Photo: Christopher Crouzet · CC BY-SA 4.0
Com Tam (Broken Rice with Grilled Pork Chop)
Saigon broken rice: grains that cracked in milling, cooked so they stay separate, topped with a lemongrass-marinated grilled pork chop, scallion oil and pickled daikon and carrot, with sweet-sour fish sauce poured over the plate.
Ingredients
- Rice
- broken rice · about 400g, sold as broken rice in Asian grocers2 cups
- water · the same volume as the rice2 cups
- Grilled pork chops
- thin bone-in pork chops · about 600g4
- lemongrass · pale lower part only, finely minced2 stalks
- garlic4 cloves
- shallots2
- fish sauce3 tbsp
- sugar2 tbsp
- honey1 tbsp
- neutral oil1 tbsp
- black pepper0.5 tsp
- Scallion oil
- spring onions4
- neutral oil4 tbsp
- salt1 pinch
- Pickled daikon and carrot
- daikon200 g
- carrot1
- vinegar100 ml
- sugar3 tbsp
- salt1 tsp
- Nuoc cham
- fish sauce3 tbsp
- sugar3 tbsp
- lime juice2 tbsp
- warm water6 tbsp
- garlic · minced1 clove
- red chilli · sliced1
- To serve
- cucumber1
- tomato1
Steps
- ⏲ 60 min
Pound the chops to 1cm with the back of a knife or a mallet. Mince the lemongrass, garlic and shallots finely, mix with the fish sauce, sugar, honey, oil and pepper, rub it over the pork and leave for at least an hour. Overnight is better.
- ⏲ 10 min
Cut the daikon and carrot into fine matchsticks, toss with 1 tsp salt for 10 minutes, rinse and squeeze dry. Put them in the vinegar with the sugar dissolved in it for at least 30 minutes.
Cover the broken rice with water, swirl it gently by hand and pour the water off four or five times, until it runs almost clear. Swirl; do not scrub.
- ⏲ 15 min
Put the rice in a pan with the same volume of water and bring it to the boil. Turn the heat as low as it goes, cover and cook for 15 minutes without lifting the lid or stirring.
- ⏲ 10 min
Take it off the heat and leave it covered for 10 minutes, then loosen it with chopsticks, lifting rather than stirring.
- ⏲ 1 min
Slice the spring onions into a heatproof bowl with the salt. Heat the oil until it is just short of smoking and pour it over them.
- ⏲ 10 min
Heat a charcoal grill or a grill pan to medium-high and cook the pork 4-5 minutes a side. The sugar in the marinade catches quickly at the edges, so turn the heat down a little if it colours too fast.
- ⏲ 2 min
Dissolve the sugar in the warm water and stir in the fish sauce, lime juice, garlic and chilli to make the nuoc cham.
Mound the rice on each plate and spoon the scallion oil over it. Add a chop, the pickles, cucumber and tomato, and pour the nuoc cham over the rice.
Variations
- Com tam suon bi cha. The full plate: the grilled chop plus bì (strands of pork and pork skin tossed in roasted rice powder) and chả trứng, a steamed pork-and-egg loaf.
- Fried egg. Many places put a soft fried egg on instead of the chả trứng.
- Over charcoal. On Saigon streets the chops are grilled over coals and the edges char.
- Without broken rice. Use jasmine rice, rinsed, with a little less water. The grains come out longer and smoother.
Tips
- Rinse broken rice more than whole rice. All those broken faces carry more loose starch.
- Use the same volume of water as rice. Less than you would give whole grains.
- Do not stir while it cooks. Loosen it with chopsticks after the rest.
- Pound the chops thin. The marinade is sugary, so a thick chop burns outside before it cooks through.
- Pour the nuoc cham over the rice. It is not a dip here; add as much as you want.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- One broken grain, three results. Cooking rice warns that grains broken while rinsing turn the pot to porridge. Jeonbok-juk breaks its grains on purpose for exactly that, and Senegal's thieboudienne uses broken rice because it drinks a lot of broth and clumps a little. Com tam takes the same grain and wants it separate. The roads to porridge are the loose surface starch and a stirring hand, so this rinses longer and never stirs. The broken faces also let water in quickly, so it needs less water.
- From unsellable rice to Saigon's plate. Broken rice was the cheap grade, cracked in milling, and in bad harvests the rice farmers of the Mekong delta, short of whole rice to sell, cooked it for themselves. Urbanisation in the 20th century carried it into Saigon, where grilled pork and chả trứng were added and it moved from bowl and chopsticks to a plate with fork and spoon. The saying goes that Saigon people eat com tam the way Hanoi people eat pho.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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