Bánh bột chiên chay – Vegan Vietnamese Fried Rice Cake

Bánh bột chiên chay (translated to English as Vegan Vietnamese Fried Rice Cake) is a super delicious street food in Vietnam that I ate a lot for breakfast growing up. It’s typically super oily, super savoury, and full of fun texture.

I’ve been wanting to share this Bánh bột chiên chay recipe for a very long time, but it’s been a bit intimidating for me for a while. My family is notorious for cooking without a recipe: they simply cook based on feeling and texture and while I can do that sometimes and get delicious results, it’s often not as consistent as my grandmother or mother does it. I don’t really know how they manage to do it so well, but I guess I still have a lot to learn!

There are actually a lot of pre-measured packets of this mixture at the grocery store, mostly just telling you to add water and oil, but in case you prefer to measure it out yourself or don’t have access to the pre-measured mixes, this recipe is for you! My grandma uses a recipe that has significantly less tapioca starch in it, but I find that the tapioca adds a really lovely bounciness to the steamed rice cake that yields a really tasty texture that isn’t quite as starchy.

There are a few recipes I see online that have different methods that I find a little tedious. Some say to sift the flours together, some say to add 2/3 of the water as cold, then the final 1/3 water as boiling hot. I’ve seen some recipes that tell you to microwave it and stir in intervals to cook the mixture through, but I’ve made this as lazy as possible from my experience of watching my family cook this (granted, it’s been a while since I saw the whole process start to finish).

Since testing it in my bột chiên chay YouTube video, I’ve just mixed everything directly into the pot, using a whisk to make sure everything is totally incorporated. Then switching to a silicone spoon, you have to stir it over the heat until it thickens. You want it to be a thick, pancake batter, but not so thick that it’s “glompy”. You want thick and gloopy, but not glompy. Does that make sense..?

In any case, I found steaming to be the most hassle-free way to cook this (none of this microwave nonsense, not that I have anything against microwaves, this just seems really cumbersome). Steaming it for 45 minutes cooks the cake through and then you simple cover and refrigerate this until the next morning, when you can fry it up for breakfast!

Now I don’t know if this is still something people eat for breakfast, I assume it is, but I remember on the weekends when I didn’t have to wake up super early for school (I went to school in Vietnam for like a month when I was 7), I would ride on the motorbikes with my grandpa and my mom to a street vendor, and we’d sit on those super sketchy plastic chairs about a foot off the ground and eat a very oily plate of this delicious, savoury concoction.

Bánh bột chiên typically uses a lot of oil to fry up these little golden cubes, then is bound with 1-2 eggs and topped with green onions and a dash of a specific soy sauce. The soy sauce I would see a lot was mostly a soy + sugar + water mixture, but I always have my nuoc mam cham chay recipe in my fridge so I tend to prefer using this is a tastier and (funkier) version of that sauce.

Eating bột chiên chay always kind of brings me back to the sounds of motorbikes honking and whizzing by, and using these little appetizer picks to spear tender chunks of egg stuck to these crispy and chewy squares. I’m so thankful that we have vegan options for eggs that yield such a nostalgic and similar texture. I hope you try out this recipe and enjoy this veganized Vietnamese street food!