Hue's royal-city kebab: seasoned pork paste molded around stalks of lemongrass and grilled, then rolled at the table in rice paper with herbs, green banana, and star fruit and dunked in a peanut-liver dipping sauce. The lemongrass skewer doubles as both handle and aromatic.
Also known as: nem lụi, nem lui Hue, Vietnamese lemongrass skewers
Watch it made
Ingredients
- 400 g fatty pork, minced fine, plus 100 g pork back fat, finely diced
- 2 garlic cloves and 2 shallots, minced
- 20 ml fish sauce
- 15 g sugar
- 0.5 tsp white pepper
- 0.5 tsp baking powder
- 12 lemongrass stalks, trimmed
- rice paper, lettuce, mint and perilla, plus sliced star fruit or green banana, for rolling
- dipping sauce: 60 g ground roasted peanuts simmered with 30 ml hoisin, 1 minced garlic clove, chilli and 100 ml water
How to make it
- 1
Pound or beat the pork, fat, garlic, shallot, fish sauce, sugar, pepper and baking powder until the paste turns pale and springy.
- 2
Bruise each lemongrass stalk with the spine of your knife, then mould a 2 cm sleeve of paste around its top half with oiled hands.
- 3
Grill or broil, turning, 8-10 min until blistered gold with the lemongrass perfuming from inside.
- 4
Simmer the peanut dipping sauce 5 min until it coats a spoon.
- 5
Bring everything to the table: each eater wraps a skewer in rice paper with herbs and fruit, pulls out the stalk, and dips.
Pro tip: Bruising the lemongrass before moulding is the Hue move; the crushed core releases its oils into the pork as it grills, seasoning the kebab from the inside out.
