Banh Mi

Banh mi is a Vietnamese sandwich built on a short, thin-crusted baguette with a light, airy crumb, typically filled with a combination of proteins such as pate, Vietnamese pork sausage or cold cuts along with pickled carrot and daikon, cucumber, fresh coriander and condiments such as mayonnaise and chili sauce. The baguette itself reached Vietnam through French colonial rule in the mid nineteenth century, and during the First World War Vietnamese bakers began mixing rice flour into imported wheat flour to make bread more affordable for ordinary people, producing the lighter loaf associated with banh mi today. The distinctly Vietnamese sandwich, combining the French loaf with local meats, pickled vegetables and herbs, took shape in Saigon in the 1950s, evolving out of earlier French-style ham and butter sandwiches sold to colonial residents. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Vietnamese refugees carried banh mi with them abroad, and it has since become one of Vietnam's best known foods internationally, entering the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011 and appearing widely on menus in Australia, Canada and the United States.