MSG in Lao Food (Bang Nuah)

Center right you can see the classic long crystaline structure of MSG

Links
MSG
IFIC dot org

In the early 1900s a Japanese scientist was studying which parts of the tongue recognise different tastes. When testing his wife’s soup flavoured with seaweed, he identified a fifth basic taste. He called it uami, we would call it savoury. It’s what gives that extra good flavour to cooked tomatoes and aged cheeses. The other tastes are sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. Although MSG had been used for thousands of years. that Japanese scientist was the first to isolate the chemical compound that gave us that taste.

MSG doesn’t enhance the taste of all foods, only in those predisposed to a hearty taste. It is used much the way salt or sugar is. If you’ve ever baked a cake you know that the recipe often calls for a quarter teaspoon of salt, similarly homemade cookies. One wouldn’t want cookies or cake to taste salty, but a good cook knows that just that little bit brings out the flavour. Like salt MSG only takes a little bit. If you add salt to a soup until you taste it you’ve already added too much.

Sometimes I’ve heard good cooks who should know better claim that good food doesn’t require MSG. Well I guess not, neither does it require salt or fresh squeezed lime but it might well taste better if it had all three. I’ve never used it on fruit or ice cream but I have in salads containing meat or fish sauce. I use it to marinate meat, in soup stock, in laap, and in jeao, I even use it in those steamed vegetables with sesame called soup pak. I never add it to the foe I buy at a restaurant, I figure it’s already there in the correct proportions.

I first became aware that the MSG myth is simply that when reading an entry into one of the guide books to Thailand penned by the prolific Joe Cummings. I’ll just kind of lift parts from one of the old books.

“Many visitors try to avoid this natural substance, believing they are allergic to it, or that it’s dangerously high in sodium.

For the record, MSG is a simple compound of glutamate, water, and sodium (about two thirds less by weight than in table salt.). Glutamate, an amino acid that occurs naturally in virtually every food, is a major component of most natural protein sources. Like salt and sugar, MSG has been used in Asia for centuries, originally as a distillate of seaweed. Today it’s produced through a natural fermentation and evaporation process using molasses made from sugar cane or sugar beets. …..

Contrary to popular myth, the human body metabolises glutamate added to food the same way it metabolises glutamate already found in food. Although some people report physical reactions to MSG (the so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome) every placebo controlled food research study on humans thus far published has concluded that such reactions can almost always be traced not to MSG but rather to psychological syndromes or to food allergies other than MSG.”


Bang Nuah for sale at the Tesco Nong Khai

In the mid 1990s the American Food and Drug Administration published a politically influenced qualification to their finding that there were no safety issues linked to use of MSG in food. They went on to list symptoms which “may occur” even though they could find no instance of them and then went on to list all the anecdotal evidence. Kind of similar to the right wing’s attempts to deny global warming.

In my minds eye I can just imagine Bill woofing down huge take away dinners of Chinese food and Hillary looking on concerned and noticing the flushing and sweating from his clogged arteries and attributing it to an MSG attack. Rapid fluttering heartbeats, shortness of breath, dreaming of Monica.

If I had to identify a typical sufferer of MSG I’d say a female with a college degree in something not scientific, whose parents were in the upper fifth by income in the United States. Certainly not the 2 billion (billion with a B) Asians who have used it daily without any reaction their entire lives.

Scientifically there is little interest in more studies of MSG. There’s nothing there. Friends who are chemists find it laughable. All a scientist has to do is review studies already done and the conclusions are obvious. Yet the urban legend continues.

I attribute the belief to the same source that creates the beliefs in aroma therapy or grand conspiracies. Deep down I think we all need to find reasons for things we don’t understand. The older I get the more commonality I find between the Akha who live in a village where there is not one literate person who has ever attended a school, and our supposed sophisticated educated modern society.

Ouah Guang (deer sausage)

Uncooked Sausage, notice the white chunks of sticky rice visible through the casing

I recently read in that online Lao cooking site aptly named Lao Cook that he couldn't find any sausage casings locally. All that fresh seafood and organic cuts of meat but no sausage casings, well at least stranded here in the landlocked Rocky Mountains that's one thing we do have.


Served with cilantro and green onions on the side

My Lao consultant cooked some up last week so I took some snaps for photos and here I am. My apologies for the pics. My small sensor doesn't do so well hand held in low light, or maybe it's the taker behind the picture. I need to think ahead and bump up the ISO or else pull out the tripod.


Deep fried

We still had some deer burger left over from the venison my friend Bryan gave us. It's pretty gamey as deer tends to be. Because it's already ground up my wife refuses to use it for laap, claiming laap needs to be chopped fresh with a knife. I think it's a waste to use in spaghetti as she is prone to doing.


Of course with sticky rice

The sausage was a pleasant surprise. The gamey venison wasn't covered up but rather used to it's best advantage. Seasoned with lemon grass and bai kii hoot the venison was able to hold it's own and not get lost as much meat tends to do, especially with that bai kii hoot, (kafir lime leaf).

The other ingredients were the usual suspects, salt, bang nuah, green onions, sticky rice. In this instance a spoon was used to push the ingredients into the casing, it was a small batch. For larger batches we use a sausage stuffer we bought from a farm supply. My job is to push the handle.

Cooking was done by deep frying. Cooked some chicken wings at the same time. On the side fresh cilantro, green onions, and sticky rice.

Sun saap.

Jeao Kai

Big Saht, little coke, cute cooker


I always hear jeaos described as a dipping sauce, I’d say more accurately they’re a mopping up sauce, as in when you use the sticky rice to mop some up. Jeao Kai is exactly that kind of jeao. It’s dry, drier than say potato salad, but it none the less sticks to the rice well especially when smushed. (smush: to smash and mush at the same time)


Some of the ingredients, that white stuff ain't salt

I never seem to hear of people eating or making jeoa kai despite it being so easy and being made from such common ingredients. It’s another one of those dishes passed down from great grandpa Kahman, probably an improvisation from times in the Soviet Union spent without access to padek, or maybe just a Lao adaptation of an egg salad.


the greens

It’s as simple as boiling an egg.

Boil a half dozen eggs or so, cool, pulverize some hot peppers in the bottom of the coke add just a couple green onions, dent them, throw in salt, bang nua, fish sauce, then the cut up eggs, stir, then lots of mint and a little cilantro, voila.


I like it with mint on the side also and thick coffee in those cheap plastic mugs from Thailand

Som Pak (gaht) or pickled mustard greens

I’ve no idea why we call these greens mustard greens. In Laotian they are called pak gaht. They grow pretty well in the cooler part of the year, and are a common winter vegetable. Here in Colorado they are one of the first plants up in the spring, and one of the last to die in the fall.



Mustard greens are the ingredient for the som pak you see sold in bags wherever kao neeow is sold. Typicaly a small bag costs twenty cents or so, combined with sticky rice and something barbequed they round out a meal.

The following is mama’s method.



The leaves are washed then sprinkled with salt which is worked in with lots of turning over of the leaves and gentle squeezing to push the salt into the vegetable. A benign bruising if you will. To test for saltiness taste some of the water that collects at the bottom of the bowl. If too salty drain and add fresh water. Remember the rice water has salt too.



Rice is boiled with water and salt so that the rice breaks down, cooled, and then pushed through the fine strainer when added to the mustard greens. The whole concoction is put in a large jar and set on the counter to sour for a day or two. The reason for the screen is to keep out the rice grains themselves, they don’t look good.

I like the som pak plain with ginger and sticky rice, with scrambled eggs, and especially in the stock for the thin sour soup called gaeng som pak.

A Lao Food Blog I've been reading

But first a photo, have to have something to catch the eye right?


I thought this pepper was a habanero turns out the shape is slightly wrong and the way the fruit stem attaches to the pepper itself is different. I think this is a rocoto but I can't tell for sure. Never can tell what's going to come up in our garden box or where the seeds come from. Sometimes the seeds are from the actual fruit at the grocery store, sometimes from the mothers of my wifes Lao buddies, and sometimes from Laos. (Turns out these were hot peppers sold in a Super Walmart)

Anyway about the blog.

In my explorations of Lao cooking blogs I keep returning to one the same few to read more. Lately I’m intrigued by this one called Lao Cook.

The name itself is indicative of what’s underneath, not that is about a Lao Cook, which it is, but that it’s understated and doesn’t toot it’s own horn. I mean they could just have well called the blog Lao Fusion Haute Cuisine, or “The Most Modern, Avant Guard Interpretation of Lao Food On The Planet”, even Lao Chef, but no, they stuck with the humble “Lao Cook”. Vienne the head of the Lao cook team in keeping with his character calls his food Lao “new style“.

The more I read, the more excited I get in that here for the first time is Lao food not only prepared but also presented in such a way as to take it’s place amongst the finest foods of the world. I used to worry that the flavours of Laos would be lost before they were even known. I’m not so worried anymore.

I knew that the background for the website was a restaurant in Europe, I’d always assumed France, a more thorough reading reveals a restaurant at a very posh Spanish resort.
Bear in mind that normally I am a reverse restaurant snob in that I don’t eat at any place that has a menu, and seldom spend over a dollar on any meal. In Laos I steer clear of all tourist type restaurants. Actually I usually eat either at the market, very small mom and pop foe places or at home and at friends houses who are Lao. Reading the web site and watching the videos makes me wish that I somehow had a table between the kitchen and the dining room so that I could watch the food being cooked and grab some dishes as they go by on their way to the customers out front.

I also saw a link on Lao Cuisine to a video called “Lao Cook TV“, or LCTV. The video was about soured Lao Pork Sausage by LCTV. Som Moo with Alexandra saying "hi" and "by" In the video, I assume it must be Vienne speaking with a pronounced English accent. It has to be Vienne in that the speaker obviously knows Lao food. The video isn’t rehearsed and the speaker understands what’s going on with the break down of the texture of the pork as it’s being kneaded. The video begins and ends with a hello from Alexandra the Lao Pop star. Maybe my blog needs a hello from Paris Hilton or something. Notice though that the background music is classical.

Check out this recipe called Duck, Liver, and Mango

Foie Gras is covered with wafer thin slices of raw Duck Breast, and dressed with Yuzu Sauce that has been heated in Olive and Sesame Oil with some Peppercorns. Shreds of ripe Mango adds sweetness.

Duck, Liver, Mango typifies Mr. Viennes cooking style, background, and attitude. The influence is Lao, with a Euro twist, and a very unassuming presentation. I mean isn’t foie gras not so different than the pig liver pate that is in the baguettes sandwiches? Raw duck in laap is famous in Laos, and the mango is everywhere, especially in April. Mr Veinne could have called this dish many things, instead he chose the simple name to describe it.

If you followed the link you would have noticed that below the duck is some Nahm Dtok, you know that yam called waterfall after the way you are supposed to cook the meat only until the water starts to come out. They use tenderloin. I’ll bet the meat is a lot tastier than the hormone antibiotic feedlot raised beef I’m used to, and much much more tender than those cows in Laos that more resemble goats. The photos make me want to grab a piece with my fingers and and make it disappear.

Below that still is tom yum. Check out the lemon grass. It’s the leafy part. Great for soups, do they sell it that way in Spain? I doubt it. I suspect chef Vienne has a large patch growing out back. Bai kii hoot and kah too.

Kai Yo Ma, (eggs of horse)

What’s a Wat doing on a blog entry about rotten eggs? I just liked the way it looked, and I haven’t used this photo before. Photos of rotten eggs aren’t so inviting.

The wat has a tin roof but still has the tiered parts at the top. If I knew anything about wats I could probably say this is Thai Lu style or something. I like the wat in that it has nought to do with being an attraction yet. It was a quiet day, no one about. I walked behind it to do the first of two river crossings to get to the crags at the far side of the valley. Lot of kids playing in the river, a few people washing clothes.

I sure didn’t see any kai yo ma in Muang Long. There were Chinese people there and if you want kai you ma you have to have Chinese people, it’s Chinese food.

I looked all over the market for one of those tin cups with a lid that you see all over China. I was about to head out for a walk and wanted something to make my morning coffee in. A lot of the traders were recent immigrants from China. I finally found a porcelain cup with a broken handle and asked one of the vendors how much, he just gave it to me.

I like Chinese people, not just because they give me things for free, but because of the way they are. They push. they shout, they spit, they bargain hard. Sometimes the sound of Mandarin is music to my ears. People say Chinese food is swimming in oil, well so it is, tastes great. The Chinese are gregarious, and you could never have a better friend.

I learned to eat kai you ma in China. I used to live in a town that was in it’s infancy as far as being on the tourist trail. That part of China had just recently opened up to foreign travel. I too was in my infancy of learning foreign languages and of living in Asia. I was still eating at restaurants that had English menus. Regardless of the menu, the restaurants were frequented by the Chinese. I saw someone eating the eggs and asked for the same. They were pretty good. Later I asked some friends and they got some for me. I was astonished when I saw the outside.



Notice the grey looking stuff on the outside? I was told that’s caked on ashes. The story goes that the reason they are called horse eggs is that they are made by caking them in straw ashes that has been wetted with horse piss. Certainly an evocative origin for something that smells like death warmed over.

I took this picture in Luang Namtha at the well stocked market there. They look just like the eggs I used to eat in Yunnan and they tasted like them too. Fairly mild and a yellow tending to green in colour on the inside. Delicious.

Remember my qualifier. I won’t eat any food that doesn’t taste good to me at the time I eat it. I know often Lao people don’t eat these eggs, I assume it’s because they weren’t brought up eating them. New things are difficult even for a people who eat padek.


These eggs are like the kind I found in Taiwan and are the only kind I’ve been able to find in America. They are pretty strong. I wash the outsides off with water and that seems to kill some of the sulphurous odour. I also eat them with a sauce made of nam sii you, macpet, and cilantro. The chillies are actually that sauce you make by toasting dried chillies in oil. And of course I use kao neeow to scoop them up with.

Sun Saap

Yam Salat

Crushing the freshly toasted peanuts in the koke

Yam salat has to be one of the few true vegetarian dishes in Laos, that is if you don’t throw in any pork, and you can overlook those undeveloped chicken embryos.

It’s now the end of the summer and all of the garden seems to be reaching it’s prime at the same time. Almost all of the vegetables for this salad were home grown. The tomatoes are ripening so fast we are having to freeze many of them for the cold winter months and the seeds from the celery that Creagy poured into the garden while no one was looking has given us a mini celery forest. The lettuce is the second crop that my wife started back in mid August to take advantage of the cool fall days. The cilantro just keeps coming up, as long as we remember to let some go to seed and to turn it over into the soil. Cucumbers have been appearing regularly since the beginning of August. The green onions we dig up and replant when they get too bitter, somehow the first shoots from onions are sweetest.



Above is some of the celery. This variety is from Laos, it never forms the stalks we are familiar with in the United States. It’s only grown for the leaves which are eaten as a leafy vegetable, great in soups.



Behind the celery is the leaf lettuce in clumps. This batch started off slow in the heat of the summer. The lettuce from the spring was a lot larger.



In this sauce I think there were four eggs used. They are hardboiled, the yolks are set aside for the dressing and the whites are sliced into the salad. Besides this big spoonful of squeezed lime juice there’s also a quarter cup of water, some bang nua, and a little salt.



On top of everything else is some toasted crushed peanuts. The peanuts come uncooked and unsalted, I guess from the Vietnamese grocery where we buy everything else. I don’t know why but peanuts quickly lose their fresh toasted taste. Best to cook them just before making the salad.



Not mentioned is mon pao, a crunchy white tuber that is often sliced thin and added for it’s texture as well as it’s sweet apple like taste. (sorry don't know English name) We didn’t have any. People also use any sort of salad green they have, water cress is popular. I’ve never seen nam pa, hot peppers, or garlic of any kind. Sometimes bits of pork. Moo sam san lightly fried is great. Of course just after I posted this a friend told me he has had yam salat with nam pa, I asked my Lao consultant and she said yes some people mix it into the sauce.

(notice the celery greens?)

The peanuts are sprinkled over the salad, the sauce is poured on, everything is tossed to get good coverage, and voila, yam salat.

Also…. A lot of times I eat the salad hours after it’s made, or even the next day. The greens wilt and give up their juices quickly so that the whole salad is swimming in the much thinner sauce. I love it. I even drink down the sauce from the bowl as long as no one is looking. This drunken salad affect is how I’ve most often bought yam salat in Laos served up out of trays at the buffet at the airport, or in bags at the Luang Prabang night food market.

A lot of these photos I’ve taken at the high ISO setting. I get sick of trying to hand hold at 1/5th of a second. Sometimes 800 sometimes a thousand or 1600. For you purists,, sorry.

Sun Saap

Sticky Rice Stuck to the Tree

I can only guess as to the meaning of sticking a small pinch of sticky rice to a tree above the place you sell barbeque from every day.

I would assume this is a carry over from the worship of animals, house spirits, and the like. Probably thought to bring good business to the woman. I watched her carefully affix a new pinch onto the tree just before I took the photo.

For the record she had a little of everything, Sam San Moo that three skins of pork, pieces of chicken, and five stuffed fish. Quite the variety.

Anyone definitively know the reason for the rice, or perhaps the name of the habit?




Up close

About Lao food and Blogs

Two Lao Girls slurping Tam Mii


Lately Lao Bumpkin has been getting hits originating from food blogs mostly by Lao Americans. I’m psyched to know that there are people interested in the food of the culture their parents come from. The bloggers are young, articulate, and sometimes very funny. (one is called I eat padek) If you are looking for the nuts and bolts of how to cook Lao food it’s there. What, how much, and often with videos and ingredients lists. To say I’m impressed is an understatement.

I had been worried that the food of Laos would be lost with the transition to western society. I often hear from travelers to Laos that Lao food is bland and tasteless. Well I guess that stuff served up at restaurants with English menus is. I mean how exactly do you cook laap without pa dek, organ meat, or bang nua? Oh and no hot peppers, king, kah, and so on. You end up with hamburger seasoned with a little mint. More often it’s fried rice, a sure fire meal guaranteed not to offend the delicate palate of the tourist. Or mixed vegetables. I digress.

The web sites of these new Lao cooks are written mostly in English. For any of the Lao cooks who read this sorry about the lack of specificity. I assume anyone reading knows their way around a Loa kitchen already. My intent isn’t to provide a step by step, but just a rough guide.


Nice padek brown color to the sauce eh?

I know what your asking, what the heck are they eating. It’s like tom makune but with those noodles that you use for foe, sen foe or mii. It also contained whatever they wanted to throw in. Toasted fresh peanuts, padek, kapi, bang nuah, cabbage, that green called pak bong, meat balls, squid, and a couple pieces of nuat on top, that’s the brown tofu.

Sun Saap

Look for a separate section of links to Lao Food blogs.

Obe

Obe on the stove ready for a long simmer


It’s hard for me to start talking about obe without first trying to explain how to say it. I always thought it was pronounced ope like in the word dope but without the d. I don’t think we have a short b sound in English as in obe. The b really is a b, as in baw beh the sound for goat in the lao alphabet, it’s just that the sound is so short we have nothing to compare. I get away with it when I say ope.

Anyway obe is made from meat and is mostly meat. I’ve had it made from all different kinds of meat but it lends itself to wild meat, the spices are strong. I’d imagine porcupine, rabbit, raccoon, and all those other critters would do just fine, especially with the bones cut up along with the meat, lets the flavour out.


Mule deer looking young and tender in velvet

Above is a mule deer, affectionately known as a muley. I don’t like deer as much as elk, the deer is a little gamey tasting making it a prime candidate for ope .In Laos I’ve also had ope made from civet. I’ve heard it’s made from all the usual wild foods especially tough meats, and animals with a lot of bones. By chopping the bones across the ribs and cutting the backbone into pieces a lot of the good juices are released into the sauces.


Venison

This piece of venison (deer meat) was given to me by an old friend of mine last week. I’ve known him for probably twenty five years, since we were both pretty young guys. Being a farm boy he was familiar with butchering animals and we used to take advantage of the many road kills on the sides of the highway. Nowadays he uses a big old 300 magnum that seems to drop just about anything he points it at.


Shallots Garlic Lemon grass

The fresh spices for this batch were lemon grass sliced very thin so that you can eat it, shallots, garlic and bai kii hoot, (kafir leaf). Our lemon grass has matured enough to have the thick stalks that you need to actually eat the stuff, most other years we plant it too late and all we can use is the grassy parts in soup. The bai kii hoot is from our house plant that we’ve had for a few years, in the winter we bring it in and it becomes a house plant.


Lemon grass in a pot



Bai kii hoot


Tumeric powder, dried kha, bai kii hoot


Normally kah (galangal) is fresh also. While in Laos my wife bought a few kilos and dried it, the customs police decided that it was ok so we now have a couple years supply of the stuff. The dried stuff from Thailand in a jar labelled “curry powder” is that yellow spice that Kohn Kak and Malaysians use, I think it’s turmeric.


Stove cranked up to high


The cooking method is obvious and simple. The dried stuff is pulverized in the coke, the wetter lemon grass, garlic, and shallots are added then lastly some naman hoi, (oyster sauce) bang nuwa, some nam see yu and the bai kii hoot. The cubed meat is kneaded into the sauce then quick fried at a high heat in the bottom of a pot stirring constantly.


Ope ready for the long simmer

After a couple of minutes the heat is turned down as low as it will go and a little water is added as needed to keep things from burning. With an occasional stir the pot is left cooking for an hour or two or three until the meat is tender.

Jeao Mac Len

It seems like the koke and the saat, (in English mortar and pestle), are in use preparing every meal. If nothing else, they are used to crush and pulverize the spices that go in every food. The order in which ingredients are added to the koke is determined by what the ingredient is being used for. Hot peppers and dried spices that need to be crushed into tiny pieces often go in first, liquids like fish sauce are often added last to clean the other things off the side of the koke. Sometimes like in making Tom Mac Kune, that salad made with slivers of green papaya, the green papaya is added at the very end and slightly dented. The denting causes the juices to be soaked up by the papaya more than just mixing. Salt and Bang Nua added early and used to help puree the hot peppers.

It seems like you never see people dicing or grating.

The hollow thunk, thunk, of the saat hitting the coke is a dinner gong telling me food might just be appearing within the next little while to an hour.

The koke itself is non porous even though made of clay, it doesn’t soak up the juices, the rough textured sides help in grinding up things like fresh toasted peanuts or fibrous ginger or kha that looks like ginger.

The inside slopes steeply to the bottom causing loose things to fall and gather at the bottom. You don’t need to aim too well to hit the food with the saat every time.

It’s said a broken koke brings bad luck to the household. I’ll bet, as in someone has to go buy another one and food isn’t good until then, I’d call that bad luck. Prudence suggests a careful examination of any koke before buying to check for minute cracks. Of course if cracks do develop it never hurts to go buy a new one and retire the old one to be used as a flower pot or something. Never hurts to cover all possibilities.



Above are the ingredients for jeao mac len, and my rice basket. Mine is the one with the athletic tape sewn over the edge. I’ve used the same basket to take my rice to work for about ten years now. It was made by one of my sister in law’s boyfriends.

The rice basket on the right is a gift from a woman who was jailed for selling ya ma. I think she was doing quite a long time, perhaps five or ten years, in any case she is out now within the last couple months, hooray. The basket has the finest and smallest weaving I’ve ever seen, she had lots of time on her hands. Notice the dark colour? I think the bamboo was darkened in smoke, it somehow hardens the bamboo. Notice the string has a fancy woven handle as do the edges of the basket. The weaving is so small I think this one could hold water. Click on the picture to blow it up and you’ll see what I mean.

Back to jeao mac len.

The ingredients are cherry tomatoes, hot peppers, garlic, shallots, green onions, cilantro, fish sauce and a little bang nuah. I had a hard time finding cilantro, most has gone to seed or is too small to pick. It should also be noted that I actually only used half of the shallot. See the seeds on the cilantro?

Jeao is usually referred to as “dipping sauce” when people talk about Lao cooking. I’d more call it a mopping up with rice sauce. You more kind of use the rice to scoop some up. It is mostly to help the rice go down. All jeaos are wet, and usually they have some salt, some fermented fish, and often some hot peppers. The food is rice, the jeao just helps to wash it down, kind of like the function of gravy when you mop it up with bread.

To be authentic I should have toasted the ingredients over charcoal in a cooking pot, I don’t have either so had to make use of the gas grill. The hot peppers cook quickly, the garlic and shallot more slowly and the tomatoes take forever. All ingredients should be blackened. The tomatoes not only need to be blackened but cooked all the way so they are cracked and oozing juice. Regular sized tomatoes take a long time. Of course I break off the burnt outsides of all ingredients as much as is very easy to do, but I don’t go to lengths to do so, jeao is supposed to have bits of charcoal floating around in it.

The mixing is simple. Throw the hot peppers and bang nua into the saat, pulverize, add the garlic and shallot, mush some more, add fish sauce and tomatoes mush some more, cut up the uncooked green onions and cilantro, stir them in.

All words beginning in ''mac" are some sort of vegetable, in this case it's tomatoe, mac len.

Sun Saap

Khao Niaw (sticky rice)

Khao Niaw before dawn at the restaurant shacks bus station Oudomxai

I’m surprised I didn’t write something about khao niaw before this. Rice is the basis for food itself in Laos, so much so that the expression to eat is gin khao which might loosely be translated as consume rice.

The comparison for westerners that springs to mind is bread, if you could imagine bread being almost all the calories we eat. The following is a poem taught to infants similar to the way we teach patty cake patty cake.

Dtop meu xa
Dtop meu xa
Gin khao gap plah
Gin khao gap plah


Clap your hands,
Clap your hands,
Eat rice with fish,
Eat rice with fish.

Kids love it. It’s perhaps the first taught activity they hear. They like to clap their hands before they can walk or talk.


Loading rice at the fast boat landing below Luang Prabang

Fish means anything that lives in the water, minnows, fresh water crabs, insects, whatever. Everyone always has rice, then they go out into the river with a net and get fish. Without rice, life becomes a desperate struggle of digging bamboo shoots to try to get enough calories from starch to survive. If you talk to older people they can remember doing just that in the lean years following the end of the war when Laos closed it’s borders and experimented with collectivization.


Khao Jao left, Khao Niaw right

If you look at the rice above you can see a difference between the two varieties. The rice on the left you can see through, it’s translucent, the rice on the right is more white and dense. When digging through the rice bins that’s how I tell them apart. Regular rice is lighter, you can see through it, khao niaw is more thick and dense.


Up Close

Sticky rice is denser but by weight has the same calories as regular. Other than the affluent people in town everyone eats khao niaw, except for mountain people. Mountain rice isn’t grown in paddies but on burnt hillsides. The mountain rice, and all other rices are called Khao Jhao. Jasmine rice is simply a high grade of Thai rice, similar rices are grown in Laos but in much smaller quantities.


Second rice crop above Xiengkok

I like the mountain rice in that it has a nutty flavour. I think the taste comes from the fact that the milling is done by hand using one of those foot powered coke and sats. Small pieces of the husk up near the top and on the side of the grain are left on the rice. If you look carefully you can see them.




Mountain rice at 1200 meters just above Nambo

Getting back to the subject at hand… Khao Niaw cost about a half a dollar or a little more per kilo when I left Laos in March of 07, cooked or uncooked. It costs so little that my wife used to send me down to the market to buy it for dinner if we had unexpected numbers of people. I also buy it to eat when traveling, it can be eaten hours later and is still good, or many hours later if there is no place open when the late bus gets in. The many hours later kind is a little dried and hardened but still edible.

Talk of carrying it brings me to the implements for cooking and carrying khao niaw. There are three necessary utensils that can’t be substituted.. A pot to boil the water, a basket for steaming, and a basket for storing cooked rice. I’ve heard of people cooking in a regular rice steamer, I don’t believe it, seems like if there were a way to do it well the Laotians in America would have switched long ago. Reheating with a microwave doesn’t cut it either. All that does is heat it up, it’s not moistened from the steam, and it quickly dries out when it cools down.

That same bus station restaurant in Udomxai, she's brewing up my coffee.

There is something about the shape of the pot that allows water to be heated quickly and with a lot of steam concentrating the steam at the top of the pot and forcing it through the cone basket. I suggest anyone wanting to cook sticky rice take a look at the video on the Thai Lao Food Blog.
Scroll half way down the page for the video. Notice she uses a pot lid to cover the top of the cone? My wife bought a bamboo cover while in Laos. It sits on top of the cone similar to a lid but it allows the steam to escape, just keeps it there a little longer, and you avoid getting water dripping on the rice, don’t want soggy rice, oh no.

If you are looking at the video watch the flip, essential. Notice too how the rice doesn’t stick to the sides of the cone. That’s a broken in cone, when new they tend to stick. I like the plastic ones sold by the Hmong people for just that reason but my wife prefers bamboo. Says she doesn’t want a bunch of plastic in her food. I think she whets down the cone for a little bit before steaming to avoid the sticky rice sticking to the cone syndrome.

Transplanted rice

In the video that’s a tiny amount of rice, I typically steam about three of four times that much for a day.

Also on the Thai Lao video the writer, Ms. Larprom, tells how to reheat the left over rice from the last batch. In Lao households cooking and reheating rice is an ongoing process. Rice is often cooked more than three times a day, often just to heat it up. Hot rice is definitely preferable to cold rice. Rice can be recooked up to three times, after that it begins to turn into a glob of wallpaper paste.

The last but one of the most important parts of the cooking is allowing the rice to air and give off it’s steam. In her video Manivan uses a storage basket to stir it in. People who cook a lot of rice such as for a family often have so much rice they use a flat bamboo platter and a wooden spoon or chop sticks to lift the rice and let it fall apart. I think the reason is not only to stop it from cooking but to allow all the steam to escape rather than cooling when it reaches the outside of the pile of rice. A friend once described the process as pulling the rice apart such that if there were a lost ring in the rice it would be found.

After airing for the few seconds it takes the rice to cool it is piled loosely into a rice basket and covered with the top. There is a reason why rice baskets are woven bamboo. They keep the heat in and slow the escape of moisture but allow enough water vapour to escape so that you don’t get slimy rice. Rice kept in a plastic bag doesn’t keep as long.


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City Food on One Street

This is a street I started eating at the last month I was in Laos.

We moved into a new rental over in Ban Amon, and though nice it didn't have a fridge or stove or internet connection, the basics of life for me to survive. Everyday I would take the short drive into Vientiane.

At first I was satisfied with the baguette sandwiches, with all my fellow tourists, next door to the internet place, but the bread wasn't always the freshest and after a while I had a hankering for more. Most stuff down by the river was out of the question. Overpriced and bland it's special food for foreign consumption. The push carts are good but I wanted to sit down.

I found a street out past the cultural hall off Samsenthai that fit the ticket. Lots of restaurants, not many guest houses, not over saturated with falang.

A portion of a map liberated from the ecotourismlao site, hey its for a good cause.

On the map above you can see the cultural hall across the street from the national museum. The hall is really set back from the street more than the map would lead you to believe, my food street is the one with two dead ends parallel to, and slightly south of Samsenthai. I think the first picture of this blog post is taken from in front of the hotel called "Lao" on the map. You can clearly see the stop sign on Chao Anou, and the ostentatious pillars of the cultural hall down the street.

The first day I had Kao Piak. It was ok, and it certainly filled me up, but I'm a Kao Piak snob. The broth was from pork bones, I like chicken stock, and the noodles themselves weren't as good as mama makes. I wouldn't really call Kao Piak city food, and I don't know that it was brought to Laos by the Chinese, but it sure doesn't seem "loi percent Lao", no insects, no pla dek, no roots and leaves from the jungle.


Sen for Kao Piak

Above are the soft noodles of kao piak before cooking. Most people use half rice flour, half sticky rice flour, my wife uses half tapioca flour. I like the extra chewiness that tapioca brings to the noodles. The noodles are coated with flour to keep them from sticking while rolling them out prior to cutting with a long knife. The loose flour thickens the sauce and gives it that "stick to your ribs" comfort food quality. Hard to feel hungry after eating a bowl.


Kao Piak Sen

Notice the "brown tofu" floating around, that's lueat, or in English congealed pig's blood. Pieces of cilantro, green onions, bang nua, the usual culprits. Actually this isn't just kao piak but more exactly kao piak sen, sen being noodles. Kao piak kao is kao piak rice. To round out the language lesson, kao piak means wet rice. Kao piak kao is known as conge in Chinese, (Cantonese?) and joke in Thai. Kao piak (sen) I've only seen in Laos, maybe it's a Vietnamese invention.


Moo Daeng

The next day I tried across the street at a place that looked vaguely Chinese. The restaurant could have been in Nong Khai or Chang Mai, or even Penang. I had Moo Daeng, red pork, it's sold all over Thailand at restaurants close to the bus station. It was good, and the rice was very fresh and good quality. So good I had to try the rice before taking this shot. Cucumbers on the side and a bowl of very thin soup in the background.



Kao piak, and moo daeng are fine, but I've eaten them a few hundred times, when I wandered back down the block towards the cultural hall I hit pay dirt. Notice the pot this young lady is pouring the batter on? It looked like an upside down cooking pot, except the handles are reversed, as if this is the way the pot was designed to be used. She is cooking up Bun Guan. The filling is some sort of pork, mushrooms, cilantro, onions, mixture, and the wrapper is a very thin almost translucent chewy pancake. I suspect there is Tapioca in there somewhere but I don't know.



The whole thing is served with a sprinkling of deep fried shallots across the top and a very thick peanut, lime, fish sauce, bang nuea, chillies, sauce on the side. I could gain weight eating these.

I wasn't familiar with the food. My wife doesn't cook it, I haven't seen it around at all the markets or restaurants. When I asked the girl cooking it what food it was, she replied, "Vietnamese food" of course I didn't mean where does it come from, but rather what's it called.


House above the bun stand

Looking around I noticed that the card table I was eating off of was set up by an alley leading to some very old houses. out front was an old sign advertising suits I presume, and next to it a laundry. I could barely understand the signs as they were in Lao and French, there were old paintings showing a suit. I imagined a scenario of a Vietnamese family left from the days of Indochina, surviving the various changes in regimes and wars. A Scent of Green Papayas compete with whirling fans and long lost histories.

The next day when I went back I struck up a conversation with the granny who seemed to be in charge. I noticed she was speaking Lao to the girl. She told me the reason she spoke Lao to the girl was because the girl was Lao, when I asked if the house belonged to her family she laughed and said she commuted a long way into town every day. So much for assumptions. I didn't dare ask if she was Vietnamese, I wanted to leave some of my imaginings intact.


Bun Xiao

The other food sold there was a similar food in that it was a filling wrapped with a pancake type thing they cooked right then called bun xiao. The ingredients besides including rice flour also include corn flour and turmeric. The whole thing is a bright yellow. It came with a heaping plate of mint. I know the word "home laap" means mint, but I don't know the name for the different kinds. This kind has smaller leaves and a very delicate flavour. Great for eating as a green on the side.


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