Luke Nguyen seems to be a bit of a cultural sensation in Australia at the moment. On the back of a SBS television series and co-authoring the cookbook Secrets of the Red Lantern, Luke has also recently appeared twice on the Master Chef series.
I'd always been interested in his recipes when flicking through the beautiful Red Lantern cookbook but it wasn't until he made a chilli crab variant on Master Chef that i started actively hunting down his recipes. Luckily many can be found on the SBS website for his televsion show Luke Nguyen's Vietnam.
This is probably one of the simpler dishes that i have seen from Luke's repertoire to date. Juicy bites of chicken saturated in the pungeant aromas and balanced tastes of fish sauce, sugar, lemon grass, chilli and garlic. Rather than adding chicken stock to make the sauce, Luke used young coconut juice which keeps the dish tasting quite clean: unfortunately i had to use the canned variety of coconut juice.
Please note that i have not stayed completely faithful to the original recipe.
