banh mi is the king of sandwiches in my book. what i learned from trying to make it at home is that it is easy to make something similar and delicious, hard to capture the exact dimensions of awesome that you'd get in a store-bought version. The components we used were: 5 minutes a day bread, crispy tofu, carrot-daikon pickle, sriracha-lemon mayo, and cilantro. i think what ours was lacking was the lightness and coolness. 5-minutes a day bread always comes out pretty dense and moist, good but very different from the totally airy, fluffly, thin-crackly-crust french bread usually used in banh mi. we also could have used more fresh, cold vegetable, maybe some added cucumbers or even lettuce, or just put the carrots and daikon in there unpickled.
for the tofu: cut up a block of tofu into slices of your liking. wrap them in lots of paper towel and press em under something heavy for an hour. mix/puree together some soy sauce, sesame oil, pepper, and minced ginger and garlic, then soak the tofu in it for an hour, rotating the pieces if they're not all submerged. shake off the liquid, heat up a pan, and fry them on both sides (little to no oil necessary) until crispy, pressing a bit to get the moisture out.
for the pickle: cut an equal volume of daikon and carrots into matchsticks. salt them in a bowl and then press them with paper towels a few times throughout a half hour to get the moisture out. then doise them in vinegar and stir in some sugar. they should be sufficiently pickly in an hour, and will keep in the fridge (titled covered) for a week.
for the mayo: stir some lemon juice and sriracha into mayo, to your liking.
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