Cooking The Books

The Street Food of Hoi An - Banh Mi Op La

Name:  Banh Mi Op La

Time of Day:  Breakfast only

Location: The south end of Thai Cao Van

Cost: 15,000 dong (c. 50p)

The Rest:  Early one morning I noticed a stall rammed full of locals.  I went over to take a closer look and saw everyone eating what looked like mini fry ups out of metal trays.  The owner shouted 'omelette' at me, beckoning me to join the throng of before school and work locals.  Whilst it definitely wasn't an omelette my interest was beyond piqued and I pulled up a stool.

As you can see what I was served was a quite underdone fried egg in its own frying recepticle (a quartet of which I've now acquired to repeat the dish in England) complete with luncheon meat and a couple of pieces of beef.  The dish is finished with a ladle of pork stock which carries on the cooking of the egg and mingles with the yolk when you start mopping away with provided baguette.

It's as good as it sounds, in fact scrap that - it's far better.  Rich yolk mixes with stock which then soaks into crisp baguette which I chose to top with little squares of egg white and meat.  I'm not sure of the honours system in Vietnam but Banh Mi Op La Inventor should be Sir Banh Mi Op La Inventor.

The Street Food of Hoi An - Banh Mi

Name:  Banh Mi

Time of Day:  All day

Location: Everywhere

Cost: 7,000 - 10,000 dong (c. 20p - 25p), but locals pay more like 5,000

The Rest:  Vietnam used to be a French colony and whilst they managed to drive out their occupiers they made the wise move to keep their bread, although they call in Vietnamese bread.  It is eaten with soup - which is good - but the best use is the mass of banh mi stalls lining the streets who fill it with meat, salad, pate and various sauces. 

The bread is crisp and light and in the nicest places still warm, getting heat from charcoal fired ovens under the counter of the street stalls.  You get pork belly, pork luncheon meat and pork paste (all at once).  Cucumber is joined by grated carrot and a few strands of pickled veg.  Sauce wise there's chili and then other oils, both meaty and herby.  I'm not too sure exactly what they are but one local person said they were the meat juices from the roast pork filling.  Whatever they are they soak into the bread adding flavour (not that we're short on flavour anyway with all that filling) and then drip out down your arms as you stuff your face.  One of the best additions is something called pate, which I've already mentioned as a topping to the Vietnamese polenta in Hanoi.  Here the soft minced meat is spread on to the bread before the other fillings go in, adding yet more depth and richness.

They are one of the world's great sandwiches - fact.

Bai People - Baba, Market and Local Tofu

Getting slightly outside Dali one leaves behind the new "old town" and sees a far more traditional way of life.  One of the nearby Bai minority villages runs a market every five days and luckily for me it coincided with our couple of days there.  Not one to turn down a wet market we hired a guide and cracked on.

As we went down the cheap route with our guide there was no private car and we used the local bus for transport.  Half an hour outside Dali we passed through Xizhou.  I'm not sure if this place lays claim to inventing a flatbread called baba or if it's just known for having good baba but it's definitely famed for them.  Lining the main street were a number of identical baba sellers, all having nothing more than an umbrella and a big wicker basket full of the delicacies, and luckily for us our bus pulled up alongside them.  Notes were passed from hand to hand down the rather crowded bus (a few minutes later we had to get out the bus, get a taxi past a police checkpoint and then get back on the bus once we'd cleared the overloading check) and then baba made the return journey.  They came in sweet or salted and we took the salted - an oily, soft, salty, layered flatbread studded with spring onion and with the surprise of some minced pork on top.  Whether they invented it or not it was damn fine street food.

You'll have to view the market shots on Flickr until I can get pictobrowser working again - click here

I love a good wet market and this was a good one.  The food was interesting but reasonably normal - well beside the live piglets and chickens - but the people were amazing.  The bright colours, headresses and altitude weathered skin were more reminiscent of the altiplanos in Peru than what I thought of as China.  I'll stop here as with any market I think it's better shown off with pictures than words.

There were a few street food stalls at the market and one I had to sample was the local tofu.  Sat beneath a muslin cover was a big slab of freshly made tofu, not the usual white but a yellow, a colour that, I was told, comes from the yellow beans it was made from.  The texture of the tofu was reasonably fim with some pieces having the added support of a darker skin.  To stimulate the tastebuds a bit it was topped with pickled veg, chickpeas and rather a lot of chili.  As with most things so far in China it was pretty damn warm.

Roti canai making in action

I've wrote about the roti canai a while back and said I'd report back once I'd got some action photos of them being made.  Well I finally plucked up the courage to photograph the chef in action so here they are.

An Average Breakfast: Roti Canai and Char Sui Pau (Bao)

Previous trips to Kuala Lumpur have differed from this one in two ways, firstly they've been much shorter, like 2 or 3 days, and secondly I've had a job to fund them with.  Both have meant that when I've been here I've splashed the cash, staying in the mind blowingly good Mandarin Oriental each time.  This trip is somewhat different though and so I'm currently staying in the more humble Alex's Guesthouse.  I won't lie and say I don't miss the Mandarin Oriental but here does have some advantages, outside of the cost and the friendliness the main one is the location.  Gone is the tourism of the KLCC and the Golden Triangle, replaced by normal everyday KL life.  We're only a few minutes from the Mid Valley Mega-mall (the biggest in South East Asia), with its food hall and masses of global food chains, but for everyday meals we've got two Chinese restaurants and a handful of little hawker stalls over the road, the latter providing my breakfast everyday, which is normally something like this.

The flatbreads are roti canai and they're quite simply one of the tastiest foods known to man.  Fresh bread is always good and here it couldn't get much fresher.  A lump of dough is rolled out, then swung around and pulled even thinner on an oiled work surface till it's maybe a 1mm thick.  It's so impressive to watch them work and I'll get some photos some day.  I'm normally not too self conscious with the camera but here it's not at all touristy, it's just locals eating breakfast, and I do feel a tad self conscious.  As we're the only white folk here though everyone's starting to recognise us, say hello and wave, so I think I'll get the courage soon.  Once I do the snaps will be up here.  Until then words and the finished product, snapped in the comfort of my home, is all you're getting.  Back to the roti, once the dough is very thin it's folded back in on itself to form a 15cm multi-layered square which gets cooked in a couple of minutes on a big hot plate.  What you're left with is a steaming hot flatbread that pulls apart in flaky but chewy layers.  This is served with either dal or fish curry (light and dark bags in the snap respectively), both very watery and lacking lentils or fish.  Both very tasty nevertheless.

Malaysia is very multi-cultural - being maybe 60% Malay, 30% Chinese and 10% from the Indian subcontinent - and as a homage to that (well more because I can) I supplement the very Indian roti with a very Chinese char sui pau (or bao if you're not in Malaysia) which is massive by UK dim sum standards.  The roti are 1 ringgit (20p) each and the pau 1.40 ringits (so maybe 35p, the mango maybe 15p) - I tend to have some combination of these every morning, although I sometimes have a dosai (fermented rice pancake) from the same stall that does the roti, I'll cover them another day though.  Breakfast here is probably my favourite meal of the day.