Yia Vang on how to prepare an abundant Hmong holiday meal

Whether for a reunion, a celebration or a holiday, Hmong meals begin as assembly lines and end as celebratory feasts.

When chef Yia Vang was a kid, anytime his large family gathered for the holidays, his extended relatives went to work making the most labour-intensive Hmong dishes. That usually meant the girls went to the kitchen to help their mothers and aunts chop vegetables from their farms or wrap egg rolls and steamed buns, while Vang would join the boys out back with his dad to break down a hog and use all its parts. By grade school, he was already proficient with a cleaver. 

It was exactly the culinary training Vang needed to become a lauded chef at the top of his game in Minnesota's Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. A 2023 James Beard Award finalist, Vang is the chef and owner behind two groundbreaking Minneapolis restaurants: Union Hmong Kitchen and the newly opened Vinai. With the former, Vang attempted to showcase a cuisine that historically hasn't relied on written recipes but has instead been passed down from parents to their children for generations through hands-on experience. With the latter, he set out to establish what is, to his knowledge, one of the first full-service Hmong restaurants in the US.

Both spots celebrate the culture and cuisine of the Hmong people, a migratory ethnic group from Southeast Asia. Hmong immigrants came in waves to the United States as refugees after the Vietnam War. Many of them landed in Minnesota – specifically in Minneapolis and Saint Paul  – where Vang has lived for the past 14 years. Today, the Twin Cities are home to the largest Hmong community in the US.

At Vang's restaurants, his dishes tread the line between rustic and refined: purple sticky rice and lemongrass-scented Hmong sausage; a rich beef stew with the rib bone sticking out of the pot amped up by a briny, pungent fermented shrimp sauce; whole grilled fish and nests of cold noodles piled onto banana leaves; and luxe crab fried rice. 

Vang's father was a war hero who fought with the United States in its "secret war" against communism in Laos in the 1960s. By the time Vang was born in 1984, the war was over and the family was living in a refugee camp in Thailand called Ban Vinai. His family emigrated to the US when Vang was four years old, but his experience in the camp was so formative that Vang named his restaurant after it.

In many ways, Ban Vinai became a symbol of survival for Vang. However hard life was in the camp, there was also a will to persevere that was evident in the elaborate meals his family would create and enjoy together. Those all-hands-on-deck meals came with Vang and his family to the United States, and he credits them with making him a chef. 

"For me, it was this pinnacle of learning how things work, of being able to watch the gathering of people and learning all these cooking skills," he says.

When the family gathers now, whether for a Western holiday, a reunion or a church gathering, the meals begin as assembly lines and end as feasts. "If you have 50 people making it, it's really so much more fun," Vang says. "That's so Hmong culture."

Every gathering is laden with memories of sausage-making, when Vang would join the line of cutting boards with the other boys. "It was like, 'Hey, you get that intestine and you get that intestine,'" he jokes. He'd fill the casings by cutting the top off a two-litre bottle and using it as a funnel. 

But today, the exact dishes are almost irrelevant. Vang's family is as likely to have turkey and cornbread stuffing as they are egg rolls and fermented hot sauces for Thanksgiving. 

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"It's more about the gathering than the actual food, because when you come from a place where people weren't able to gather together for so long [because of] war, the idea of having these big dinners was merely a story to my parents," Vang says. "Thirty, forty years ago, it was really hard just to be together. These are the lessons from our elders." 

With such a large family, Vang's holiday meals can include dozens of dishes. Here, he shares some of the most common elements of a meal embracing his Hmong heritage.

Vang's holiday plate begins with a green banana leaf. "As much as it's a cool colour and design, my mom and dad would tell stories, that [the leaf] would sometimes be our table that we put all the food on in the refugee camp," Vang says. "It's nature's tin foil."

The foundation of most Hmong meals, the rice is a bold purple colour from a mixture of black rice with sweet white rice. "The Hmong people are considered one of the first peoples to cultivate black rice," Vang says. "That's kind of our symbol." As Vang explains, the bond between the grains is strong enough to use it as a utensil: just pull off a hunk of rice, flatten it and use it to scoop up sauce and meat.

Vang makes it at a ratio of six parts white rice to one-part black rice. He washes and strains it over and over before letting it soak overnight. Then he puts it into a rice net and steams it. As important as the rice is in his cuisine, serving it doesn't have to be overly ceremonious. Many families just portion it out into little plastic baggies that keep it moist, so everyone can easily grab one to go. 

"You have to try the sauces with everything; there's no wrong way of doing it," Vang says. The sauces are meant to be interchangeable, but always essential. His mother, Pang, makes her signature hot sauce from the peppers she grows on her farm. His dad roasts them over a fire until they're charred. Then his mom and aunt grind them up to a pulp and add fish sauce, herbs and aromatics. "Every family has their own," Vang says. Mama Vang's hot sauce has become a menu staple at both of Vang's restaurants.

Grilled pork is almost always the main protein, and the seasoning is simple – just salt and pepper. The flavour comes from the way the fatty parts interact with the smoke from the grill. "We would never just do lean pork chops," Vang explains.

Shoulder or coppa, butterflied, starts out over high heat and then roasts over a medium-low flame. The pork is then sliced into small pieces that can be picked up easily with the sticky rice and dunked into hot sauce. "That's our [finger] food, if you want to call it that."

The other primary meat on the plate is Hmong sausage, which is made from a coarsely chopped mix of pork belly and shoulder. "It's from the mountains where Hmong people would catch wild hogs and domesticate them," Vang explains. The aromatics are typically ginger, lemongrass, garlic and fish sauce, but Vang likes to add shallots, oyster sauce and some Thai chilli, too. 

Roasted chicken might be on the plate, or, on Thanksgiving, turkey stuffed with a glass noodle egg roll filling. The poultry comes from a local farm, and the family will butcher and pluck the birds themselves. 

"A lot of times, it's literally cleaning your fridge," Vang says of the cold rice noodle side dish, khao sen. Vang mixes the noodles with shredded cabbage and carrots, green onions and tons of herbs: mint, dill, coriander. It's all coated in a soy or coconut-ginger vinaigrette. 

Being from a migratory culture, Vang says vegetables are the most adaptable, changeable item on the plate – and the most connected to home. Lately, he's been exploring how to enliven root vegetables with the vibrancy of Hmong flavours. He will toss parsnips, turnips, carrots, whatever is abundant at the moment, with garlic and ginger. 

He'll also finish the plate with a pile of bright vegetables, a mix of fresh and pickled finds from his mother's garden. Right now, he's loving her pickled radishes. "If we were living in Fresno, California, we probably would use something different, but here in the north, that's the touch of Minnesota there," Vang says. "For us, it's all about preservation."

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