Vân Vân’s Single-Origin Spices Dial Into the Regional Flavors of Vietnam

Nat Belkov

Provenance, process, and packaging are a few things that set the brand’s seven-product spice line apart

The next time you’re at the grocery store, scan the spice aisle and take note of how many jars contain powder compared to those that don’t. Yes, bay leaves, star anise, cloves, and even cinnamon often appear in their whole form. But ginger? Or lemongrass? These are harder to find unpulverized when dried or preserved. Even various chiles, unless they’re sold at a specialty grocer, often come in their ground-up form.

That’s a problem for those who want to prepare dishes where an ingredient’s size and shape dictates the way its flavor transforms when it’s added to the cooking process. What’s more, so much of the pulverized stuff is lacking in freshness and flavor, as it can be hard to track the origin of a single jar’s contents.

Thankfully, single-origin spice companies committed to sustainable and ethical harvest and production practices have been cropping up more and more in recent years. With traceable provenance, these spices, simply put, taste better. Even so, most single-origin brands grind the bulk of their spices, a processing method that’s more cost-effective but less conducive to some non-Western cooking traditions.

Enter Vân Vân, the almost one-year-old brand from chef Thảo Bùi and her partner, designer and architect Duy Võ. Through Vân Vân, the couple sells whole, single-origin spices and herbs sourced from growing regions around Vietnam.

Amanda Pham

Vân Vân’s line of spices include: northern mountain garlic, coastal purple shallot, Delta lemongrass, heaven facing chile, and sparrow ginger.

Amanda Pham

Vân Vân’s garlic and purple shallot are showcased in canh khổ qua, or bitter melon soup, a popular dish served during Lunar New Year.

The seeds for Vân Vân were planted during the pandemic, when Bùi, a front-of-house industry vet, turned her focus towards aid work, founding an organization with Võ called Đùm Bọc to support disadvantaged communities in Vietnam with limited access to food and health care. Through Đùm Bọc, Bùi and Võ forged connections with a network of creatives in and around the food industry, both in New York City and Vietnam. They eventually launched their first pop-up, Ăn Xôi, an iterative concept centered around sticky rice and its role as a blank canvas for whatever protein, sauce, or legume is seasonally appropriate to ladle over it.

Then, in 2022, Bùi was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and progress halted on the many projects she and Võ had in the works. “I promised myself that if I made it out, I would do something that is meaningful to me,” Bùi says.

Once she completed treatment, the duo began laying the groundwork for Vân Vân. “My family grows black pepper in Bình Phước,” says Bùi. “They were my first connection to eventually meeting the farmers we work with now.”

Even in the densest, multicultural urban areas like New York City and Los Angeles, there’s a good chance that ingredients like lemongrass and ginger are coming from farms in North America. “Garlic here, for example, doesn’t taste like garlic there,” Bùi says. “Garlic grown in Vietnam is much smaller, with more cloves. It’s stickier when peeled due to the high concentration of natural oils within, and its flavor is slightly spicier.”

All of this is not to say that ingredients grown in North America are inherently bad — in many cases, it’s quite the opposite. But they are different from those grown in Southeast Asia because they come from different terroirs. And for chefs and home cooks who want to dial into the nuanced flavors present across the vast lexicon of Southeast Asian cooking, limited access to the specific plant species that grow there poses a problem. In fact, that’s exactly what led Bùi and Võ to create Vân Vân in the first place.

“We were running our pop-up Ăn Xôi and started to notice, even if we followed an exact recipe, it just didn’t taste the way it was supposed to. Something was off,” Bùi says. “That’s when Duy and I realized that the ingredients really make a difference. We started to connect the dots, and Vân Vân was born.”

Vân Vân

A recent sourcing trip took Bùi and Võ to a farming co-op in Bình Phú outside the city of Quảng Ngãi.

Vân Vân

Red galangal and củ nén, an allium similar in appearance to a pearl onion, will soon join the Vân Vân product line.

Vân Vân launched in August of 2023 with a core set of spices prevalent throughout homestyle Vietnamese cooking: garlic from the northern Hải Dương province, purple shallot from the Phan Rang coast, lemongrass from Tiền Giang in the Mekong Delta, and both sparrow ginger and heaven facing chile from mountainous Lâm Đồng region in Vietnam’s central highlands.

Finding a partner willing to process and package the spices without pulverizing them was a challenge. After much searching, Bùi and Võ settled on a company based in Saigon. “We knew we didn’t want our spices to be ground up the conventional way they come in the U.S. because that’s not how we use them in Vietnamese cooking,” Bùi says. “If our customers want to grind them up, they can, of course! Just like you would grind black peppercorns or cumin seeds.”

Each bag includes instructions on how to rehydrate any of Vân Vân’s products, too. While they can be used as is — employed in recipes the same way any dry spice would be — the fact that they haven’t been pulverized affords them the ability to act as much like the fresh version of themselves as possible. Home cooks may be familiar with the whole-dried shiitake mushrooms common across Japanese cooking, for example. Once rehydrated, they’re a key ingredient in flavoring dashi, the ubiquitous soup base. Similarly, dried whole chiles like guajillo and ancho, once rehydrated, become the base of dishes like pozole rojo, mole coloradito, and birria. Dried shiitake mushroom powder and ground-up dried chiles wouldn’t work quite as well employed the same way in these recipes.

In keeping their products whole, Vân Vân affords home cooks the freedom and flexibility to do more with them. What’s more, blooming any of the spices almost immediately fills the kitchen with intoxicating aromas — ginger’s spicy astringence, the balmy brightness of lemongrass, or shallot’s earthy sweetness.

“What Thảo and Duy are doing with Vân Vân is truly incredible,” says Phoebe Tran, co-founder of Happy Family Night Market, and chef behind the New York City-based pop-up Bé Bếp. “Not only are we reaping the benefit of these ingredients and their quality here in the States, Thảo and Duy are partnering directly with the farmers, so that strengthens an important resource in Vietnam.”

Bùi and Võ take frequent trips back to Vietnam to visit the farmers they work with, tasting their crops and seeking inspiration for their pop-up menus. Back home in New York City, they keep busy: Along with Ăn Xôi, the couple hosts Cơm Nhà, a pop-up focusing on regional dishes you’re unlikely to find in most Vietnamese restaurants anywhere in the city. Each one, naturally, employs Vân Vân spices.

Bánh cay, the crispy shrimp-flecked cassava nuggets prevalent throughout the south of Vietnam, are spiced with their own dried chiles. Gà kho gừng, the sticky, savory, braised chicken dish, relies on Vân Vân’s sparrow ginger. And dưa chua, the ubiquitous pickled mustard greens that accompany a number of classic Vietnamese dishes, uses both garlic and purple shallot from Vân Vân.

This coming August, after an extensive sourcing trip, Bùi and Võ will be introducing two new products to Vân Vân’s line: red galangal, the spicier rhizomic relative of ginger, and củ nén, an allium similar in appearance to a pearl onion. Both ingredients are pillars of central Vietnamese cooking.

To find a sustainable resource with the best quality ingredients, Bùi and Võ headed to a farming co-op in Bình Phú, outside the city of Quảng Ngãi. “It took us a while to find our way out to the farms tucked away from the main road,” Bùi says. “When we arrived, Auntie Lệ was almost finished with her morning harvest, and greeted us with a smile. She told us she’s been growing củ nén for most of her life. Her farming method, like many others, has been passed down for generations, and has largely remained unchanged.”

Through cooking and building her pop-ups, and then Vân Vân, “I’ve realized that there is so much about Vietnamese cuisine that we don’t talk about enough or even know enough about. There are so many nuances to the cooking that we don’t understand yet,” Bùi says. “Through all of this, through eating the food I prepare or cooking with our spices, I hope people get more curious about how these dishes came to be, and how these ingredients really reflect the region they’re from. That’s important to me.”

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