While in San Jose, I enjoyed showing people there was a whole variety of Vietnamese food aside from Pho. My personal favourite place for any celebration was Anh Hong for their 7 courses of beef (Bo 7 Mon). It is beef made 7 different ways – a salad, a soup, beef dipped in hot pot water, and a few different ground beef variances to be rolled in rice paper. It’s my personal favourite way of introducing friends to Vietnamese food because the experience is interactive and tasty!
My favourite dish in the 7 courses of beef has always been Thit Bo La Lot – beef wrapped in this extremely flavourful and tasty leaf. I’ve never made it before and stumbled upon this great Viet food blog and followed her clear well written steps. What an awesome blog and what an awesome recipe!!!! It was an instant hit with my friends! I’m on a mission to learn how to make the remaining 6 dishes and have a 7 course of beef dinner within a few months!!
Summary
Preparation Time: 10 min to prepare the beef. 30 min to roll 30-45 rolls.
Cook Time: 8 min broil for each tray of beef
Servings: 40 rolls
Meal type: Main / Side dish
Grocery Cost: $6.50
Recipe Rating: 
Ingredients
I slightly modified VietKitchen’s recipe for the meat seasoning.
- 1 pound ground beef, chuck preferred ($4.00)
- ¼ cup minced scallion (about 3 stalks of green onion) ($0.50)
- 2 teaspoons fish sauce
- ½ teaspoon salt
- ¾ teaspoon ground black pepper
- 1 tablespoon Madras curry powder
- 2 tablespoons finely minced lemongrass (about 1 medium-small stalk) ($0.50)
- 1 teaspoon cornstarch
- 1 bag of la lot leaves with stems (4 ounces that yield 30 large leaves) ($1.50)
- 1 tablespoon neutral flavored oil (I used olive oil)
Instructions
1. In a bowl combine the beef, scallions, fish sauce, curry powder, salt, pepper, lemongrass and cornstarch.
2. Mix well with your hands and set aside.
3. Wash the leaves thoroughly and remove the leaves from the main (bigger) center stem but keep the leaf stem).
4. Scoop some meat onto the leaf and roll. Use the stem to seal up the roll. See the VietKitchen blog for more detailed pictures.
5. Brush a bit of olive oil on each roll. Place on aluminum baking sheet.
6. Set the oven on broil (high) and set the baking sheet on the top 1/3 of the oven.
7.I kept checking on it from 7min to about 9 min. Once the leaves look slightly shriveled and charred, its done!
8.To serve this dish as part of the 7 courses of beef, you eat it with rice paper, rice noodles, lettuce and of course nuoc mam (fish sauce dipping sauce!) I’ll write more about how to do this in another post!
Quick Notes
I made this twice this week. The first batch, I used 1 lb of lean ground beef and we ended up with many extra betel leaves in the package! So the next batch, I used double portions of everything and ended up making too big of rolls even though I used all the leaves. I’d probably say go with 1.5 lbs of ground beef for the packages of betel leaves that I bought.
Variations
The VietKitchen blog offered varieties on how to marinate the meat. I distinctly remember lemongrass for this meat everytime I’ve eaten it in the past so I was determine to use this in my cooking! However, I didn’t want to add oyster sauce as the Seasoning option 2 suggested since I felt it would take away from the basic Vietnamese taste. So I essentially just added lemon grass to Seasoning option 1.
Actually traditionally, this is made on the BBQ so I was quite impressed the broiling worked so well ! I’d love to try this on the BBQ in the summer.
Results
DELICIOUS!!! I feel this recipe yielded exactly what I’ve been missing from not having Anh Hong in my neighborhood and eating in Vietnam. It’s one of my favourite Vietnamese dishes of all time and am so happy that it took less than an hour! Try it out, you won’t be disappointed!
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Tags: 7 courses of beef, Anh Hong, Betel leaf, bo 7 mon, Luc Lac, Recipe, Restaurant, Thit Bo, Viet, Vietnamese
