Houston has the second-largest Vietnamese population in America, and you can tell as soon as you set foot in a grocery store: The aisles are packed with all sorts of Vietnamese ingredients. In this episode of Cooking in America, host Sheldon Simeon does a little shopping, gets his hands a little dirty, and helps prep a Vietnamese crawfish boil at Cajun Kitchen in Houston’s Chinatown.
After the cooking is over, Simeon samples Dungeness crab in tamarind sauce, garlic noodles with lump crab meat, and oysters grilled with butter and scallions. John Nguyen, Cajun Kitchen’s head chef, lets Simeon in on what makes cooking in Houston so special: “Not only do we get the freshest seafood from the Gulf Coast, but because it’s a port city, we get ingredients from anywhere.”
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