Summer weather of the unbearable sort finally arrived last weekend to the Twin Cities and left me craving light, fresh flavors. Hence, fish tacos! Here’s the recipe if you are so inclined.

Fish:

• Filet of a fish of your choice; our’s was cod
• Flour
• A few eggs
• 1 cup cornmeal
• A handful of parsley, minced
• Green onion, minced
• 2 T paprika
• 1 t cayenne
• Salt and black pepper
• Oil for frying

Cut the fish into pieces of approximately equal size. What size? That depends on your preference and your fish. I managed to get pretty even 4″x1″x½” pieces. Prepare a breading station: fill one wide, shallow vessel with flour and season with salt and pepper. Prepare another with beaten egg. In a third, place the combination of cornmeal, a 1/2 cup of flour, the parsley, the green onion, the paprika, the cayenne, and a little pepper.

Now you are ready to bread the fish. Observe a strict “wet hand, dry hand” regime: designate which hand is wet hand and which hand is dry hand and don’t deviate from them for a second so help you God. Take your wet hand and pick up a piece or two of fish and drop it in the seasoned flour. Use your dry hand to splash a little flour over the exposed pieces of fish flesh so as to avoid any “wet” contamination. Toss the fish around to make sure it is well-coated in flour, shake off the excess, and deposit it in the egg wash using your dry hand, avoiding getting any egg on said hand. Use your wet hand to coat the fish in egg, and after shaking off the excess drop it in the cornmeal mixture. Use your dry hand to move the fish around (being careful not to get it wet!) in the cornmeal and then put it on a tray. Repeat until all the fish is breaded.

Heat enough oil that the fish pieces can float freely in a high-sided frying pan or dutch oven to 350°F. Add a few pieces of fish at a time to the oil. The fish pieces will float when they are done, although it might be a good idea to allow a little extra time for browning. Remove the fish from the oil with tongs or a slotted spoon on to paper towels and proceed with frying the rest of the fish.

Sour Cream Sauce:

The idea here was kind of to make a Mexican-style tartar sauce but I pretty quickly started just throwing the things I had from the farmers’ market into some sour cream.

• Kernels from one ear of corn, uncooked
• Roma tomato, diced
• Jalapeño, minced
• 1 clove of garlic, minced or pressed through a garlic press
• 1/3 c sour cream
• Milk
• Salt

Mix together the first five ingredients, then use milk to thin the sauce to the consistency you like. For whatever reason, I like thin sour cream (perhaps it mixes better with the other taco ingredients instead of sitting aloof in a pile on top). Add salt until you can taste everything.

This is a perfect place to use any pickled cabbage you have sitting around.

Serve with warm corn tortillas.

With Martha out of town all week, I needed to hold back at the Midtown Farmers’ Market. There’s only so much produce one person can go through in a week! On the other hand, it’s the first day of August, what feels like the midpoint of the growing season, and that means there is tons of basically irresistible produce. I did the best that I could with restraint, but I am only a man. In terms of summer produce, there’s really anything you could ever want: summer squash, cucumbers, lettuces, kale, herbs, sweet corn, eggplant, carrots, radishes, beets, some peppers. Tomatoes are still just getting started: only a few stands have them and their are not many varieties to choose between. But who can resist in-season tomatoes, even if it’s just the beginning of the season?

Since I’m on my own this week, my strategy for buying was based on projects. I bought a bunch of dill, a quart of jalapeños and a bunch of pearl onions with pickles in mind. Specifically, I need to preserve a ton of cucumbers from last week before they tragically rot in the crisper drawer, as well as some even older beans. I may also pickle the jalapeños on their own. I doubt I’ll have any trouble going through my five tomatoes, but they can always be turned into a canned salsa if need be. I bought broccoli with a recipe in mind that should feed me for a few days, and while I didn’t have anything in mind for sweet corn I’m really a sucker for the stuff and couldn’t pass it up.

And speaking of not being able to pass up, take a look at those raspberries!

Since the bánh mì is the sandwich of the moment—with a New York Times article and plenty of blog coverage—I thought I’d add my voice to the chorus.

My relationship with the venerable Vietnamese sandwich started well before I knew its name, when Emeril Lagasse (a man who I am not ashamed to admit inspired me to cook in a big way) featured a recipe for “Vietnamese-style Poor Boys” on one of his many Food Network shows. Emeril was taking a bit of liberty with his nomenclature, but I recognized a good thing when I saw it and made this sandwich several times over the years. My other bánh mì breakthrough was when I began working as a cook at Blackbird Café in Minneapolis, which features a pretty excellent version on its menu. Nothing like making a sandwich a hundred times to come to appreciate its nuances.

So there are my two big influences in banh mi-making: a creole TV chef and a South Minneapolis neighborhood restaurant. I’ve never been to Vietnam. But, great food knows no borders—earlier this week I set out to make my banh mi from scratch.

As with any sandwich this popular and widespread, or any sandwich at all for that matter, there is no exact consensus on what ingredients go in it. But from my experience eating the sandwiches, I knew what I wanted: liver pâté, roast and pulled pork, pickled carrots and daikon, sliced cucumber, cilantro, jalapeño and mayo all on a baguette-style roll.

Just as every house needs a foundation, every great sandwich needs to be built from a strong, tasty base; the first thing to tackle was the bread. Because it works very well for me, I used my standard sourdough bread recipe, which consists of mostly white flour with a little wheat flour thrown in and is hydrated to about 68%. This produces a nicely airy crumb while not being so wet as to be unworkable. After the initial rise I cut off 8 0z pieces and shaped them into rough bâtards. After a rest, a slash and 20 minutes on a 450° baking stone, I had respectable rolls on which to build my sandwich.

Although some restaurants omit it, in my mind liver pâté is essential to a great bánh mì—something about its rich fattiness and that funky liver flavor. Ever since finding an old copy of Terrines, Pâtés and Galantines in an antique store in Red Wing, MN I have been thoroughly immersed in the world of potted meats. Since it was going to be a spread for my sandwich, I needed to make a smooth pâté, rather than my usual chunky, rustic terrines. A food processor made this really easy: chunks of lamb liver, chunks of pork fat, spices are pureed in a matter of seconds. (Not really a process for the squeamish, you’re basically making liquid meat). If I were really anal retentive (ok, more anal retentive) I would have passed the resulting puree through a drum sieve to make sure it was perfectly smooth. To cook the pâté, without overcooking it, I utilized a double boiler. I cooked the ruby mixture until it had become more beige and granular and looked done. Pâté!

With the pâté resting in the refrigerator developing its wonderful flavors, it was time to tackle what is in some ways the star of the show: the pork. The question of the preparation of the pork is another area where pretty much everybody differs, but I fell back to experience. For one thing, I know that I prefer tender pulled pork to pork cooked more quickly.  Many of the bánh mì I have tried seem to use some kind of hoisin barbecue sauce, but I just rubbed the meat with salt, pepper and chinese five-spice. The warm, sweet spices are already somewhat present in the pâté and complement the heat of jalapeños.

Since the chunks of pork form a craggy, uneven layer, for a level sandwich you need something to build up while filling the cracks. This is where I like to bring in the pickled carrots. Since there was daikon at the farmers’ market, I used that as well (apparently this is traditional), shredding both.

I fell in love with making quick pickles at Blackbird. It’s as easy as taking a vegetable, cutting it into small pieces (or shredding), tossing it with a hot pepper, a garlic clove, whole peppercorns, coriander seed, and/or whatever other pickling spices call to you, and pouring boiling vinegar, water, salt and sugar over it all, then letting it sit in the refrigerator over night. I put a lot of sugar in to make a sweet pickle, since pork loves sweet things.

With a solid level built up by my pickled roots, I was ready to stack on the fresh vegetables. This was the only part of the process that felt like cheating since I didn’t have to do anything except for clean and cut the vegetables—it felt like it would have been more “from scratch” to have grown them myself. But since I won’t be growing hot peppers in my northern-exposed apartment windows anytime soon, store vegetables would have to do. It’s not like I raised the pig.

Thick slices of cucumber are essential to cool your tongue from the punishment meted out by thin slices of jalapeño. If you are one of those unfortunate individuals to have been cursed by God with a distaste for cilantro,that’s too bad, because the best bánh mìs pile it on, both the fragrant leaves and the crunchy stems.

With the sandwich elements perfectly balanced structurally, there remained only to add the finishing touch to top it all off and bind it all together: mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise can be put together from scratch really easily and can taste a bit richer and have a silkier texture than the heavily processed stuff from the jar (but honestly, if it weren’t for the ‘from-scratch’ gimmick behind this post, I probably would have whipped out the Hellmann’s). It’s just a matter of whisking an egg yolk with some lemon juice, salt, pepper and sugar and then slowly whisking in olive oil until you have mayonnaise.

And so, applying the top piece of bread, I had the scratch bánh mì: built from the ground up, each element custom designed to my exacting specifications. Was it worth it? Well besides the fact that it was more like fun than work to build each element of the sandwich, the sandwich itself was very good; I wouldn’t to call it “the ultimate bánh mì” because I have yet to meet a bánh mì I didn’t like. With pork, pâté, cool cucumbers, jalapeños, fragrant cilantro, sweet pickled carrots and rich mayonnaise on good bread you can’t go wrong. So while I instinctively bristle at all the hype, there is scarcely a sandwich that deserves it more than the bánh mì.