Cooking The Books

Dai Cuisine

Well after getting on for 4 months in South East Asia I've finally made it in to China.  As we're trying to do the whole trip overland the first port of call after leaving Laos was Yunnan, China's southwestern most province and also it' most ethnically diverse, having almost 50% of the population represented by non-Han minorities.

One of these minorities is the Dai people and with their food being heavily represented on Jinghong's menus we had to have a dabble.  Alas I don't know the real names of the dishes but we ordered Dai style fried noodles, Dai style lemon chicken and Dai style braised aubergine. 

Whilst the aubergine was unfamiliar (tomato, chili and just cooked onion were the main flavours) the noodles and chicken were very familiar. 

The flat wide rice noodles were very Pad Thai like, as was the ground peanuts and lime on the side.

The lemon chicken, made with mince and flavoured heavily with mint and lemon, was like a larb, just served hot rather than room temp.

Even with the blaring similarities and the somewhat similar names it took me a while to realise that the Dai of China's Yunnan aren't too far removed from the Thai folk, which makes sense really when they're only a couple of hundred miles apart. 

So one meal down in China but I've still not quite made it out of South East Asia, good to see some diversity in the Chinese cuisine though.

Jungle Eating in Luangnamtha, Laos

Every once in a while something comes along and just blows your mind.  These last two days, both food and otherwise, are one such thing.

We'd trekked in Thailand before, hiking our way through jungle till we got to a beautiful bamboo village where we enjoyed the evening eating Thai curry and listening to locals play the guitar.  It was a great evening but the satellite dishes and cars we spied when we left the next day suggested it wasn't that remote or traditional a village, no matter what we were told.

Here in the North of Laos though you're meant to be able to find some pretty unspoilt villages so we set off from Luangnamtha on a two day trek with the promise of local tribes.  Even the first village we visited, which was only a couple of hundred metres from the road, threw up some interesting sites.  First off the entire village came out and stood watching us for a good 20 minutes and then on the way out we spotted this young girl smoking.  According to the guide this isn't usual and it was propbably just some rolled up paper.  She had the toking action nailed though, chugging away, inhaling and breathing out through nose and mouth.

We statrted trekking and I was wondering what we'd get fed once we got to the village but I didn't have to wait that long.  3 hours into the trek lunch was called and it was none of the fried rice in polystyrene containers you usually get on tourist operations in South East Asia.  Wild banana leaves were cut down to make an eating surface and some real local food was laid out.  We picked the leeches from our ankles, tried in vain to keep flies and ants off the food and cracked on.

The white coleslaw like stuff is rattan, which it seems has uses beyond furniture.  The meat was water buffalo larb, slightly chewy but full of flavour.  The greens contained manioc, sweet potato leaves, some fern and some other jungle plants the guide didn't know the English name for: some bitter, some sweet, some tender, some stringy - all interesting.  The white leek like things were one of the most interesting for me, young galangal.  I've used the rhizome in tom yam and curry pastes, where it's distinctive flavour has no subsistute, but here the shoots were a much more delicate affair, obviously the same plant but the strong spice was now just a hint of flavour.  Tidying up was easy with the leaf and remains just being dumped into the river for the wildlife to feast on.

Lunch over we set off trekking again, on what turned out to be one of the hardest days trekking of my life.  After our guide getting us lost we hired a local rice farmer to take us on for a couple of hours until our original guide recogised the jungle again.  Along the way our guide picked lemongrass, ginger and loads of wild mushrooms ready for the evening meal.  To add to these he found the biggest bamboo shoot I've ever seen, it was quite literally as big as my arm, and so far removed from the uniform rectangular strips bought in tins.  I'd wanted to take a photo but it ended up getting prepared before I could.

Finally we arrived in the village which was just a few bamboo huts running wild with chickens, piglets, cows and local children.  We were showed to our hut (home to 7 already) and it was something straight from a museum with hard mud floor, sparse bamboo funriture and an open fire.  We were told they'd only let their first tourists in 4 months back and we were the 18th group to visit.  We certainly seemed to interest them as within half an hour most of the women and children were sat watching us eat, the men all seconded to other local villages to help with the rice planting.  Dinner was fried water buffalo and some greens along with a soup made from the mushrooms our guide had picked as we went along.  All was flavoured with the spices he'd gathered on the trek.  All was prepared under candlelight and cooked over an open flame, there was no electiricity or gas here.

We went to bed on our bamboo bed and had a pretty bad night's sleep.  It was hot and clammy and there was noise a plenty from both the family two foot away and all the animals outside.  I wouldn't have  changed it for the world though.  Whilst being woken up at 5.30am after hardly sleeping would normally piss me off opening my eyes to a local lady weaving cloth on her loom made up for it all.

Breakfast ended up being bamboo shoot fried with garlic and ginger served with fried rice.  The type of bamboo we'd picked needed 4 hours simmering (which had happened overnight) and then a simple fry, other bamboo (I learnt) can be fried straight off after peeling and slicing.  Even in daylight the huts still tended towards the dark side.

BBQ Belly and Sweetcorn

Whilst a lot of food in Thailand and Laos is heavily spiced there are some simple things too.  In Laos one of these simple dishes is barbecued meat.  Every town we visited was littered with stalls selling barbecued chicken and pork sandwiched between bamboo skewers or barbecued sausages.  Vang Vieng took it further though with a trio of stalls barbecueing big cuts of belly pork and pork ribs.  Simple or not the pork belly blew my mind, jumping straight into the top 5 foods of the travels so far.  There was crisp crackling, tender lean and juicy fat, seasoned to perfection and full of smoke flavour.  Served in a plastic bag with another little plastic bag of chili sauce who could ask for more?

Another more frugal affair was boiled corn.  Whether it's electronics on Tottenham Court Road or books on Charring Cross Road sellers like to stick together and in Luang Prabang it was no different with one street full of ladies under umbrellas selling sweetcorn.

For 1,000 kip, which is about 7p, you got a bundle of 3 pint sized sweetcorn, still in their husks and even though they're removed from a big plastic bag still piping hot.  Judging on how they tasted I'm guessing they've not been harvested long either.

Laos Omelette

Loas is an amazing country, probably my favourite so far, but it is very, very poor. This can be seen in the street food stalls. Whilst a hawker in Malaysia or Thailand has a nice stainless steel unit on wheels, complete with a gas burner or two, here in Laos the street stalls tend to cook over an open fire. They're just a table, a hearth, some burning wood and a wok.

One such stall in Luang Prabang was turning out omelettes so I thought I'd give it a go. Even with such simple equipment the meal was superb. The egg was swirled to coat the wok and then covered with some morning glory and bean sprouts, the whole shebang given a moment under a lid so the heat would wilt these. Once sufficiently tender the omelette was folded into a veg filled parcel. A big bowl of fish sauce and lime juice to dip added salt and sharpness, dried chili gave the heat prerequisite in these parts.

Dog

I've always been of the opinion that one shouldn't favour animals when it comes to eating.  Why's one good for food and another not?  With this in mind I'd said I'd eat dog if ever the opportunity arose.  After watching a program on TV though, where in Vietnam the dogs were treated pretty badly, I decided I probably wouldn't eat any dog once I got there.

Unbeknown to me though it's not only Vietnam that eats the stuff and one evening in the jungle town of Pakbang, Laos (halfway through a two day ferry ride down the river Mekong) I asked the lady what she was grilling and she said "Dog".  I thought I must have misheard her but she pointed at one of the street dogs to confirm and I had to oblige, hoping the bad living standards were Vietnam only.

I've read a lot about folk eating dog and it's never been too positive, always moaning it's fatty and chewy.  Maybe I got a pedigree though as it was fantastic, a thought shared by the other 5 people who also cracked on (I didn't expect everyone we'd ended up travelling with to be so game).  It was lamb-like in both taste and fat content, the meat was dark and tender and any fat not unplesant, especially after a good barbecuing.  The stuffed dog intestines were heavy going though, even if the strong lemongrass flavour suggested the filling was there on purpose I couldn't disassociate it from the other dark filling intestines usually have.  Weak of mind I know but true.