Cooking The Books

Asia - The Best of the Best

Well that's it for my travels.  It's been an amazing experience and I'm far from happy to be back in England.  Most of the trip's food was great, and low points were still pretty damn good, but there were definitely some winners and losers so I'd thought I'd put them down for posterity.  I've decided to rate the countries as far as their food goes and then give my favourite dishes too.  I was thinking of ranking the latter too but after weeks of thinking about it I still can't really decide an order.  As such whilst the countries are from best to worst the dishes are just my ten favourites in no particular order.

Country Competition

1) China

There's no doubt in my mind on this one, whilst some lower places were a bit harder to decide.  It's a tad unfair too as China's bigger than the rest of the countries put together.  Unfair or not though it wins, there's just so much variety, from the familiar to the unexpected, hardly a day went by without something amazing being eaten.  Even after two months there I feel I need another six months to finish exploring.

2) Vietnam

Whilst it may not have the breadth of China's food Vietnam excelled in freshness of flavour and throwing up lots of surprises.  The combination of salty fish sauce and sour lime juice is perfect for my palate and it's in everything.  The popularity of Vietnamese food in the UK deserves to be as popular as it is in my little bit of East London.

3) Malaysia

Where Malaysia excels is with its meeting of cultures.  The three big ethnic groups - Malay, Chinese and Indian - all contribute to a breadth of cuisine way beyond what should be expected from a country that size.

4) Thailand

My first couple of weeks in Thailand were a big let down when it came to food.  I was expecting big things from it but the country is so developed from a tourist point of view that I think if you stick to the usual destinations - Chiang Mai and southern islands - you're rewarded with pretty generic, low grade food that's made not to offend Westerners over anything else.

I finished the trip with a few days in Bangkok though, where I made a big effort to eat on the street and away from tourist locations, and I was rewarded with the interesting food I'd been searching for - fiery, sour soups and curries, fermented crab salads and bags of fried pork and sticky rice. Whilst not doing enough to lift Thailand from fourth place it definitely saved my opinion of it.

5) Indonesia

Like Thailand, Indonesia suffered by my staying on a pretty touristy beach were the restaurants consisted of the places that happened to be on the beach when it started getting popular, rather than people who could actually cook.

A couple of days on mopeds and another in Banda Aceh threw up some decent dishes though that left me hungry to learn more.  Luckily I bought a cook book there, I just need to learn Indonesian/Malay now so I can read it.

6) Cambodia

Cambodia - particularly Phnom Penh and Siem Reap - is currently suffering from too many expats and tourists which have led to too many expensive and Westerner friendly restaurants. 

Kep and Battambang did throw up some nice street food but not enough to save it from the wooden spoon.

Dishes

1) Pan Mee (Malaysia)

Whilst this list is in no particular order if I had to give a first place it would be this.  Freshly made noodles, minced pork and crispy fried anchovies form the base this amazing dish with some chili sauce and - if you're lucky - a softly poached egg finishing the dry version and some stock completing the soup.

Hopefully a trip around the oriental supermarkets of London will throw up the required ikan bilis (dried anchovies) so I can attempt to mimic this at home.

2) Pork Mee (Malaysia)

Such a simple combination of ingredients - noodles, pig, stock and maybe an egg - yet so good.  Obviously the stock needs to be a flavoursome one and your pork can't be that insipid, overly lean stuff you buy in the supermarket over here but as long as your ingredients are good quality this dish is a winner.

3) Thai Sausages (Thailand)

Thailand may have managed a measly 4th place in the country competition but these were a winner.  Strong flavours and interesting additions like rice & rice noodles caused a soured flavour to develop.

4) Tian Shui Mian (China)

Thick, chewy wheat noodles bathed in sweet, sticky, salty, spicy, numbing sauce all served at room temperature.  Strange but beyond good.

5) Chinese Hamburger

Braised pork belly chopped and in a pitta-like bread.  Nothing more needs to be said.

6) Sichuan Crescent Dumplings (China)

These had always grabbed my attention in Fuchsia Dunlop's books and the real thing didn't disappoint.  The meat filling may be a plain one but when you start pairing them with red oil or seaweed and mushroom they're transformed.

7) Baozi (everywhere)

I'm sure most people have had Char Sui Bao - soft white steamed buns filled with barbecued pork - but the bun/bao doesn't need to stop here.  Laos, Thailand and Cambodia did a filling revolving around minced pork, shredded wood ear mushroom and a hardboiled egg, frequently a quail's egg, that was very good.  As was frequently the case China excelled though - minced pork with salty dried shrimp; pork and spring onion; shredded mushroom; spiced  potato; pork, shrimp and quail's egg to name a few.  So good that even though I ate them more than any other food I never had them long enough to photo and blog.

8) Mi Fen (China)

The simple things are often the best.  Rice noodles with crunchy preserved vegetables, a variety of chili and as much stock as you want.  Truly a delight.

9) Banh Mi Op La (Vietnam)

Fried egg, luncheon meat and beef, a bathing of stock mingling with the runny egg yolk and soaking in to a crisp baguette.  Shouldn't be too hard to mimic at home.

10) Com Tam (Vietnam)

With barbecued pork chop, pork terrine, pork skin and rice all pepped up with the salty, chili-laden nuoc cham this was always going to be a winner and that's before you've added a bowl of soup and a 30p price tag.

The Street Food of Vietnam - Com Tam

Name:  Com Tam

Time of Day:  All day

Location: Everywhere.  This one was in Chau Doc, the last town in the Mekong Delta before Cambodia.

Cost: 10,000 - 50,000 dong depending where you are and if it's street or restaurant

The Rest: Taking the barbecue concept and beefing it up (well porking it up really) is com tam.  If my sources are correct com tam means broken rice but it's the pork that's the main event.  No kebab this time but it's not missed too badly due to the freshly barbecued pork chop, slice of pork terrine, shredded pork skin and - if you're lucky - some pork stomach.  A veritable pork banquet all for about 30p and all for breakfast.

As this is more meal than snack (broken) rice provides carbs, pickled veg some nutrients, nuoc cham some saltiness and heat and soup some rehydration.  The one pictured was my last meal in Vietnam and also one of my favourites of my month there.

The Street Food of Vietnam - Thit Nuong

Name:  Thit Nuong

Time of Day:  Anytime

Location: Anywhere

Cost: The cheapest I saw were 2,500 dong each, the most expensive 15,000 - although they came with rice and pickled veg

The Rest: A lovely (for the person eating anyway) side effect of being in a poor country is, due to the lack of plumbed in gas and a dodgy electricity supply, lots of food is cooked over open fires.  Here the smoke filled flame gives heavily seasoned skewers of minced pork a flavour you just couldn't replicate with a different heat source. 

Eaten as a snack or with rice and some pickled veg as a meal you're onto a winner.

The Floating Markets of Vietnam

Along with the snake another thing that made it onto my heavily food biased 10 things to do whilst away was to visit a floating market somewhere and eat on the river.  With this is mind we were always going to visit one down in the Mekong Delta - the mouth of the great river in the south of Vietnam.  

A quick search around in some guidebooks suggested Can Tho was the best town to start in and so we headed there and, after our meal of snake, hired a long tail boat for the next morning along with a lovely English speaking local lady as guide.   By setting off at 5.30am we were told we could make it to two markets - Cai Rang and Phong Dien.  Cai Rang would consist of bigger boats and Phong Diem smaller canoe like vessels, manned by a woman or two.

To complete my task I had to do more than visit a market though and this was easily accomplished in Cai Rang where a little restaurant boat sat moored to a larger ship.  Inside a lady turned out bowls of hu tieu (a local noodle soup with pork and dried shrimp stock) and cari ga (curry chicken) which were passed outside for consumption on your own boat.  The market sellers popper over, grabbed their lunch and left, returning the bowls once they'd finished.  The food was tasty, sure, but it was the setting that made it, the diesel smoke that hung heavy in the air, and the noise of the engines, adding to rather than taking away from the meal.


Once our hunger was sated and one more item was ticked off my list we got to view the market proper.  It wasn't as dense with boats as I was expecting but it was great nonetheless and it was the real deal - people threw pineapples between boats, weighed fruit and exchanged cash, and I didn't see another tourist the whole time. 

Whilst for the small boats it was pretty obvious what was on offer from the proud piles within them, the larger boats had to choose a different route for advertising.  This they accomplished with the addition of a skyward pole with a sample of all they had, uniformly spaced up it, replacing a flag.  With all this activity the water was a tad dirty, littered with the outer leaves of cabbages or any specimens that had passed rom ripe to rotten.  Most of it was organic matter though and I'm sure the fish appreciated the feed.

Talking of feeding, between Cai Rang and Phong Dien we hopped ashore to see a plant nursery and there saw possibly (we did spend 2 months in China) the greatest toilet of our trip.  Two logs extended over a pond so you carefully shuffled out and went into the pond below.  If this wasn't fun enough said pond was a fish farm so as soon as anything hit the water it erupted in a frenzy of fish, fighting to be the recipients of a between meals snack.

The second market was far removed from the first, gone were the widely spaced boats replaced with a scrum of smaller ones side to side over a far smaller area.  Passing through just involved floating in to the mass, colliding as you went, and waiting for the boats to separate one by one allowing your passage.  This was an obviously slow process but it allowed you time to snap away and purchase some fruit for the return journey.  The conical bamboo hat is such an overused image of the far east but overused or not there's many places where simply everyone wears them (namely poor areas of China and SE Asia) and here was no different as they littered the small market.

After this market was over we hopped ashore to Phong Dien town and visited another market - this one land based - with such exotic delights as rat - in cages and skinned - and bags of live snakes. 

This finished a fantastic food related day, just leaving us a couple of hours to meander back through the many canals of the region, waving at local children and watching fisherman in action.  A fine end to a fantastic four weeks in Vietnam.

Snake

Some point last year Fergus Henderson - of St John/Nose to Tail Eating fame - and another chef - whose name evades me - had a show on TV called Hot to Eat an Elephant.  From the adverts it promised to be smorgasbord of weird eating with this view strengthened by Fergus's penchant for the less desirable bits of an animal.  As a fully paid up member of the weird eating brigade I tuned in but ended up pretty disappointed.  Dog was seemingly dismissed prior to tasting and post-eating described as fatty and chewy (I thought it was very good), rat never made it down their gullets due to cleanliness concerns and elephant failed due to moral concerns, even though the tribe they visited ate it regularly and had already slaughtered one in their honour.  I got left with the feeling Fergus was a bit more fussy than some of his recipes (a nice bit of spleen anyone?) would suggest.  One thing they did crack on with was snake though - in Vietnam and in the form of a multi-course snake meal.  At the start of this trip the gf and I made a list each of 10 things we wanted to do over the course of it and this segment had such an effect that 'Eat snake in Vietnam' made it onto mine.

It was only after I was thousands of kilometres south of Hanoi that I found out these multi-course meals were a very northern thing and I thought I'd missed my opportunity.  Chatting to a moto driver in Saigon reignited my hopes but the 1,500,000 dong price tag quashed them soon afterward.  Two days before leaving the country though a chance encounter with a Vietnamese/American citizen (emigrated after the war now back to his home town for a wealthy retirement) on a local bus in the Mekong Delta found us sitting in his friend's restaurant eyeballing 1.5kg of snake, decidedly still alive, with the prospect of a 470,000 dong bill.

The full 6 courses of the north weren't to be sampled but we would get a couple, along with the rather dubious sounding drinking of the blood and eating of the heart - still beating of course - and the gall bladder.  With these organs in short supply we agreed I could have the heart and the gf the honour of the gall bladder.  Normally I like a little alcohol (well a lot actually) down me when eating weird stuff but before I'd had a chance to even sip my beer the blood turned up.  I swear when I've seen this on TV a shot of hard liquor has been produced and a small quantity of blood drizzled in, the red swirling to pink before the lucky diner necks it in one.  No such luck for us as we were presented with a half pint glass with maybe 3cm - 4cm of blood sat in the bottom.  We were told to drink quickly - I can only assume before it clotted - and as the gf's list item specifically mentioned eating a snake and drinking its blood she went first.  Before my turn she said it just tasted salty and I concur, I'd add that it had an irony taste too.  I was very pleasantly surprised that it was cool, a pleasant side effect of the animal’s cold blooded status.  Pleasant surprise or not though it was still pretty heavy going and I was glad of the cold beer waiting in front of me.

It was a good few minutes before the organs came out but the heart was still happily beating away, no idea how long it would have carried on for – or it did for that matter but inside me - if I hadn't swallowed it.  We were told not to burst them, swallowing them whole instead, but there was little possibility we'd have given them a chew.  This time around some alcohol was present but just in the form of an inch of beer in the shot glass with them to help them down.  They tasted of nothing but the beer.  They were definitely for bravado over pleasure.

The snake itself was served some time later after a good simmering in the hope of tenderising.  First course was boiled snake - on a bed of onion and banana flower - served with rice porridge.  The snake was far from tender with the skin, in my mind, as edible as any other materials used in the making of handbags, shoes and belts - I've heard locals eat it though.  The meat itself, whilst a work out for the jaw, was very tasty.  A thick muscle ran down each side of the spine with smaller ones over the ribs and some intercostals too along with a surprising amount of fat.  Clichéd or not it tasted like chicken more than any other meat I've eaten, just with a lot of bite.  It chewed up okay though and I was more than happy to eat it.

Whilst waiting we asked how many people a 1.5kg snake would normally feed and were told 6.  With this in mind it was no surprise that come the final course we were absolutely stuffed.  Luckily the second course was a relatively light snake and straw mushroom soup/hotpot, sat simmering over a hot plate with greens and some crinkle cut starches of some description to go in.  The snake was much the same as the first course (they'd both been simmered the same way then unceremoniously portioned with scissors) just maybe a bit more tender with the extra cooking.  I may well have imagined that though.  Not wanting to waste food - especially expensive food - we ate as much of the main event as possible but didn't really put a dent in the other bits in the stock.

Overall I'd recommend snake meat to anyone wanting to try something different, if you don’t mind chewing a bit it’s very tasty - you'll know yourself if you're open minded enough for the preliminary titbits though.