Pork banh mi sandwich
- Preparation 1 h 15
- Refrigeration 1 h
- Cooking 15 min
- Servings 4 to 6
- Freezing I do not suggest
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🥖 A banh mi that started with a first date
Straight up: I have never been to Vietnam, and I have never eaten a real street banh mi. I built this one for a date. I had invited over a girl who had just come back from Vietnam, and she talked about those sandwiches like they were the eighth wonder of the world. So I chased the idea with what I had in my head and in my fridge. I don’t have the reference, and I’ll own that. But this sandwich is seriously good.
🐖 Oven-baked pork tenderloin, not a three-hour roast
The meat is pork tenderloin sliced as thin as you can manage, marinated for an hour in fish sauce, maple syrup, soy sauce, ginger and lime juice. Then it goes into a 450°F (230°C) oven for about fifteen minutes, just long enough to cook through without drying out. Fifteen minutes. The maple syrup caramelizes along the edges of the slices, and that is exactly what you want to bite into once it is packed inside a baguette.
🌶️ Fill it. Actually fill it.
There is a rule floating around everywhere that says the number one banh mi mistake is overfilling it. I don’t really agree with that, and I’ll say it plainly. If you’re genuinely hungry, fill it. If you want less, put less in. It’s your sandwich, not a competition. Between the sambal mayo, the pickled vegetables, the cucumber strips and the cilantro, there is room for all of it, and it tastes better when it spills a little.
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🧊 Pull the tenderloin from the freezer too early, on purpose
This is the move I use every single time, and almost nobody mentions it. A pork tenderloin that is still a little frozen slices infinitely better than a soft one straight out of the fridge. The blade doesn’t slide, the meat doesn’t squash under the knife, and you end up with genuinely thin slices instead of thick chunks that turn tough in the oven. Go as thin as you can. That single detail is the difference between meat that disappears into the baguette and meat you have to tear at.
Want to push it further? Run the sheet under the broiler for the last couple of minutes. The maple syrup in the marinade caramelizes across the top of the slices and it changes the whole sandwich. Watch it though. There are about forty seconds between caramelized and burnt.
🔪 Julienne by knife, or by mandoline
Ideally you cut the carrots and daikon into julienne with a knife. Honestly though, a mandoline slicer is the best tool for it: faster, and every stick comes out the same thickness, which means they all pickle at the same rate. If you only want the vegetables without building the whole sandwich, I have pickled carrots and daikon written up as its own recipe.
🥖 One baguette, cut into 4 or 6
A baguette cut into four gives you four big sandwiches. Cut into six, you get six more reasonable portions, which is what I do when there is something else coming to the table. Use a serrated bread knife rather than a chef’s knife so the crust splits instead of crushing.
📅 Make it ahead
Everything can be done ahead. The vegetables, slicing the meat, marinating the meat: all of it. Except the cooking, maybe. Pickle the vegetables the morning of or the night before, and the pork is perfectly happy sitting in its marinade overnight. From scratch you’re looking at about 2 hours 30 total, fridge time included, so split it over two days and all that’s left at supper is fifteen minutes of oven.
🫙 What to do with leftover pickled vegetables
They’ll easily keep a few weeks in the fridge. And they’re not stuck being banh mi filling: they go into any other sandwich, into an Asian stir fry, or into a salad. I usually make more than I need for exactly that reason.
🐟 What I left out, and why
A traditional Vietnamese banh mi often carries pork liver pâté and a splash of Maggi seasoning. I simply didn’t know that world well enough, so I left both out rather than fake it. If you know them better than I do, add them, nothing here fights against it. As for fish sauce, I buy the same one every time and I couldn’t tell you the brand if my life depended on it. Taste your marinade before you pour it over the pork: saltiness swings a lot from one bottle to the next.
✅ What to serve with my pork banh mi
A banh mi stands on its own. But if you want a full meal out of it, serve it with a salad or a soup. My Asian cucumber salad is the first thing I reach for, since it lives in the same acidic register as the pickled vegetables without fighting them. If you want to stay in Vietnam all evening, Vietnamese pho soup is the move, and shrimp and pork Asian soup works when you’re short on time. And for a completely different weeknight supper using the same cut, try my 5-spices pork tenderloins.
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Ingredients for the pickled vegetables
- 1 1/2 cup (375 ml) white vinegar
- 1 cup (250 ml) water
- 1 1/2 tablespoon (22.5 ml) sugar
- 2 teaspoons (10 ml) salt
- 1 cup (250 ml) daikon (or radish), cut into julienne
- 1 cup (250 ml) carrots, cut into julienne
Ingredients for the marinade
- 1 3/4 lb (800 g) pork tenderloin, thinly sliced
- 1/3 cup (80 ml) fish sauce
- 1/3 cup (80 ml) maple syrup
- 1/4 cup (60 ml) soy sauce
- 2 tablespoons (30 ml) mirin
- Juice of 1 lime
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) grated fresh ginger
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) sesame oil
- 3 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
Ingredients for the spicy mayonnaise
- 1/2 cup (125 ml) mayonnaise
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) sambal oelek
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) honey
- 1 tablespoon (15 ml) rice vinegar
- 2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
Ingredients for the sandwiches
- 1 baguette, cut into 4 (or 6) pieces
- Cucumber strips
- Fresh cilantro
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Preparation
- In a saucepan heated over high heat, put the vinegar, water, sugar and salt and stir. Heat for a few minutes while stirring, just enough to dissolve the salt and sugar. Remove from heat, add the daikon and carrots and stir. Let marinate for 30 minutes, then drain. Set aside.
- Place the pork in a large airtight container and set aside.
- In a bowl, combine the fish sauce, maple syrup, soy sauce, mirin, lime juice, ginger, sesame oil and garlic, season with salt and pepper and mix. Pour over the pork, toss and refrigerate for 1 hour.
- In a bowl, combine the ingredients for the mayonnaise, season with salt and pepper and mix. Refrigerate.
- Preheat the oven to 450°F (230°C). Drain the meat, spread it out on a baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake for about 15 minutes, or until the meat is cooked through but still juicy.
- Cut the baguette into 4 (or 6) pieces, split each piece open, spread plenty of mayonnaise inside and fill with meat. Add pickled vegetables, a few cucumber strips and lots of fresh cilantro!
A banh mi, written bánh mì with its accents, is a Vietnamese sandwich built on the baguette the French left behind. The skeleton barely changes: a crusty baguette, mayonnaise, a marinated meat, vinegar-pickled vegetables, cucumber and a lot of cilantro. Traditionally there is also pork liver pâté spread on the bread and a splash of Maggi seasoning. I left both out of mine, honestly because I didn’t know them well enough to do them justice. What you get instead is oven-baked pork tenderloin marinated in fish sauce and maple syrup, pickled carrots and daikon, and a sambal mayo.
A baguette. In Vietnam the bread is a lighter, airier baguette made partly with rice flour, with a thin shattering crust, but a regular grocery-store baguette does the job perfectly well here. One baguette cut into four gives you four generous sandwiches, or cut it into six for smaller portions. Cut it with a serrated bread knife so the crust splits instead of compressing, and split each piece most of the way through rather than all the way so nothing falls out the back. If the crust has gone soft, three or four minutes in the oven brings it right back.
Mine is a spicy mayonnaise stirred together cold: mayonnaise, sambal oelek, honey, rice vinegar and finely chopped garlic. Everything goes in a bowl, salt, pepper, mix, and back in the fridge while the rest comes together. The honey rounds off the sambal and the rice vinegar keeps the whole thing from feeling heavy. Spread it generously on both cut sides of the baguette. It’s the glue that holds the sandwich together, and it’s the bridge between the sweet-salty pork and the sharp pickled vegetables. If it tastes tame to you, add more sambal, it takes the heat well.
I’ll be straight with you: I have never made the tofu version, so I’m not going to hand you instructions for something I haven’t cooked. That said, nothing in this marinade is specifically tied to pork, and plenty of people build chicken banh mi. If you go that way, keep the same principle: slice it thin, give it a long marinade, then cook it fast and hot. What I can tell you for certain is that pork tenderloin works, because that’s the one I’ve made over and over. If you want pork in another direction, my Vietnamese pork chops use the same family of flavours.
A salad or a soup turns it into a full meal. My Asian cucumber salad is the first thing I go to, because it sits in the same acidic register as the pickled vegetables instead of competing with them. On the soup side, Vietnamese pho soup keeps the whole supper Vietnamese, and shrimp and pork Asian soup is the faster option. Keep any leftover pickled carrots and daikon in a jar in the fridge: they hold for a few weeks and end up in just about any sandwich or stir fry you make that month.
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