Dish · vietnamese
Com Tam
Grilled pork chop served over broken rice grains with a fried egg, pickled vegetables, and fish sauce, a dish built around rice once considered a byproduct.
Where it comes from
Broken rice grains, leftover from milling whole rice for export, were once sold cheap or fed to animals; cooks in the Mekong Delta began serving them as a meal, and broken stayed part of the name even after the dish became popular everywhere.
What cooks argue about
Cooks argue over the grain itself: true broken rice cooks up drier and more separate, while some restaurants now use whole rice cooked to look broken, which changes the texture.
Versions
Nobody has published a com tam here yet. When somebody cooks one from a video and publishes it, their version appears in this list, with a link back to the original.
What goes in it
Each one opens everything else made with it.
cucumber
carrot