Cooking with Mr. Sing

I really only have one Lao cookbook.  “Traditional Recipes of Laos” the collection of Phia Sing the royal chef from Luang Prabhang edited by Alan and Jennifer Davidson.  So I resolved to hone my home cooking skills by recreating recipes from the book.  My first idea was to go through the book and cook everything in it.  But even weeding out those with ingredients that seemed too hard to get even in Laos –  “pickled fish roe membrane” or “dried quail (matured until almost moldy)” – there were still over 100 recipes to try.

I decided to narrow the field to recipes that would epitomize different cooking methods and techniques and see what I could learn from that.  Here goes.

Recipe #10 Sousi Pa Gnon – A ‘Hot’ Dish of Small Catfish


The second ingredient is written as follows “1 fully grown coconut, split open – grate the meat and squeeze two extractions of coconut milk from it”.  This is the kind of instruction that makes me want to turn the page.  Have you ever actually split open and grated the meat of a coconut?  It’s hard and it takes forever.  But here in Laos there is a magic machine that leads you to read on.  Click here to see it at work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsSnBtqG8xA

Then all you have to do is pick out the bigger brown shell bits; add some lukewarm water and squeeze away until you get a nice thick milk – actually more like a cream.  You drain and reserve that and re-squeeze the coconut with more water until you get the second extraction.  A bonus is that your hands get all soft and lovely from the coconut oil.

I couldn’t understand Mr. Sing’s initial instruction: “Put the first extraction of coconut in a wok on the fire until it becomes creamy”.  I mean, isn’t it creamy already?  But the next phase of the recipe is to fry a pounded mixture of shallots and chili peppers in it.  I realized that I had to reduce the coconut cream, getting rid of its water, until all that was left was the oil as a frying medium.  Cool.

So I did that, and then added the fish, the second extraction of coconut milk some kaffir lime leaves; salt and fish sauce.  Here it is with a handful of coriander and scallions on top.









Recipe #18 Keng Som Kalampi – Sour Cabbage Soup
Recipe #64 Jeow Bong – Bong Sauce

For a royal cookbook #18 is a very homespun recipe.  Pork bones; cabbage; scallions; lemon grass and two fresh tomatoes all boiled up in water until the veggies are cooked.  The reason I made it is because it’s supposed to be served with jeow bong.  Remember the water buffalo skin being grilled in the fire in the jeow blog?  That’s part of  recipe #64.  The rest of 64’s ingredients include 10 dried chili peppers grilled until brittle; 5 small shallots and 5 small heads of garlic blackened in the fire; 2 slices of galingale.  Once these are all pounded together to a paste you stir in the previously grilled and then salt-water-soaked buffalo skin bits.  Bruce, my husband, felt that the chewy texture of the buffalo skin made the flavors of all the other ingredients stay longer in the mouth.   And the punchy flavors of the jeow were balanced by the simplicity of the soup.


Recipe #44 Kanab Pa Gnon – Catfish Grilled in a Banana Leaf

In Laos it seems that everything that isn’t actually grilled over an open flame is grilled in a banana leaf.  Here’s a market stand devoted to the sale of nothing but.  And don’t try to buy just a couple of leaves – you have to get the whole pack or else they get very huffy.

This recipe mixes small catfish with finely chopped pork belly; pounded lemon grass, chilies, shallots and pork cracklings; plus some scallions and sweet basil leaves.  I guess the pork is to add some fat to the dish.  You wrap it all in a double layer of banana leaf and grill it.  I couldn’t find small catfish so I bought a bigger one and filleted it and cut it up.  But I have to admit I really don’t like the flavor of catfish.  It’s got a muddy aftertaste that a lot of river fish seem to have.  I’ve decided from now on to stick with tilapia which, although a bit boring, nevertheless isn’t a bottom feeder.

Recipe #27 Pa Fok – Minced Fish Cooked in Packets

This was a real winner.  Lots of pounding going on but so worth it.  Pound together skinless fish fillet (tilapia); shallots; black peppercorns until a really sticky mush.  Then stir in some coconut milk and beaten egg plus fresh coriander and some fish sauce.  I know these directions are vague but so’s the recipe.  Then you spoon the mixture into banana leaves.  By the way, in order to make your banana leaf more pliable, you run the shiny side over an open flame to soften it.  I learned that in Veracruz, Mexico along with my tamale in a banana leaf folding and toothpick closing technique which came in handy here.  Then you take all your banana leaf packets and steam them for a while – like 15/20 minutes.  I know, it really is a very vague recipe.  But what you get is divine – like a Laotian quenelle.

Recipe 54b Ua No Mai – Stuffed Bamboo Shoots

I got a kind of false start on this one.  I found fresh bamboo shoots, already peeled, at the market, brought them home and cooked them.  Bamboo shoots are evidently quite bitter and despite cooking them for over half an hour they were still pretty hard to take.  I went online and learned that the Japanese cook them using the rice soaking water to dispel the bitterness so I tried that and it seemed to work.  But I couldn’t go on to the next step since I had the wrong kind of bamboo – too skinny to stuff.

I needed fatter shoots which could be slashed through the middle making a kind of pocket into which a mixture of minced pork, shallots and scallions gets smushed.  Mr. Sing suggested making the slits with a needle but we used a box knife.  They probably didn’t have box knives in Luang Prabhang back then.  What a pain – this slashing/smushing is the kind of fiddly cooking assembly that I loath.  Mr. Sing prescribed wrapping these stuffed shoots in banana leaves, steaming them and then batter frying them but that seemed like overkill.  I was, however, a bit afraid that the whole incredibly labor intensive thing would disintegrate in the oil – so I floured them first and then fried them.  Mr. Sing would have you fry them in lard but I used vegetable oil .  They probably didn’t have vegetable oil in Luang Prabhang back then either.    Unfortunately, they turned out to be absolutely scrumptious but if I ever make these for you you’ll know that I really, really love you to pieces.  

Jeow

People often ask me what I think is the main difference between Lao and Vietnamese food. My first answer used to be that Vietnam has thousands of kilometres of coastline so seafood plays a huge part in the cuisine. Laos is landlocked so river fish is the staple here.

But recently I went back to Luang Prabhang and took two cooking classes. One run by the restaurant “Tamarind” and the other a one-on-one with the doyenne of Lao food, Vandara. After these lessons, I’d have to say the use of the mortar (kok) and pestle (sak) - which figured in almost all the food we prepared - may be more germane.

There’s even a whole repertoire of pounded dishes made to go with sticky rice called jeow (rhymes with Day-O like the Harry Belafonte song) whose recipes are actually ones you can reproduce at home. Dear reader, do I hear an electronic sigh of “finally” exhaled down the information highway as you read these words?

I cadged the following four recipes from Joy Ngueamboupha and Caroline Gaylard who published them in their charming cookbook “Tamarind’s Little Book of Jeow” Here’s a bowl of jeow mak len, a tomato salsa which, except for the fish sauce, could be served with a bag of tortilla chips at your next Cinco de Mayo party. I always wonder what Old World cuisine was like before 1492 when the chili was introduced from meso-America. Can you imagine Southeast Asian or Indian food, or practically any cuisine, without it? It seems there’s a substance in chilies - capsicum - which stimulates endorphin production (the feel good hormone) and explains why people rapidly become addicted to them. Chocolate, another New World food, has the same properties.

This is jeow mak keua – eggplant dip. The eggplants and chilies are grilled before pounding and with a slurp of olive oil and substituting mint for coriander you could be eating this in Turkey. Of course, no fish sauce. Although if you were eating it in ancient Rome 2,000 years ago, no chilies, but there’d definitely have been fish sauce. The Romans called it garum and chucked it into everything. It was so popular, that the overwhelming, noxious odor of rotting fish guts led the Roman government to outlaw the manufacture of garum in the home.

Here’s my sak with pounded fresh ginger soon to have the addition of pounded peanuts and then lightly pounded pork cracklings. Jeow king. Nothing grilled; just a lot of elbow grease. This was great with barbecued chicken and sticky rice. The leftovers I mixed with ground pork and then stuffed into wonton wrappers for wonton soup. I feel that if I’ve thrown food away – I’ve somehow deeply failed.

Here’s jeow si khai whose principal flavor component is pounded lemon grass. This we ate together with little pieces of poached tilapia wrapped up in lettuce leaves. The mixture would also make a super stuffing for a grilled fish.

O.K., I lied! This is an essential ingredient for the classic Luang Prabhang jeow bong and you can’t make this at home. But how could I resist a recipe that calls for “ ½ a strip of dried water buffalo skin, grilled until done, then scraped smooth, cut into thin small slices and soaked in salt water”? I got the recipe from Phia Sing the royal chef whose hand written collection was published by Alan Davidson as “Traditional Recipes of Laos”. But how do you know when it's "done"?

Bo, my gatekeeper, who is rapidly becoming my sous chef, demonstrated that cooking water buffalo skin can’t be accomplished by placing it on a grill the way we westerners would do. No, you thrust it into the coals until it turns black and all the hairs have burned away. Then you bang it with your pestle to get all the charred bits off. In fact, the Lao “grill” everything right in the fire which produces the smoky flavor that is such an integral part of Lao food.

This trio is another Bo recipe, who, by the way, also taught me that you can use the outside surface of your mortar as a knife sharpener! Bo’s jeow is about as basic as you can get. Grilled chilies, garlic and shallots peeled and pounded. Fish sauce, natch, and then, to Bo’s taste, a whole lot of MSG. That led me to the internet to find out exactly what it is.

MSG was created by a Japanese chemist, Kikuna Ikeda, in 1907. It was patented in 1909 and here’s a bottle from that same company, Aji-no-moto, still being manufactured today. Wikipedia states that it’s a salt which appears naturally in food – previously extracted from seaweed and wheat gluten - but now from either fermented sugar beets, sugar cane or molasses. It goes on to say that there is no real evidence supporting the claim that it makes you feel physically peculiar when you eat it. But, come on Wicki, we all know that’s not true. Or maybe just us falangs (Lao for foreigner – like gringo) have a problem with it.

Natacha du Pont de Bie in “Ant Egg Soup”, her book about traveling through Laos and learning about Lao food, writes that "Bo’s jeow” was also the former King of Laos favorite jeow. Unlike Emperor Bo Dai of Vietnam who lived out his days in Paris, or King Sihanouk of Cambodia who never really lost power, the politically naïve King Savang Vatthana was not so fortunate. After the revolution in 1975, he and his wife, Queen Khamponi, and Crown Prince Vong Savang were all sent to “re-education” camps in the northeast of Laos where after many years they finally died from malnutrition and neglect. Such a simple jeow befits what seems to have been a simple man.

Bo and the King’s Jeow
12 small fresh green chilies (or less if you can’t take the heat)
4 cloves of garlic
3 small shallots
salt

Grill the first three ingredients. Remove the stalks from the chilies and peel the garlic and shallots. Pound them together with salt to taste.

I make this and then fold it into a fresh tomato sauce for pasta. Zowie!

Jeow si khai

Pound one fresh chili, one clove of garlic and a pinch of salt to a paste.
Finely chop 2 or 3 stalks of lemongrass and then pound them in until softened.
Mix in two teaspoons of lime juice; a half teaspoon sugar and a teaspoon of fish sauce.

Jeow king
Pound 100 grams of peeled and chopped fresh ginger
Add two tablespoons of peanuts and pound thoroughly.
Add ½ teaspoon of salt and 30 grams of pork cracklings then pound until well mixed.
Add fish sauce to taste.

Jeow mak keua
Prick three small Japanese eggplants, one fresh chili and four cloves of garlic. Grill them until charred. Peel.

Pound chili; ¾ teaspoon of salt and the garlic to a paste. Add eggplant and ½ cup chopped coriander. Pound again until a soft paste. Add fish sauce to taste.

Jeow mak len
Pound four cloves of garlic, a pinch of salt and one fresh chili to a paste. Roughly chop eight medium tomatoes. Add tomatoes to mortar and pound a bit to blend flavors.

Put a teaspoonful of vegetable oil in a pan and lightly fry the roughly chopped white part of five or six scallions. Then add the tomato mixture to the pan and cook, stirring continuously, until they have broken down.

Add the roughly chopped green part of the scallions, then ¼ cup of chopped coriander and cook for only a minute.

Add a little dash of fish sauce and a small squeeze of lime. If it seems too sour add a pinch of sugar.

I tried grilling the tomatoes before chopping them and I like the extra flavor that gives.

A Detective Story

A quasi vegetarian friend of mine wrote vis-à-vis my blog “I’m beginning to think there’s not much I could or would eat in Laos”. So, realizing that maybe I’ve been concentrating a bit too much on odd proteins, I resolved to return to the market and check out the greens.

Here’s an example of a veggie stand where you can get all sorts of Southeast Asian things you know like Thai basil, lemon grass, coriander, lime leaves, etc. and a hell of a lot of things you haven’t a clue what they are. I bought a bunch of every single mysterious green thing I could find. I brought them home and asked my Lao next door neighbor, Pa, what they were called and, as she told me, I tried to write - using the western alphabet - the word the way it sounded to me. Then my husband, Bruce, took photos of each individual leafy thing and we e mailed those pictures labeled with my Lao transliteration to the always helpful Caroline Gaylard and Joy Ngeuamboupha of “Tamarind” restaurant in Luang Prabhang. Could they send me their identification and possible use for same? Which they swiftly did. So here’s what that whole process and some time on the internet taught me.

Plus this guy. Here’s someone I would really have liked to have met. Alan Davidson. A serious “foodie” before the word was coined. He is most well known for writing and compiling “Oxford Companion to Food”. As the British Ambassador to Laos from 1973 until 1975 he gathered information for two seminal works on Lao food. One “Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos” includes the Lao as well as the Latin name for fish from the Mekong. There are also exquisite drawings; general info about each species; recipes etc. Most importantly, for my project, were line drawings of herbs, fruits and vegetables plus Lao/Latin names. In short, a wealth of information.

Like this. Because of Davidson I now know that the westernized Lao name is phak hom tet and the Latin is eryngium foetidum. In English it’s known as saw tooth herb. I first met this plant in Mexico where it’s used a great deal. It’s a similar taste to fresh coriander but you can put it into soups and stews without the flavor disappearing in the cooking process. In Laos it’s served raw with the ubiquitous plate of greens for your pho. If you hate coriander you’ll really hate this.

Here’s another Davidson ID. Phak tam ling (melothria heterophylla). No English word as far as I know. Another of Davidson’s Lao achievements was saving the handwritten recipe book of the royal chef of Luang Prabang. A man named Phia Sing. Davidson borrowed the notebook from Sing and had it photocopied and then later arranged for its publication as “Traditional Recipes of Laos”. With the overthrow of the monarchy in 1975 the original has since been lost.

Believe it or not these are little baby eggplants. Mak kheng. They’re no bigger than a large pea. I made Phia Sing’s recipe for chicken stew - Or Sod Kai - which calls for both phak tam ling and mak kheng. Scroll down for the recipe.

This is a vine leaf – phak ya nang (tiliacora triandra) . The leaves are pounded then put in water and the resulting liquid is added to soups to remove bitterness from other vegetables especially bamboo shoots. I didn’t even know fresh bamboo was bitter since I’ve only ever eaten it from cans. My neighbor, Pa, helped me make a bamboo soup using phak ya nang. Scroll down for the recipe.

The red calyx of this plant is what Caroline and Joy use to make their delicious drink, katiep. Mak som po dee (hibiscus sabdariff). Rosella in English. I’ve only ever seen it before dried as hibiscus flowers. In Mexico it’s flor de Jamaica. Whereas in Jamaica it’s called sorrel. It’s packed with vitamin C and is probably known to you as that zesty kick in Red Zinger tea. You can eat the leaves too – they’re kind of lemony tasting.

Pa calls this phak bai som seua. Caroline and Joy call it phak som pborn. Route 13 which connects Vientiane to Luang Prabhang was only fully paved in 1997. Even today it’s a full day’s drive. So it’s no wonder different towns have different names for the same thing. This feathery plant comes from a tree - Acacia pennata. I tracked the Latin down on the internet and felt really pleased with myself afterwards. It’s used as a souring agent in soups. Also said to be big in omelets in Thailand. I haven’t tried it yet.

I put this one in just because it looks so pretty. The Luang Prabhang name phak khai hom translates as frog’s egg vegetable. Can’t find any more info on it. It grows in rice paddies and is used (yet again) in soup.

As Caroline and Joy so gracefully put it. "Phak com kadao – com means bitter. They believe if you eat a lot of it it’s like an energy medicine in particular inspiring the penis…” Perhaps, therefore, it was appropriate that it was for sale right next to the lettuce, itself considered an aphrodisiac in Ancient Egypt. Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose.

Needless to say, I offer these recipes realizing it is nigh impossible to reproduce them anywhere other than in Laos!

Phia Sing's Recipe #24 
(from Traditional Recipes of Laos)

Or Sod Khai – Chicken Stew

• 1 chicken cut into pieces
• 3 sweet young round eggplants, sliced vertically
• 2 large fresh chili peppers
• 2 small shallots
• 1 stalk of lemon grass
• cooked sticky rice – a quantity about equal to your thumb – mash it together and grill it until it is golden (this is called khao jee)
• 20 very small eggplant (mak kheng)
• 1 handful phak tam ling
• 1 handful hed bod or hed khao (mushrooms)
• salt and padek or fish sauce
• basil leaves
• chopped scallion leaves

Chop chilies, shallots and lemon grass finely and then pound them together in a mortar until a paste.
Put 1½ pints of water in a pot and place it on the fire. When the water comes to a boil put in the chicken pieces and the pounded ingredients. When chicken is cooked add sliced eggplants, phak tam ling, the mushrooms, the piece of grilled rice, and either fish sauce or pa dek (strained). When the larger eggplants and the phak tam ling are cooked add the mak kheng. Taste and check the saltiness, then add the basil leaves and take the pot off the fire.
Serve the dish in a bowl, garnished with the scallion leaves and accompanied by a variety of fresh raw vegetables (such as cabbage, cucumber and yard-long beans).

JoJo’s notes: I couldn’t buy the hed bod or hed khao mushrooms since they seem to only be available in the rainy season. So I substituted fresh straw mushrooms, washed and sliced in half.

The sweet young round eggplants you can buy here look like green golf balls. And are indeed sweet, you can eat them raw.

Pak tam ling turned out to have a very gentle anise flavor. Similar to braised fennel.

I also think the mak kheng should be added a bit earlier. Not right before you take the pot of the fire. They seemed a bit harder than they should be. Maybe add them in with everything else or just slightly later.

Pa Thongsanuan's Bamboo Soup - Kheng gnaw mai

• 1 kilo bamboo shoots thickly sliced
• 2 handfuls raw sticky rice
• ½ kilo oyster mushrooms, cleaned and thickly sliced
• 10 small fresh chilies
• 1 stalk of lemongrass peeled and smashed
• 2 cups phak ya nang juice
• 1 tablespoon shrimp paste
• 3 tablespoons sieved pa dek
• 1 chicken bouillon cube
• salt to taste
• 2 small bunches phak kha yang, washed and cleaned.

Blanch bamboo shoots in boiling water and then drain and rinse. With the flat side of a kitchen knife or cleaver smash shoots.
Soak the sticky rice in water to cover for 20 minutes.
Return shoots to a pan with water to cover plus smashed lemon grass. Add phak ya nang juice. Bring to a simmer over medium heat.
Drain soaked sticky rice and pound with chilies until a paste, then dilute with water and add to pan.
Add shrimp paste to pan.
Sieve pa dek directly into pan.
Add mushrooms, bouillon cube and salt to taste.
Simmer for five minutes
Turn off heat and add phak kha yang

Serve over rice.

JoJo's Notes: phak ya nang juice is sold here in the market already prepared. Pa dek is Laotian fish sauce. There’s a picture of it in the “What Makes It Lao Food” blog. You sieve it because it still has bits of fish and bone in it.


This is phak kha yang.  According to Caroline and Joy it is only popular in bamboo soup in Vientiane.  So don't try ordering it in Luang Prabhang.

The flavor of this dish is extremely distinctive and very reminiscent of Veracruz, Mexico’s hoja santa leaf. I don’t know if that’s because of the phak ya nang or phak kha yang or a combination of both.

Ping

I’ve finally found a word I can say and have the Lao understand me.  No struggling with the six tones.  O.K., now, is that a high falling tone or a low falling tone? (The biggest problem being that I can’t actually hear the difference.)  But if I say ping everybody gets it. Ping means barbecue and Laotians are absolutely mad for anything and everything cooked over a fire.

Here’s a relatively mundane selection of chicken (kai) on the right and pork (moo) on the left.

For dessert or a street snack you could try banana or sweet potato both nicely caramelized from the grill.

For an early evening nosh you could have a chicken foot kebab.  The Chinese were incensed when President Obama levied a duty on Chinese tires and threatened to start charging import taxes on chicken.  This seemed very odd to me.  Why would the Chinese ship over American chickens?   Then I learned that what the Asians crave is what we discard.  The demand for odd bits like chicken feet and gizzards exceeds their production.  I’ve tried chicken feet both here and in Italy and quite frankly I don’t get it.  I think it must be a textural thing - perhaps the cartilaginous crunch.

As we head back into adventurous eating, here is, what, a “croak” of frogs?  You can find frogs this size and other tiny itty-bitty ones all done to a turn.  Thus far I have wimped out when it comes to frogs.  Perhaps too many bad memories of having to partake of whole grilled little birds – guts and bones included – which are considered a delicacy in Italy.  Once more it’s just crunch, crunch, crunch.

These vegetables – eggplants, garlic, shallots and chilies – are being grilled prior to being peeled and pounded to make a jaew.  A jaew is a condiment served with a typical Laotian meal - a spicy dip for the sticky rice.  There are endless varieties.  With grilled mushrooms or shrimp paste or minced pork or even grilled water buffalo skin - but the blackened garlic, shallots and chilies always seem to be the foundation of the dish.

So much Lao food being cooked over charcoal it seemed imperative that we purchase our own.  Here’s where we bought our charcoal stove, stand, tongs and grill.  That set us back a whopping great $8.  Some of the stoves are reinforced with tin cans taken from other sources.  We picked one appropriately decorated with roosters and fish from what had originally been a large can of mackerel.  The person who sold us our supplies was a transvestite.  There are quite a few transvestites in Laos called khatoeys.  The Lao are a very tolerant people and see them as a third sex.  The person who sold us the actual charcoal was also a transvestite.  Is this a khatoey niche trade?

Here’s our very own tilapia, pa ning, on the fire.  Yet another use of that miracle plant – bamboo.  I bought pieces at the market that the seller then split down the middle – but not all the way - with her girl machete.  You slide the fish into the split and then tie it on with finer bamboo strings which you’ve soaked to make them pliable.  Brilliant!  The fish is easy to turn; doesn’t stick to the grill.  Our gateman, Dui, showed us that you can even upend the fish onto it’s back so the thicker part gets cooked evenly with the thinner part.

Sindad is the Laotian idea of a great night out.  And it certainly is.  You get a hubcap shaped grill – kha tha - placed over burning coals set in a hole in your table.  Then you choose what kind of very thinly sliced meat or fish you want.  This comes on a plate with a piece of pork fat to grease the hubcap plus a host of fresh veggies, noodles, an egg and a bucket of broth.  The broth goes into the rim of the hubcap to which you gradually add your veggies and noodles. Meat is cooked over the coals and then dipped into side dish sauces.

Click this link to watch our sindad being set up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCCmEuTJrW0

Korean friends here told us this is a Lao variation of Korean barbecue.  The hubcap actually started out as a real hubcap.  Koreans came to Southeast Asia and had to improvise with the closest thing they could find to the Korean hibachi-like original.  Now kha tha are made here especially for sindad.

The Laotian version introduced the veggies and the broth.  Your delicious finale is the egg cooked in the incredible broth you get after you’ve finished everything else.  Perfect with a Beer Lao or, perhaps, two.

Fast Food

Laotians and Italians have at least one thing in common. When an Italian gets up in the morning he doesn’t wonder whether he’ll have a bowl of pasta or not that day. It goes without saying – at some point - either lunch or dinner - he will indeed have a bowl of pasta. Laotians, likewise, from my observation, appear to have the same relationship to their noodle soup called pho. It seems they are always eating it. Either for breakfast or lunch or in between. They eat it at roadside stands or they get it to go or they, like these folks, eat it at a stall in the market. This is my favorite pho place in my favorite food market - Thong Khan Kham. Please note the crowd. When it comes to third world eating turnover is your friend.

Pho is actually a north Vietnamese invention.
The Vietnamese brought it with them when they themselves were brought here to run the bureaucracy of Laotian French Indochina. But it has a couple of Laotian twists. First there’s the plethora of condiments. Vietnamese pho, at least in my experience, is a much more pristine affair. Chili flavored fish sauce; fresh mint, basil, and coriander, perhaps a few more fresh chiles, a handful of bean sprouts, a squeeze of lime and some shrimp paste if you’re feeling brave. That’s about it. Here we have all that plus scallions; long beans; soy sauce; vinegar; chiles - whole pickled, crushed dried and crushed dried in oil; pickled ginger; peanut sauce and a real shocker – sugar. I originally thought it was MSG but it’s not. People actually dump soup spoons full of it into their broth!


And although you can easily get a pure beef pho, Laotians are big fans of innards. You pick out three or four bits you like with the tongs provided which are then chopped up by the proprietor. These and the fresh noodles become the foundation of your soup. Brit that I am, I adore this. I tend to go for a tongue, kidney, spleen combo.

But is this the future? Here’s the food court at the brand new mall in downtown Vientiane. I must admit it does have its advantages. It’s bright and air conditioned (kind of). There’s a series of sinks with soap, water and paper towels for washing your hands before eating. There are a half dozen TV’s all playing different Thai channels so you can keep up with soccer matches or new music videos. And then there’s the food.

Of course there’s plenty of pho - even one actually made by a cook from Vietnam. But then there’s a lot more. This is a Chinese noodle soup. Note the wontons and the pork tinged that weird color. You can also buy kimchee soup; fresh and deep fried spring rolls; pot roasted ham hock on rice, the list goes on and on. There’s even an Indian halall food stand for our visiting Muslim friends from Malaysia and Indonesia.

Payment is made with these coupons which you buy once you’ve decided what you want and how much it’s going to cost. I couldn’t figure out why the coupons but I think it might be a hygiene thing. Paper money is one of the most common spreaders of disease. It really is filthy lucre.

If you want to eat here every day the management suggests you buy a refillable mall food card the how to’s of which are explained in two languages. Lao and English. Each food stand has a debit machine for the card, skipping the need for coupons. Here’s the bus boy’s advertisement for same.







But, alas, could this truly be the future? This construction site is Vientiane Mall – Phase Two. The edifice going up - surrounded by the charming buildings which remain of the original Morning Market - will be finished next year. The billboard announcing its amenities includes the following:

1st Level consists of:
Units for Fast Foods of sizes: 100 m2; 192 m2; 368 m2; 504 m2 Expected to house Fast Food like - Pizza, Ice cream, Grill/Burger, Fried Chicken

Hunter/Gatherer

Northern Laos is craggy, forested, mountainous country.  There’s very little arable land and what there is is given over to sticky rice production.  Water buffalo are highly prized and everyone seems to have some chickens and a couple of little black pigs running around the yard but other than that – plus kitchen gardens – you’re out in the forest looking for free food.

There’s a wonderful restaurant in Luang Prabhang run by an Australian (Caroline Gaylard) and her partner a Laotian (Joy Ngeuamboupha) called “Tamarind”.  Joy does the cooking, Caroline’s front of house and they’re both dedicated to serving food that – although tailored for tourists – retains the flavors and spirit of Laotian cuisine.

But, for a really authentic Lao experience, you can order in advance and they’ll make you a dinner described as “Adventurous Lao Gourmet” a rare opportunity to try all sorts of foraged food.  After a phone consultation a couple of days before in which I allowed that rodents made me a bit squeamish but everything else would be dandy we arrived for what turned out to be an unforgettable evening.  Here’s what we had:

Sample Plate One – All to be eaten with loads of sticky rice.

A: Pak Goot which means curly vegetable. A kind of fern simply stir fried with oyster sauce.

B:  Pounded river crab (mortar & pestle working hard here) with garlic and lashings of chilies.  Absolutely scrumptious and one of our favorite tastes of the evening.

C:  Soop pak. A Luang Prabhang style salad.   Eggplant, sesame, and a vegetable that looks somewhat like okra (but isn’t) along with its bitter yellow flower, both called maak buap.

D:  For those of you paying attention from earlier posts – here we have maak kok again – one of the secret ingredients in the papaya salad – only this time its been grilled on a barbecue and mashed.  Bruce and I saw it “in situ” growing on a tree while trekking near the Chinese border.  Yes, that’s right, JoJo actually went trekking!

E:   Another big hit. Het bot.  A kind of dried mushroom that seemed slightly sweet.  Sautéed with kaffir lime leaves.  I’ll try and bring some back to Italy since Caroline said you can buy it already dried in the market. 

F: This is also a pre-prepared condiment. Pak Gat.  A dried vegetable pounded with salt.  Looks like pepper but it’s not.  Great dabbed on your sticky rice.

G:  River moss, dried in sheets with garlic and chilies and then flash fried is a very popular Luang Prabhang dish which you can also bring home.  This is the same moss but not dried and, instead, mixed with fried garlic.

H:  River moss again but this time steamed and mixed with dill, spring onion and wood from a kind of vine botanically related to the pepper family – sa khan.  You can eat the piece of vine but I just sucked on the wood which has a spicy and, well, kind of woody taste. 

Moving on to Sample Plate Two in which things start to get a bit stranger.

A:  Here’s a relatively straightforward item.  Ua no mai.  Bamboo shoots stuffed with a mixture of pork, shallots, eggs and scallions and then batter fried.  Delicious.

B:  Next up, nor mai som. Pickled bamboo shoots with ginger.  It seems that along with sustaining the nation on a daily basis sticky rice can also be used as a pickling agent.  I haven’t a clue how.  I’ll try and check that out.

C:  Cured fish in sticky rice.  The fish was tilapia not a native Lao fish but increasingly used all over the world because it’s so easy to farm.  Originally from the Nile, I believe.  This was pretty fishy – somewhere between the sour of a pickled herring and the salty of a kipper.

D:  Here’s where it got a bit too weird, even for us.  Fish guts - lower intestine fish guts with contents - if you get what I mean.  Salty, intense.  Makes sea urchin roe taste bland.  A little dab on your sticky rice is all you need to get the idea.  A teaspoon could flavor risotto for eight.

E:  Moo foi.  Pork marinated with turmeric, dried and then fluffed up.  A nice break from the fish guts.

F:  Sin dot.  Laotian water buffalo jerky cured with ginger, galangal and sesame seeds.   I’d bring some of that home, too.

G:  Som Moo. Pork fermented using the ubiquitous sticky rice and then grilled in a banana leaf.  Very tasty.  A bit odd but the kind of odd you can get into.

H:  In our phone conversation I’d asked Caroline if they could serve anything that was seasonal.  So we got this smashing mushroom dish. Het bot – same as the dried ones – but fresh and stir fried with garlic and spring onion. 

And last, but definitely not least, Sample Plate Three.

A:  Steamed wasp larvae.  You pick out the larvae from the comb and dip them in salt.  If one of them is black you can still eat it but it’s more mature so you have to pick off the stinger before swallowing.  This didn’t really taste like much of anything. It felt like the kind of thing you’d be grateful to have if your plane was downed in the jungle and you’d happened to survive and a friendly ethnic group was trying to feed you.

B:  This was my Waterloo.  It’s a waterbug, grilled.  You crack it open and eat the insides.  Maybe it was just too similar (if not exactly the same as) waterbugs that come out of tenement basements in New York's Lower East side when it rains, but to me it tasted like chicken livers gone bad.

C:  Now here’s a bug you could learn to love.  Bamboo caterpillar (Omphisa fuscidentalis) flash fried.  It’s so popular here and in northern Thailand that the Thais are trying to farm it, but for now it can only be found in the wild.  Tasty, tasty.

D:  River eel threaded on bamboo sticks and grilled.  You can eat the whole thing, bones and all.  Bruce thought it would be a great thing to take on a picnic.  Very, very nice.

E:  Frog cooked in bamboo leaves.  Also very good but unfortunately we were running out of steam, perhaps from an over indulgence in sticky rice with the first plates, which was a shame.  It was a lovely dish.

F:  Elephant ear leaves, pounded and steamed then grilled in banana leaf.  Nice flavor.  On our trek we learned that you can take the root of the elephant ear plant, dry it for a couple of days and then make it into a tea.  If the tea tastes sweet – you’ve got malaria.  If it tastes bitter - you don’t.  Amazing what you can learn as you’re desperately scrambling down the side of a mountain in flip flops!

This is the one dish I had especially ordered and it was fantastic.  Or lam.  A specialty of Luang Prabhang with bits of buffalo skin and that pepper vine (sa khan) in a stew of buffalo meat, local greens, saw tooth coriander, cloud ear mushrooms, chilies and tiny little eggplants the size of a pea.  We were so full we could only sample a taste of this incredible dish.  I really want to go back to the wonderful “Tamarind”, trimming our gastronomical sails a bit next time, and order this again.