I feel like I’ve cheated–but I did it with my husband, so how can that be?

A banh mi is meant to be gulped down while standing on a sidewalk, hunkered against the wind on a park bench, or crouched on a rickety seat in front of a jewelry display counter (if you’re at Banh Mi Saigon). It’s easier to be outside, because then you don’t have to worry about the crumbs flying everywhere. (If you aren’t banh-mi-savvy yet, read up at Daily Gluttony and Porkchop Express, here, here and here, oh, and also here.)

Moreover, Peter and I have a long history with these particular sandwiches, the ones at Banh Mi Saigon–they cropped up on Boston bus rides, on the day Peter put me on his health insurance, and when we got married at city hall…and on many, many days in between. They have often given structure to an otherwise tedious day of errands (as in, “When I’m done returning those ugly shoes, I’ll stop in and get a banh mi”), and I have at least once taken the subway all the way from midtown and back on my lunch hour just to get them.

But yesterday, Peter and I got in a terrible lather reading all the reviews of banh mi joints on Porkchop Express (I didn’t even give you half the links above), but it was already too late to go to Banh Mi Saigon (they usually run out of sandwiches around 6pm, but sometimes they don’t, but it’s a big chance to take if you’re taking the train all the way from Astoria just for that). And if you’re going to get on the subway just for banh mi, why would you go anywhere but the absolute best place?

We were stymied, until Peter declared:

What the hell! I’ll just make banh mi!

Whoa, dude. Was that the earth shifting on its axis I just felt? Is that the Inquisition I hear knocking on our door? Is the floor a little warmer just now because the fires of Hell are licking up to roast our heretical feet?

While I was fretting about the state of my soul, Peter nipped out and bought baguettes (from Le Petit Prince), ground pork, daikon, cilantro, cucumbers and carrots. Believe you me, we already had plenty of mayonnaise.

Sounds straightforward, but of course the real trick was the pork. Banh Mi Saigon’s is a “closely guarded secret” or something. For more than a decade, it was made in a disposable aluminum takeout tray, in a toaster oven. I used to stand in the old place, that depressing little sandwich prison, and stare at the whole process while I waited.

You couldn’t really see much detail in there, because the oven’s glass was that permanent brown-orange of burned grease, but it required a lot of fiddling, opening and closing of the squeaky little door, scraping across the aluminum with tongs, careful fluffing the pork. (Bless them, no one deserved the move up more than these people, but now in the new spot, the kitchen is so far back you can’t see anything at all!)

After years of observation, I came to the conclusion that it must be a sort of horizontal gyro, in which the crispy top layer was scraped off for use in a sandwich, revealing a fresh layer to magically caramelize. Peter thought certainly five-spice powder was involved, so he made up some of that. Then I urged him to make some standard Vietnamese caramel sauce, because all I know about Vietnamese food is that this thin, smoky caramel stuff goes in almost everything.

In retrospect, this caramel business didn’t seem so essential, because all Peter did was mix up the pork and the five-spice, pour on the caramel sauce and stick the thing in the broiler–then every few minutes, pull it out, stir out around, and let it recaramelize. He admitted to pouring on lots more sugar in the process. It took a while to get really tasty. And it really was not like Banh Mi Saigon’s. But it tasted great–more like a snack food than anything.

In assembling the sandwiches, Peter took a little tip from our Mexican friends w/r/t the construction of tortas, and pulled out a lot of the middle of the baguette, tipping the odds in favor of the filling, as well as making a nice little trough to hold the Sweet-n-Spicy Pork Crumbles (TM) he’d invented. A lot of mayo helped stick things in place as well.

The daikon and carrot and cuke had been sitting in their little pickling juices for a bit, so he laid those on, then some cilantro sprigs and slices of green chili. (“Regular or spicy?” he called out from the kitchen, in an attempt to re-create the Saigon experience.)

He sliced it in half and brought it to the table. “My work here is done,” he said. We ate them in about three minutes flat–in that same desperate way we’ve always eaten banh mi, afraid you’ll lose some bits if you move your hands and, more existentially, afraid you’ll never get anymore and this is your last bite of heaven ever.

They were so good, in fact, that, um, these photos are all from breakfast this morning.