Banh Mi Bread Fails and Wins

After many days of rice noodles and pho recipe write, I decided to bake bread for homemade banh mi. It was early, around 8am, when I started, and for some reason, I decided to go rogue and tinker with my tried-and-true banh mi roll recipe, the one that I’d worked on for three months for The Banh Mi Handbook.

The tinkering had to do with using an industrial leavening: dough improver, or rather, mejorante para pan. It’s a powdery substance that cookbook author Kate Leahy got for me by way of her aunt, who lives in Mexico and brought it to the U.S. for me. Kate’s a good friend and curious cook. I’d not used the mejorante para pan in a couple of years so I was curious. Actually, I was inspired by Jyoti, a Banh Mi Handbook reader in Kenya who got her hands on dough improver and baked up some lovely rolls; she emailed me to ask how much to use and together we guesstimated an amount that worked out for her.

Anyway, I had this Mexican dough improver and after mixing up the dough, I knew something was wrong. The dough was slack but I baked it up anyway. The resulting rolls, which you see above, were hard and very very chewy – like rustic bread. I expected a puffy rise like commercially-baked bolillo roles. Not.

“Why are they so flat today?” Rory asked me. Because I was trying something new, I admitted. My husband indulges my experimental nature and professional obsessions. I assured him that lunch was not at stake. We were going to have banh mi. It wasn’t like past times, when I was experimenting and experienced solid fails.

If you think I turn out perfect food every time, I don’t. To prove it, here are highlights of my banh mi bread fiascos.

Rice Flour Vietnamese baguette – Is the secret to banh mi a crisp baguette-style roll made out of rice flour? Sorry, no. Rice flour does not rise like wheat flour because of the lack of wheat gluten. However, there’s a myth that Vietnamese banh mi is made with rice flour-based baguettes. During the course of writing The Banh Mi Handbook, I spent about a week obsessed with baking rice flour baguettes from recipes published in cookbooks written by established authors. There were no finished photos for me to inspect their results but I trusted my colleagues—until I looked at the often comical results.

The above banh mi rolls (or mini-baguettes) were very hearty, i.e., texturally hard and dense. The color was not golden brown because there was a fair amount of rice flour mixed in with wheat flour. Rice flour does not brown the way wheat does. I kept lowering the amount of rice flour until I realized that it didn’t do much for the bread. Turns out that rice flour may be used in small quantities to absorb humidity in the dough. Makes sense in tropical Vietnam. An America bread baker once told me that but I doubted him. Alas, I found out myself. A little rice flour yes. But a lot of rice flour yields baguettes that look like they belong in a bad museum display. Every rice flour baguette that I’ve baked has sadly been inedible. I threw them away.

After lots of sleuthing and a happy circumstance, I found out that dough improver/conditioner and special commercial-grade flour were the key to the crisp, light bread used for banh mi. That’s how I eventually arrived at the recipe in The Banh Mi Handbook.

Gluten-Free Banh Mi Rolls – You’d think I’d learned my lesson with the rice flour. Last year I tried baking a gluten-free rolls for banh mi. I baked and off for about a month, investing a decent amount of money on various flours and starches. It was an emotional roller coaster ride as I’d watch the dough rise, then slide them into the oven to bake, only to end up with rocks.

The above were my best attempts and they were batons capable of hurting someone. I could defend myself with them but not eat them. At the supermarket, I look at gluten-free rolls with envy. I still have my notes and some day, I’m going to tackle the gluten-free rolls again.

Dough Improver Banh Mi Rolls – The latest banh mi rolls were not a total loss, as I promised my husband. I got out the accouterments and prepared tofu banh mi for us. It was a darn good sandwich. All the elements were there to create banh mi's signature synergy. The bread was simply a frame for the stuff inside, but the bread was hard to eat. After lunch, the roof of my mouth slightly ached. My husband looked at me with a look that said, "Will they stay or will they go?". The rolls went into the trash.

Thinking about what went wrong today (maybe the improver was old or I was off my bread baking game), I looked through my photo archives. I found images of the perfect banh mi rolls baked from the recipe in The Banh Mi Handbook.

Made from supermarket and health food market ingredients, the dough rises into plump torpedoes and fill the house with bread perfume as they bake. During cooling, sometimes my banh mi rolls crack ever so slightly. When that happens, I lean in to listen. I look forward to that experience again.

I’ve had countless mishaps on my way to success in the kitchen. Whenever there’s a fail, I say to myself that it’s just food and move on. I know that I’ll never starve and more often than not, we eat pretty well. So keep on cooking!

What have been some of your kitchen failures and successes? I just shared mine!