Visiting Mrs. Hai's house in Chau Thanh ( Dong Thap province), YouTuber Khoai Lang Thang (Dinh Vo Hoai Phuong) witnessed the entire process of making pandan rice cake that Mrs. Hai has been making and selling for the past 50 years.

For many generations, Mrs. Hai's family has specialized in making traditional cakes such as banh duc, banh bo, banh chuoi, etc. Among them, she still makes banh duc every day to sell retail at the ferry terminal.

Since she was a little girl, Mrs. Hai has seen her mother make rice cakes and she herself has been making rice cakes for 50 years. The flour mill she is using was bought 65 years ago, when she was only 5-6 years old.

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The pot of green, fragrant pandan cake that Mrs. Hai makes every morning

Every morning, to have a pot of banh duc to sell, she has to wake up at 3am to prepare with her husband.

The first step is to chop the pandan leaves, put them in a blender, blend them with water to get the pandan juice. The rice is soaked the night before, then poured in to blend with the pandan juice.

Rice used to make banh duc must be old-fashioned rice, grown for a long time and should produce dry rice, not sticky rice.

After receiving the mixture of pandan leaf water and ground rice, Mrs. Hai poured in a lot of tapioca starch and mixed it together.

Before pouring the mixture into the pot, she coated the bottom of the pot with a layer of cooking oil to prevent sticking. During the cooking process, the heat must be kept low to keep the cake green. If the heat is too high, the cake will turn yellow.

Every now and then, Mrs. Hai would stir the cake until it was evenly mixed. With each stirring, the cake became a little thicker and more viscous.

While waiting for the cake to cook, Mrs. Hai quickly cooked breakfast for the whole family.

At about 7am, the cake was done, she poured it out onto a table, underneath was a layer of plastic. The hot cake was spread out thinly.

In the past, hot cakes were usually poured into a large wooden mold to make them square. But after a while, Mrs. Hai got used to it, now she just needs to spread it evenly with her hands and lined it with plastic.

While waiting for the cake to cool before cutting, she made the dipping sauce. The dipping sauce for banh duc la pandan is made from sugar, peanuts, and black sesame.

For convenience, she cuts the cake into bite-sized pieces, and uses toothpicks to skewer it when eating. The most “special” part of the pot of banh duc is the burnt part of the pot. It is called burnt but it is just the part of the cake that sticks to the bottom of the pot, and when cooled, it becomes crispy.

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Male YouTuber tries burnt rice cake

Trying a piece of hot banh duc, Khoai Lang Thang commented that the cake was soft, fragrant with pandan leaves and had a dark green color that would not be achieved if only using food coloring.

Mrs. Hai shared that her family’s traditional pandan cake will probably be lost if she stops making it. None of her children will follow in her footsteps because they cannot stay up late and wake up early.

Nowadays, not many people like to eat this cake. In the past, it was very popular, but now it is much less popular. Every day, if she sells all the cakes, she will receive about 500 thousand dong including capital and profit.

The customers who eat the cake are mainly the elderly, who want to enjoy the old taste. Young people now have more attractive choices of cakes and candies so they are no longer interested in the cake. Even her children and grandchildren are the same.

YouTuber Khoai Lang Thang ended his experience with a bag of banh duc given by Mrs. Hai to enjoy.

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Banh duc is cut into small, bite-sized pieces for Mrs. Hai to sell at the ferry dock.

Photo: Khoai Lang Thang

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