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.

Banda Aceh

Banda Aceh is at the northern most tip of Indonesia's northern most island, Sumatra.  I don't think they get a lot of western tourists, except for those passing through to Pulau Weh to dive, but if you're passing by it is worth a day there to see the devastation that the tsunami wreaked a few years back.  The whole place was pretty much razed to the floor and the town now has a huge power station ship sat in the middle of it as the waves unceremoniously dumped it there, its size precluded moving it and the town has grown up again around it.

Food wise there's not too much to report from there (the food stalls outside Hotel Wisata did serve the best satay I've ever eaten, sorry Malaysia) but there was a couple of fishing related snaps I liked so here they are.

Loading the boat with blocks of ice to keep the catch cool

The remains of some big tuna outside the fish market

Mie So and Mie Bakso

Another day and another moped hire led to the discovery of two new, similar dishes.

The first was Mie So.  This simple dish was just good chicken stock, rice vermicelli, crispy fried shallots and a small amount of shredded, fried chicken.  The final addition was one I'd not seen before, a handful of small and colourful (only dye) prawn crackers sat on top and going soggy.  They're something I shall add to noodle soups going forward.  The chili sauce was interesting too, brown and watery with a fresh taste.  A few hand minutes of hand signalling (the owner spoke no English and me no Bahasa) said the sauce was just whole fresh small red chillies liquidised in a little water, nothing more.  This seemed to keep fine just sat in pots as refrigerators aren't big over here, the flavour probably develops over time really.  I'll give it a go one day and see how it turns out.

The second dish was at another road side stall later in the day, this time staffed by a single young girl surrounded by her 6 even younger siblings all playing and finding us amusing.  

Mie So was on the menu but as we'd had it a few hours before we went for Mie Bakso instead.  This turned out to be a very similar to Mie So (with egg noodles as well as rice vermicelli) with the addition of bakso - small, springy meat balls.  Some pointing at the resident goat and a bit of mooing confirmed the meat was beef.  The soup was very tasty and the kids were fantastic fun, after figuring out the beef we worked our way through every animal we could imitate, them teaching us the malay for it and us teaching them the english.

Mie Aceh

Whilst Gapang Beach may not have been the culinary capital of Indonesia I knew Pulau Weh must've had more to offer.  One day we hired some mopeds to explore the island and whilst for the others it meant waterfalls and volcanoes, for me it meant the opportunity to find what the locals ate as I knew they didn't eat instant noodles and fried eggs.

When we'd been on the mainland I'd seen signs for Mie Aceh (mie is the word for noodle, Aceh is the region) but it had been between meals.  When we saw a hawker peddling the dish I told the others we had to crack on.  I wasn't missing out on an opportunity and so I proceeded to stand next to the chef whilst he cooked, making a note of everything he did so I cold recreate it at home.  Since then I've bought an Indonesian recipe book which has a recipe in but I think I'll stick to my notes instead, even if I have to go to the cook book for the chili paste recipe.

Mie Aceh is like an English Chinese takeaway chow mein given a kick up the bum with some fiery chili. Egg noodles - the dry mie Aceh are slightly orange, and straight like spaghetti, but standard egg noodles are very similar - are fried with cabbage, beansprouts, spring onions, shallots and tomato and a couple of spoonfuls of a harissa like paste.  I've not translated my cook book yet (alas they didn't have any English versions) but it seems to be chili, shallot, garlic and a few other local spices.  You're left with a very hot plate of vegetable noodles, far removed from the instant ones I'd been living off previously.  Sometimes you get a little meat too, see if you can spot it in the chef photo.  This was served with crisp, fried shallots, a little lime (limau kasturi), sliced cucumber and some crisps very reminiscent of corn thins.  Once my travels are over I'll endeavour to get recipes up for all the dishes I mention, at the moment I've not cooked for 3 months and so descriptions will have to do.  

As well as the mie we had some apong balik: crisp, filled, folded pancakes.  I've mentioned these before as I'd eaten them in Malaysia where they're filled with peanuts and sweetcorn.  On Pulau Weh the sweetcorn was replaced with a chocolate sprinkles (a throwback to their Dutch colonial past maybe?) and the whisk was replaced with a bundle of sticks.  

We had a little look around the market there too which had the usual dried fish and seafood so common in these parts.  One thing it had that I'd never seen before was pestle and mortars made from what I assume is volcanic rock, dark and porous.  Needless to say I'm now the proud owner of one.

The Food of Gapang Beach, Pulau Weh

After the Cameron Highlands we were planning to go to an island in Southern Malaysia called Tioman.  A chance encounter with an extremely well travelled couple in said highlands left us with an 11th hour change of plan, a quick booking of some flights and before you know it we were sat in Medan, in Indonesia's Sumatra.  We're reasonably well travelled but this place was still quite a shock to the system, white folk numbered about 5 sightings for the day and we stuck out so much 2 groups of kids pulled us up over the course of the day so they could take a photo of themselves with us.  Late in the evening we found ourselves in the local bus station, ready for a 12 hour coach journey to Banda Aceh so we could get the ferry to Pulau Weh, the real reason we'd left Malaysia.  At the bus station we had our first great Indonesian food experience with a bowl of soto in a restaurant next door.  This soto (there's rather a lot of them) was a watery, well spiced stew with some roasted then stewed dark meat served with a bowl of rice to spoon it over.  It was gorgeous, and well worth a blogging, but as the entire restaurant full of men had already stopped eating to sit staring at the two foreigners eat the camera remained firmly in the bag.  Sorry.

12 hours of coach, 2 hours of ferry and an hour of taxi and we were at Gapang Beach on Pulau Weh, the northern most tip of Indonesia - a volcanic island full of monkeys, giant bats and free range farm animals frequented by a handful of Westerners at a time who are there to explore the amazing underwater scenery.  After the sato I had high hopes for the food but after a couple of days it was obvious that the people serving food here were doing so because they happened to own property on a beach that had started to become touristy, not because they could cook.  The food wasn't bad but it wasn't local either, they basically fried some long keeping veg (onion, carrot, cabbage and cauliflower) and then put them with instant noodles - soup or fried - or fried rice.  This was finished with a fried egg - they eat a lot of eggs out there - and some fried chicken or fish.  Tasty but a bit repetitive after two weeks.

At the entrance to the beach there was a place everyone called the warung which served up nasi campur.  This style of food, eaten daily by malays in both Indonesia and Malaysia, is pretty scary at first.  At some point before lunch various fish, chicken, egg (boiled, fried, omelette - told you they liked them) and veg dishes are stuck in the window where they sit until they're eaten.  No heating or refrigeration, just a nice squid curry sat in the 30 plus heat for a couple of hours till you turn up.  As a child of kid gloves western society, where we're told anything, let alone sea food, must be cooled quickly and then straight away kept below a few degrees centigrade the first go is quite daunting.  Due to this we didn't eat here until a couple of days before leaving.  What a mistake, the food was divine.  We had squid curry, curried jack fruit (I assume it's not ripe), kang kung and fried fish amongst others.  So cheap too, with one piece of fish you paid 10,000 rupiah, with 2 pieces 15,000.  Chicken or squid came in at 15,000 too.  At the time of eating the exchange rate was about 16,000 to the pound.  Since then I've eaten masses of these rice buffets and as yet have felt no ill effects so if you see one, and assuming you're a little daunted too, overcome your fears and crack on.  Every one has been very tasty.

The best food experience from the beach was Mama Donut though.  A good story always adds to the enjoyment and Mama had a fine one.  Every day her husband sat at home making a plethora of steamed and fried delights - donuts, spring rolls, fried bananas, steamed buns with green beans, slices of spiced battered potato - and every afternoon she loaded up her plastic box and sat waiting for the dive boats to return so she could feed the hungry divers at 2,000 rupiah (c. 13p) a piece.  In a country where many folk don't go to school too much the story goes that Mama Donut has put 12 kids through school with these donut sales, with the oldest 2 having been put through uni off the proceeds too.  True or not that news made them taste so much sweeter.