Hands down my favorite Hue dish! This is a glutinous dumpling filled with yummy sweet and salty– with a kick caramelized pork belly and shrimp.

Follow my steps to recreate this  yourself, but before you do here are some pointers to keep in mind while you venture to making this:

• You absolutely need hot boiling water to make this dough. I put my flour into a stainless steal bowl and slowly pour over some hot water from a kettle and mix the flour with chopsticks. It helps to have another person, but you can do this by yourself by adding hot water in little increments and then mixing right after and continuing until you’ve reached the right amount of consistency of flour to work with. It takes awhile to figure out how much water, but you’ll get there. It’s intuitive since my parents never measured.. Just went by how wet the dough felt. After mixing as much as we can with our chopsticks we hand mix. Some people probably can’t do this so a Kitchen aid mixer with a hook attachment probably can help mix until its cool enough for you to handle.
• If you like more transparent banh bot loc, you need to roll out your dumpling skins to be thinner. Working with warm dough means you have optimal elasticity to make sure it doesn’t break. If you hand form your dough, you probably won’t get uniformed dumpling and they’ll prob be more opaque. If you’re end game is some really thin skinned translucent banh bot loc, roll it out homies! Use something like a cookie cutter to make your round shapes (or can lid). It’ll save your thumbs the trouble of trying to press the dough down into thin circles to make the dumplings.
• You can simmer your dumplings on medium low heat to make sure your dumplings are more translucent as well, but if your skins are very thick, sometimes its hard to get the inner layers of flour to cook as well.
• If you ever used tapioca starch as a thickening agent, you’ll probably notice that after messing with your soup a lot, it’ll go from thick to thin real quick. Something about the chemical structure of tapioca starch. I’m no chemist, but I do know that if cook banh bot loc, refrigerate, and then microwave them again, the dumplings are significantly less chewy. Also if you add more water and turn this into a paste and steam (banh bot loc goi), the dumplings are very soft. A happy medium for me actually is to make a bunch of dumplings and freeze and cook. I don’t know if it’s because I have banh bot loc readily made, but they’re yummy like this. To do this, form your dumplings and put a layer in a ziploc container and while they’re about frozen shake them around so they don’t stick to each other. Add to boiling water and cook until they’re done when you want to eat them later.
• When you form your dumplings, if you get oil on your edges where you seal, they’ll be more likely to pop open while boiling, so do be careful.
• Below, I’ve listed steps to make the ‘naked’ variation since I don’t like all the work that goes with banana leaves, but you can always use little silicone molds (used for jello/rau cau) to mimic the banh bot loc goi version. The key difference with wrapped dumplings is that with wrapped variations, you make a tapioca paste. So you essentially combine water and cold water together and mix and cook over the stove until it resembles a paste. Then you slap on some of this paste in your mold, your filling, then a bit more paste to cover your filling. The paste’s consistency is significantly less chewy when steamed.
• If you mess up your water to flour ratio, it doesn’t mean you’ve messed up your dumplings. The flour and water ratio is very forgiving. It’s all about being able to work with it. If you’re making the naked variation and are forming a dough, if you have too little water the dumplings are harder to form and the dough just takes more strength to work with and it dries faster. If you’re already at this point, you may need to add a bit water to the edges of your dumplings to seal. If it’s too wet, well your dough is hard to work with because it’s sticky. If it’s too sticky you can add more flour to make it less sticky. If its too dry and you’ve already formed the dough, it’s hard to equally incorporate your extra water… so before it gets to its final dough form try and gauge the dough’s work-ability.
• Washing/dunking your dumplings in a water bath helps cool down your dumplings and also to remove the extra lingering starch on the outside of the dumplings which will make it easier for you to serve and keep your dumplings longer.
• This can be fun to do as a family. Get your family involved. You aint no kitchen slave!

Banh Bot Loc Tran Recipe! (Naked Banh Bot Locs ;))

• Finely cut your pork belly and shrimp
• Mince some garlic
• Get a kettle of hot water going
• Get your marinade for your filling ready to go in a bowl (I use oyster sauce, sugar, cayenne, paprika, black pepper, salt, minced garlic, soy sauce)
• Get your green onion oil ready (finely chop some green onions, add a pinch of salt and sugar, pour hot olive oil on top to cover onions)
• Fry your shallots or use your ready fried shallots

1. Prepare your filling by adding your cut pork into a hot pan. You don’t need any oil if you opted to use pork belly. Add a pinch of salt and some pepper to your pork. Render out some of the fat by sauteing until you see no liquids and only oil at the bottom of the pan. Add your shrimp at this point and saute for a bit before adding  your marinade. If liquid forms, allow some more time for  your filling to absorb the sauce and caramelized. Set aside.
2. Put your tapioca flour into a metal/heat safe bowl
3. Once your water has boiled, let it cool off for ~ 5 minutes and slowly add to your flour. Use chopsticks to stir the hot water into your flour slowly. You only want enough water to be able to roll your flour into a ball. The flour should not be sticky or stick to your  hands. The usual recipe on the bags usually tell you cook the flour in hot water in a pot but this method is for the banh bot loc that’s usually wrapped.
4.  Pinch off small parts of the dough and roll out in a little circle. Make sure you cover your dough with a wet towel to keep from drying. Tapioca flour dries pretty quickly so unless you have a team working with you quickly, keep your dough moist to be manageable. Try not to use extra flour on your dumplings because it’ll be hard to form the seal.
5. Add a tsp of filling into each rolled out tapioca round. I try to add as much as I can to each so it depends on what size you roll yours out to be. What you want to make sure to do is keep any oils or residual sauce of the filling from touching the outside perimeter of the rounds since it’ll make it hard to create the seal.
6. Fold your round in half and over your filling. Pinch tightly around your filling to create a tight seal.
7. Bring a large pot of hot water to boil with some salt. Add all your dumplings and wait for all of them to float to the top. I let to let them boil a little longer since I like them overcooked a bit.
8. Remove from pot and rinse thoroughly by submerging them in a pot of cold water and using chopsticks to gently move them around.
9. Let your dumplings drain for a bit and mix in your shallot oil to coat  your dumplings.
10. Garnish with your fried shallots and serve with some spicy fish sauce!