up your body during severe cold days so much," Vui said.

“It is my family’s favourite cake. I was taught how to make the cake when I was very young. We all would join in together, making the batter and then helping to soak the duck meat in spices according to our own taste.

"Then we would all sit around the fire to wait for my mother or sometimes my grandmother to get the fried cake out from a cooking pan. We enjoy the cake so much.” 

A food lover from Hà Nội named Trần Khánh Phượng, who likes to visit Lạng Sơn’s Mẫu Sơn mountain peak every year to enjoy snow and ice during severe winter days, said that when Hanoians first saw áp chao cake, it looked to them like fried rice cake, or bánh rán in Vietnamese, but the special difference was its duck meat filling.

The dish is even more delicious if it is eaten with fresh herbs and dipped in sour and sweet fish sauce, with papaya salad topped with fresh chilli and pepper, said Phượng.

“The brown cake is crispy and crunchy on the outside, with its inner bite soft and fragrant centre best when mixed with savoury and buttery fat meat duck, creating a uniquely tasty great cake, which no foodies can refuse,” she said.

She added that her friends are still talking about the time they ate deep-fried duck legs and duck inners, dippled in mixed fish sauce with chilli, fermented bamboo shoot and mác mật (a kind of forest wild pepper).

Áp chao cake has become an exquisite culinary culture of Lạng Sơn people, who have adapted this dish to include rustic characteristics from virgin forests into the cake, said Páo. VNS