The Best Vietnamese Baguette Recipe | How to Make Bánh Mì Bread

The perfect Vietnamese baguette or Bánh Mì is deliciously light, crispy, and chewy. In this recipe, I teach you how to get the authentic taste and texture that makes this traditional Vietnamese bread so wonderful – because the best Bánh Mì sandwich needs to be made with the best bread!

What is Bánh Mì (Vietnamese baguette)?

You may know Bánh Mì as the delicious, herb and veggie-filled, savory sandwich that is a staple in Vietnamese restaurants. But the word “Bánh Mì” in Vietnamese actually means bread, derived from ”Bánh” which refers primarily to baked goods. In Vietnamese cuisine, it’s also used to refer to the short baguette that is used to make the Bánh Mì sandwich. That light and crispy Vietnamese bread is what I’m going to be focusing on in this banh mi bread recipe.

French baguette versus Vietnamese baguette

Vietnam was colonized by the French for six decades and this has had a very noticeable influence on Vietnamese food. You may notice a lot of similarities between Vietnamese and French cuisine that you don’t see in the food of many other Asian countries. Some examples of this are Vietnamese coffee and Vietnamese flan – both very delicious.

But probably the most popular example is the Vietnamese baguette or the Bahn Mi. This Vietnamese version of the French sandwich bread has a crisp, thin crust with a delightfully cottony soft and chewy inside. It’s also a little bit sweeter than the European baguette, which makes it a great base for all the delicious Vietnamese herbs and savory flavors in a Bánh Mì sandwich!

The process of making Vietnamese baguettes versus French baguettes is also a bit different. While the French baguette uses a more delicate rolling and shaping process, Vietnamese baguettes typically require more speed and more force. In this banh mi bread recipe, I use a stand mixer to get the same effect. This treatment of the dough allows more gluten to develop for the ideal chewy texture.

How to make the best Vietnamese baguette

The secret to making the perfect Vietnamese baguette is in the kind of flour used. The easiest and best way to get that authentic Vietnamese baguette taste and texture is to use bread flour instead of regular all-purpose flour. Bread flour has more protein and gluten. The extra protein gives the bread more rise and the extra gluten gives it more chew. This is what creates the much lighter and chewier texture that is unique to the Vietnamese baguette.

The brand of bread flour I like best for this recipe is King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour, but you can use any unbleached bread flour available to you. Unbleached flour is slightly denser than bleach flour which makes it perfect for creating a sturdy bread that can hold in a lot of fillings. You might also be interested to know that unbleached flour is a little bit healthier too since it hasn’t been chemically processed as much as bleached flour has.

Using the right kind of flour really makes a big difference when it comes to baking, especially in a recipe that requires very few ingredients like this bread.

Now that we’ve covered the nuances of the Vietnamese baguette, let’s get into the recipe!