Thursday's bánh mì luncheon

I normally hold my monthly office luncheons on Fridays, but my Korean coworker is taking Friday off so he can take his daughter to the dentist for one of her neverending procedures (she has to go to the dentist repeatedly for some persistent problems). So this week, I aimed for Thursday. The boss was going to be late because he was dealing with car trouble, so I knew that lunch wouldn't be served until about 2 p.m. at the earliest.

This was my bánh mì service, and I think it went all right. My Korean coworker, back from a company Christmas event that I had skipped, raved about the sandwich and ate two whole ones (he loves anything with Western bread); my boss had only one sandwich and said the food was "good" in his usual terse way, but he didn't strike me as all that enthusiastic.

If all you have are French baguettes, and you need to serve your bánh mì on something softer, there's a hack for that: take your baguettes, wrap them in damp paper towels, and microwave them until the crust softens. You've basically ruined a perfectly good baguette, but you now have serviceable hoagie rolls, and that's the strategy I adopted Thursday afternoon.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, bánh mì have a lot of moving parts, and there's a certain logic to how the sandwich is put together, with everything being where and how it is for a reason. For example: when you cut the baguette for the sandwich, you're supposed to leave a hinge. As I quickly discovered, the hinge creates a taco-like effect, holding in the massive number of elements going into the sandwich: sauces, several varieties of protein, pickled vegetables, fresh vegetables, and more sauce. Using the bread-hinge, you stack your sandwich and then close it, and it doesn't spill all over the place. The order of the elements that I described two sentences ago is the logical order by which to stack the sandwich: stack the bánh mì haphazardly, and you end up with a collapsing mess.

While my Korean coworker raved about the sandwiches, I was disappointed to see that he had no idea what he was doing as he stacked the sandwich elements—and this was after I had explained the order (and my boss had jokingly made fun of my rigidity, sarcastically ordering my coworker to Get it right!). My coworker also has a nasty tendency to put everything into the microwave before he eats it, and he did this to his sandwich after he had put on the hoisin mayo (you shouldn't microwave mayonnaise—it splits!) and the fresh vegetables, neither of which had been designed by God to endure the merciless bombardment of radiation from the little box of death. Bye bye, crunchiness. In that moment, I began to understand how it was that my coworker had been struggling to make apple pies after supposedly being "inspired" by my pies: he'd been having trouble because he has no goddamn common sense. Look, my coworker is a nice guy and a fine human being, but I now realize he's a disaster in the kitchen, and he needs help. Maybe teaching him some basic cooking techniques will be a 2024 project.

I had bought a mini-baguette, microwaved it with the damp-towel hack, split the bread with a bread knife, and told my coworker at least twice that that bread was his to use. He completely ignored this, reached into a paper sleeve for a full-length baguette I had also bought, hand-tore a length of the baguette instead of using our office's bread knife, jaggedly hand-split the baguette segment along its length... and when he saw my aghast face, he lamely said, "I thought that other mini-baguette was yours." Again, I had told him several times that that mini-baguette was his. Jesus fucking Christ. I finally insisted that he take the mini-baguette that I had pre-split for him, and that's when he began stacking the sandwich elements the wrong way. On the bright side, he said he loved the sandwich. I was left thinking that I should have made his sandwich for him. I'm still shaking my head.

Here are a few pics from the luncheon:

The bulgogi, star of the show, was from a Maangchi recipe, and I used skirt steak. I turned out great.

Other sandwich elements: pickled turnip, pickled carrot, two types of char siu pork, sliced cucumber, sliced chili peppers, cilantro, hoisin mayo, and garlic-chili sauce that wasn't meant to be used with bulgogi. (It was for the "classic" bánh mì with liver pâté. Which no one ate. But my coworker slathered some garlic-chili sauce onto his bulgogi bánh mì anyway.)

The bulgogi sauce/glaze, which only I used.

The bánh mì that I made from my coworker's hand-ripped(!) baguette.

We've got enough leftovers that I can make myself at least two more sandwiches Friday afternoon. And since I'll be making them, they'll be properly made.

This was a good luncheon, but a bit frustrating.