

Note that tamarind paste can be fibrous, so you may want soften and strain it with hot water or stock ahead of time. Tamarind paste can be found at a wide variety of grocery stores, especially those catering to South and Southeast Asian communities. Tamarind paste is the overwhelmingly popular choice for canh chua. Once you've decided on a base, you'll want to think about how you're going to sour your soup. I suppose you could try a beef stock too, but that's going to lead to a much bigger shift in the overall flavour of the soup, and it's a lot less likely to play well with seafood and other light meats. Chicken, fish, and vegetable stocks all make excellent starting points.

That being said, you have a lot of options over what that stock can be. As for the variations, cá is pronounced somewhere between "ka" and "ga" (spoken with a rising tone), tôm sounds like "dome" with a slightly softer d-sound, and gà sounds just like it looks, but is spoken with a falling tone.Īs with so many soups, the quality of your soup stock is going to play a huge role in how well your canh chua turns out. Chua is pronounced like "joo-ah" in southern Vietnam, and more like "choo-ah" in the North. Canh is like "keng", with the final tone sounding more like a spanish ñ than an English ng.
#SWEET AND SOUR SOUP RECIPE HOW TO#
Now, if you're like me and you want to know how to pronounce the things you're cooking, I've got you covered. I'll explore some of these variations in the Recipe Notes below. The base for these soups tends to be pretty broadly similar, but it's worth noting that there's actually a significant degree of flexibility with many of the ingredients. Don't get too hung up on the details, and don't be afraid to explore your possibilities. The names are really more descriptive than anything, so you can imagine all kinds of canh chua something variations. There are plenty of highly specific and/or regional variations, but broadly speaking, the most common variations are fish (canh chua cá), shrimp (canh chua tôm), chicken (canh chua gà), and a broad assortment of vegetable and/or tofu based soups.

In fact, "canh chua" translates to "sour soup," which is a rather intentionally broad name. We're going to make canh chua.Ĭanh chua isn't just a single dish, but is instead a category of related soups, generally differentiated by the focal ingredients. Thai tom yum has managed to make a sizable dent in the collective Western culinary consciousness, but Vietnamese canh chua, Cambodian samlar machu, and Filipino salagang continue to fly decidedly under the radar.įortunately, we're going to do our best to do something about that. It's rich, complex, and memorable stuff to be sure - but it's by no means the only Vietnamese soup worthy of recognition.Ĭhinese hot-and-sour soup has likewise become something of a victim of its own success, eclipsing the many other sour soups found across Asian cuisines. Enormously and understandably popular, pho (or phở, in Vietnamese) has, for better or worse, come to serve as something of an ambassador for the totality of Vietnamese food in the West.

well, just plain-old delicious! Sadly, it's all-too-often overlooked in the world of English-language food writing, overshadowed by two other particularly famous soups: Vietnamese pho, and Chinese hot-and-sour soup. It's easy to make, highly customizable, loaded with wonderfully healthy ingredients, and. Canh chua is Vietnamese sweet-and-sour soup, and it's absolutely fan-flipping-tastic.
