bánh rế — Vietnam

Bánh rế is a deep-fried snack made from finely shredded sweet potato or cassava, bound with a little rice flour and formed into a round, open-latticed cake before being fried until crisp. Its name refers to the rế, a woven bamboo basket, because the finished cake's crisscrossing strands resemble the weave of that basket. The snack is reported mainly from Lâm Đồng province in Vietnam's central highlands, and in particular from the area around Đà Lạt, where it is sold by street vendors and in local markets as a snack to eat on the spot or to carry away. To prepare it, sweet potato is peeled and grated into thin, even strands, which are lightly coated in rice flour or starch so they hold together without forming a dense batter. A ladle of the strands is lowered into hot oil in a circular motion, letting the threads overlap and fuse at the edges while staying open at the center, and fried until golden and crisp. The hot cake is then dipped in a caramelized sugar syrup, which coats the strands and sets into a thin, glossy shell as it cools. What sets this snack apart from other fried root-vegetable cakes is precisely that open, woven structure: because the strands are only loosely bound, the finished cake stays light and crackly rather than dense, and the sugar coating gives it a shelf life long enough to travel well, which is part of why it is commonly sold to visitors passing through the highlands.