How many people with the last name Nguyen do you know? My new friends are the 5th, so I think it's about time I learn to say their last name properly! It is one syllable. And you say it like a question: Nywhen? The soup these two brothers taught me in their apartment in Portland, Maine, is such a welcome recipe as we head into winter... Click at right for the story, how-to-photos and the recipe. Thanks, Quang and Minh!
Thanks mom! She's holding sea bass from their family farm. They sell 2000 pounds of it a year! Quang hopes one day to be a broker that gets a fair price for their fish.
This is what they call "spicy beef flavor paste." It's basically like "Better than Bouillon" beef paste but with spices in it - tomato paste, sugar, more lemongrass, cinnamon, ginger, cumin, star anise... FYI there is MSG in this. I'm working on a recipe for the paste without it and will get back to you. I just found one online and it looks good. 
That dark stuff under the sugar is the spicy beef paste, with a little soy sauce and hot ground chili.
You add the sauteed garlic, onion, and lemongrass to the beef, mush it all together and let it marinate.
Add some carrots.
Prep the fresh garnishes.
He whacks the stems with a pestle he brought with him from Vietnam. 
Fresh Thai basil is different than what's in the supermarket. Thai basil is spicier and more minty. Regular basil will work, but as long as you're going out to find lemongrass or getting it online, try to find Thai basil while you're at it.
Vietnamese Beef Stew
Bo Kho [pronounced Ba Kah]
Cooking Time: 3 hours, or 45 min with pressure cooker
Serves 10-12
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 pounds stew beef
1/3 onion minced
8 stalks lemongrass
3 Tbsp spicy beef flavor paste (comes in a jar labeled Gia Vi Bo Kho)
2 Tbsp sugar
¼ tsp hot chili powder
3 tsp soy sauce
4 cups water
1 ½ lbs. red new potatoes, peeled, halved if necessary to bite size
1 lb. carrots, peeled and cut into 1 inch rounds
1 bunch Thai basil
1 onion (1/3 minced + 2/3 shaved)
pepper
2 baguettes
Cut the green dry tops of the lemongrass off. You’ll just use the stem portions that are light colored. Whack them with the side of your knife (he used a wooden pestle – any hammer type motion will do) to get the juices flowing. Keep four of these whole for stewing in the soup later. Slice the other four crosswise into superfine rounds and then mince into a rough powder. You should have about a cup. In a small sauté pan with a little oil, sauté minced garlic and minced onion first for two minutes, and then add the minced lemongrass and cook for about another five minutes on medium until the entire mixture softens. You don’t want to brown anything, just get it soft and flavor the oil.
Put the meat in a large bowl, and add the sautéed mixture, salt, sugar, spicy beef flavor, hot chili powder, and soy sauce. Mix so the marinade covers beef evenly. Let marinate from 30 minutes to overnight.
In a large soup pot, add a little vegetable oil to just coat the bottom of the pan. When the pan is hot, sauté beef on medium high until beef is browned on the outsides. Then turn the heat to medium. Add 2 cups water or enough to not quite cover the beef, and the whole lemon grass segments.
While the beef is cooking, prepare the fresh garnishes by finely slicing the onion, washing the basil and picking the leaves off, and putting all this on a serving plate where you will be plating up the soup.
When the soup is beginning to boil add the carrots. When you can spear one of the carrots easily with a chopstick (or fork!) remove the carrots with a slotted spoon and put in a bowl temporarily to prevent them from getting mushy. You'll put them back in the soup at the end. (Since more water gets added to the broth later, he says he like the carrots to cook in this stronger broth for better flavor, as opposed to adding them at the end).
When the meat is tender, add potatoes. Cook until you can spear the potato with a chopstick or fork. Add two more cups water so you have more broth in your soup. Add the carrots back in.\
When soup is hot again, add 2-3 tsp flour to small dish, whisk in water, and then pour this flour-water in a small stream into a half submerged ladle in the soup pot that you’re stirring in a circular motion. The goal is to incorporate the flour mixture into the soup without clumping and thicken the broth slightly.
Ladle stew into bowls and garnish each with fresh raw shaved onion, Thai basil leaves, and black pepper.
Copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011
The Nguyen’s Beef Stew
By Lindsay Sterling
You won’t believe what just happened. So I put on my wool coat and wrap my scarf around my neck with no air gaps. Heading out to work to write the latest recipe for Immigrant Kitchens, I slip on our wooden deck. Turns out the deck was covered with the season’s first frozen invisible dew. I don’t know who decided to call our climate temperate. Temperate seems like a ridiculous name for what we’re about to go through. It’s a little joke the climatologists play on us: Temperate. Ha ha ha…. Even the season names seam a little brainwash-y. Fall, winter, and spring are just looking way on the bright side of cold, cold, and cold. We are now entering a little eight-month long conglomerate season I like to call Grim.
Before you go crying off to Florida, remember, Grim is just a funny game we Mainer’s like to play. It involves skiing, drinking hot cocoa after ice skating, and sitting around a hole hoping to catch a fish that you throw back in the hole. And I’ve got something new to do this winter! You’ve got to try cooking and eating Vietnamese beef stew. It’s basically beef stew, but it’s made with spices you’d never dream of, soy sauce instead of salt, and it’s topped with zingy, fresh Thai basil, shaved raw onions, and peppers. My kids and husband gave it thumbs way up.
I learned this stew from two brothers from Cam Ranh, Vietnam. Their names are Quang and Minh Nguyen. The soup’s name is Bo Kho, but they pronounce it Ba Kah. Their mother used to stay up until midnight making it so she could sell in the morning in front of their house. People in Vietnam eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, at parties and everyday. After a couple months of eating Kix, Grape Nuts, and Special K, the brothers called their mom in desperation and had her tell them over the phone how to make the soup.
You saute minced garlic, onion and lemongrass in a small sauté pan in a little oil. You put that sautéed mixture into a bowl with stew beef, sugar, ground chili, soy sauce, and deep red Bo Kho paste (made of blended onion, tomato paste, soy sauce, chili, ginger, cinnamon, cumin, star anise, beef bouillon and paprika). You massage that all together and let the meat marinate for 30 minutes or overnight. Then in a big soup pot you brown the beef in a little oil, add some water, whole lemongrass stems, and cook until the beef is tender. Finally cook carrot rounds and potato wedges in soup until you can spear them easily with a chopstick.
Even though there were a lot of spices in the soup, the lemongrass was the aroma that really had me oo-ing and ah-ing. Lemongrass is the very flavor of warm. We need it here. The unbelievable thing that happened is this. When I was typing the recipe, I was thinking: I need to get some lemongrass. Three seconds later, I kid you not, a friend texts me. (He’s not Vietnamese. He’s a white guy from New Jersey. A crazy gardener dude.) His text says: “Lemongrass in excess. Need any?”
We are in Maine. It is November 12th. We are entering Grim. This is what we do. We defy the growing season by building greenhouses. And then we defy the climate by planting surprisingly adaptable tropical plants in them and harvesting them two weeks before Thanksgiving. Maine? Temperate? Damn cool is more like it.
copyright Lindsay Sterling 2011
