It was an early start to our second day, and for good reason; we had booked ourselves onto a cooking class with the intention of learning some classic Vietnamese dishes, and part of the experience was visiting a local market to source fresh ingredients for use in our studies. After a quick breakfast at the nearby Sozo Cafe, we were met by our guide, a young law student with excellent English called Lieu, who led us off by taxi to meet our teacher for the morning.

After negotiating our way through rush-hour traffic, we found ourselves at a quieter back-street, and to the house of our teacher, a retired microbiology lecturer who whisked us off to the nearby market to gather produce. We’ve visited Vietnamese markets before, and this was no different; noisy, colourful and barely any space to move, with just about every food item you could possibly want all fresh that day. Obviously well versed in the art of market shopping, our teacher whipped from stall to stall purchasing ingredients, stopping only to show us the interesting stuff (including fresh noodles sold by weight; why can’t we get these at home?).

Returning to the house, we proceeded to prepare all the stuff that we’d bought; seasoning stock for Pho, mixing ingredients for spring roll filling, preparing vegetables for garnish. It was a lengthy process, but by the time we were finished, things were already looking beautify and smelling gorgeous. Wrapping spring rolls was a round-table affair, with each of us having our own rice-paper skins and grabbing filling from a shared bowl, folding and wrapping it all into a neat parcel. By the time we were finished, we had nearly fifty of them, ready to douse into a pan of pre-heated hot oil.

Making pho (Vietnamese noodle soup) is a time consuming affair (it takes hours to boil the broth to make it), so we only really managed to assist with the end stage; the key to good pho seems to be how lightly everything is cooked; all the main ingredients (including the meat) are blanched lightly in hot water, and kept separate from the broth until served; everything comes together right at the end, with fresh noodles, vegetables and meat combined with the stock moments before serving, keeping everything crisp and delicate.

With cooking over, we sat down to eat with our host and her family; the spread we prepared was magnificent to say the least (helped in no small part to the decorative centrepiece), and the eating was enjoyed just as much as the preparation. We did arrive at a disappointing conclusion though; we weren’t going to be able to replicate any of this well back home. The dependence on fresh ingredients (as in the freshly killed / picked / fished today kind of fresh), preparation time and pure skill required to make these deceptively simple dishes means that we won’t be making Vietnamese spring rolls and Pho as a quick dinner after work, but at least we ate enough that lunchtime to last us the rest of the day…