Lemongrass Pork Skewers with Pickled Carrot and Nuoc Cham

Bull In A China Shop Scarlett Bubbles

The marinade takes five minutes. The pickle takes ten and can sit in the fridge for a week. The skewers themselves are on and off the grill before anyone has finished their first glass.

What you get back is a plate of sticky, charred, herb-heavy food that tastes like considerably more effort than you put in.

The trick is the lemongrass. Used properly, finely chopped rather than bruised and thrown in whole, it perfumes the pork all the way through instead of just sitting on the surface. Combined with garlic, fish sauce and a little brown sugar, it caramelises hard against the heat and gives you those dark, sweet edges that make the whole thing.

Ingredients

Serves 4

For the skewers

• 600g pork mince, or pork scotch fillet cut into 2cm cubes
• 2 lemongrass stalks, white part only, very finely chopped
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tablespoon fish sauce
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon white pepper
• 1 tablespoon neutral oil
• Bamboo skewers, soaked in water for 30 minutes

For the pickled carrot

• 2 large carrots, cut into fine matchsticks
• 125ml rice wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt

For the nuoc cham

• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 3 tablespoons lime juice
• 2 tablespoons caster sugar
• 60ml warm water
• 1 garlic clove, finely minced
• 1 long red chilli, thinly sliced

To serve

• A large handful each of mint and coriander
• Butter lettuce leaves, or cooked rice vermicelli

Method

1. Make the pickle first. Whisk the vinegar, sugar and salt together until the sugar dissolves. Add the carrot, press it down so it sits under the liquid, and leave it while you do everything else. Thirty minutes is enough. A day is better.
2. Mix the marinade. Combine the lemongrass, garlic, fish sauce, brown sugar, white pepper and oil in a bowl. Add the pork and work it through thoroughly with your hands. Leave it for at least 20 minutes at room temperature, or up to four hours in the fridge.
3. Shape and thread. If you are using mince, take a small handful and press it around the skewer into a long sausage shape, roughly 2cm thick. If you are using cubed pork, thread four or five pieces per skewer with a little space between each.
4. Whisk the nuoc cham. Sugar into the warm water first so it dissolves properly, then everything else. Taste it. It should be sharp, salty and sweet all at once, in roughly that order.
5. Grill hot. Barbecue, grill plate or a heavy pan over high heat. Four to five minutes a side for mince, three to four for cubes. You want genuine char, not just colour. Let them sit undisturbed until they release from the grill by themselves.
6. Rest and serve. Two minutes off the heat, then pile everything onto a board with the pickle, the herbs, the lettuce and the nuoc cham for dipping. Let people build their own.

Why it works with Scarlett Bubbles

This dish is doing three things at once that most wines struggle with: chilli heat, fish sauce salt and hard caramelised char.

Sweetness is what handles chilli. Not sugar exactly, just enough softness in the wine to take the edge off the capsaicin instead of amplifying it. Scarlett Bubbles sits right in the middle of the sweetness scale, which is precisely where you want to be here. A bone-dry sparkling would make the chilli sting.

The acid does the second job, cutting through the fat in the pork and resetting your palate between skewers. And the bubbles handle the salt, lifting it off your tongue rather than letting it build.

Then there is the aromatic match, which is the part that makes this pairing feel deliberate rather than merely functional. The lifted florals in the wine, rose petal and lychee in particular, sit in the same family as the lemongrass and mint on the plate. They meet in the middle rather than competing.

Serve it properly cold, straight from the ice bucket, with the food coming off the grill hot.