V Vegan: The Vietnamese Vegan Cookbook — Trinh Diem Vy

The success of Taste Vietnam: Beyond Taste demonstrated an appetite in Ms Vy’s international readership for something more than recipes – for the cultural frameworks, personal memories, and philosophical principles that make Vietnamese food what it is. V Vegan is the first proof that the knowledge behind Beyond Taste is not a single volume but a library.

The subject is a natural one for Ms Vy. Growing up in Hoi An, vegan food was not an ideological choice but a seasonal and spiritual fact of life – the food eaten on Buddhist holy days, prepared communally at the pagoda, governed by the same five-element principles of balance that run through all Vietnamese cooking. Her grandmother Thêu, whose arrival in Hoi An in 1938 is the founding story of Ms Vy’s family, practised Buddhism devoutly; the pagoda visits of Ms Vy’s childhood are among her most vivid food memories.

The book focuses these memories through three ingredients – mushrooms, tofu, and lotus – chosen because they represent the range and sophistication of Vietnamese plant-based cooking more completely than any other trio could. Around them, Ms Vy addresses a question that international food culture has been asking badly: how does a cuisine that developed without dairy and with minimal meat achieve the depth, richness, and textural complexity that makes people feel satisfied? The answer is in the techniques, the fermentation, the balance of elements, and the philosophy of restraint that Vietnamese cooking inherited from Buddhist practice.

Produced by Metro Writers with Phúc Hưng Books and sold through the same direct venue model that made The Morning Glory Cookbook a million-dollar asset, V Vegan continues the series that Beyond Taste opened: focused, personal, and rooted in thirty years of cooking and teaching in the UNESCO World Heritage town of Hoi An.

V Vegan demonstrates that the deeper story of Vietnamese food has always been waiting behind the recipes.

Vietnamese vegan cooking is not a trend or a concession – it is one of the oldest and most sophisticated threads in the country’s culinary tradition, rooted in Buddhist practice and shaped by centuries of temple cooking in communities like the one Trinh Diễm Vy grew up in. In Hoi An, vegan food was the food of ceremonies and holy days, prepared by monks and their helpers for a thousand devotees at a time, governed by principles of simplicity, harmony, and respect for what the earth provides.

V Vegan is Ms Vy’s exploration of that tradition through three ingredients she considers foundational: mushrooms, tofu (including fermented chào), and lotus. Around these she builds a collection of recipes – Caramelised Mushrooms in Claypot, Vegan Bánh Mì, Phở Chay – that demonstrate how Vietnamese plant-based cooking achieves deep umami and complex texture without imitation products. Each recipe is set alongside the personal stories, Buddhist teachings, and cultural observations that explain where the food comes from and what it means.

This is the first in a new series of smaller Taste Vietnam volumes combining memoir, recipe, and culinary philosophy – each one a focused lens on a specific dimension of Vietnamese food culture, told in Ms Vy’s own voice.

Don’t Take These Recipes into the Kitchen. Cooking is something you need to learn from the heart, to immerse yourself in completely. You need to bring your own experiences to the process. The more you follow my recipes, the less you need to think for yourself. This is why I want these recipes to guide you, not constrain you.

How do you become a successful chef ? It’s all about how many times you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn, the more successful you become. It’s all about lessons, about practice. We talk about practice more than any theory. Certificates? Without practice, they’re just pieces of paper.

In Vietnam, we talk about the ‘middle way’. This sometimes means that most things have to come from both sides. If I, as the chef, bring these recipes to you, you need to make your own journey to experience them for yourself. Nothing is just one way. Take what I give you here, and put in the same amount of energy and effort to make it come alive.

— Trinh Diem Vy, V Vegan: The Vietnamese Vegan Cookbook