One of the famous restaurants we tried during our recent trip to Hanoi is Cha Ca La Vong. This restaurant is mentioned in the book "1,000 Places to See Before You Die."Only one dish is served here, Cha Ca, at VND110,000 (US$6.20) per serving. The snakehead fish is marinated with tumeric and galangal, and served with vermicelli noodles, unsalted peanuts, chopped yellow chili, spring onion, mint leaves, coriander, mam tom (shrimp paste) and nuoc mam (fish sauce).
We tried replicating this dish in our kitchen and much to our surprise, we succeeded. There are several recipes available on the Internet but we used mainly this one.
TIPS :
We tweaked the recipe by adding a pinch of black pepper (grinded) and salt to the fish when marinating to remove the fishy smell. Please do not use too much pepper as it is not meant to season the fish.
We also used palm sugar instead of caster sugar as suggested by the recipe. This gives the fish a more fragrant smell.
If you cannot get any firm white fish fillet and you have to use a fish whose flesh is fragile (like codfish), you should mix a little bit of cornstarch and palm oil with the fish fillet when marinating. The original Cha Ca has a firm and chewy texture.
Our kitchen experiment
The finished product
