French Fry Coated Bacon on a Stick

When Brillat-Savarin said that “the discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star” he perhaps hadn’t spent much of his time near the deep fryer. This dish confers on humanity nothing but moral decline. Watch the best porn movies here porno gratis.

I present to you french fry coated bacon on a stick. Originally I was planning on making a French fry coated, bacon-wrapped hot dog, but thought that the inclusion of the hotdog was largely pointless. Why not just head straight for the bacon?

Front.

Back: French fries attached to the bacon with thick corndog batter. No food styling tricks, apart from using a fondue fork instead of an actual stick. I didn’t have a suitable wooden skewer on hand.

Tasted. I feel ill and so very, very dirty.

If you’re keen to replicate, do so at your own risk. Follow the french fry coated hot dog recipe, omit the hot dog and substitute with a thick slice of homemade bacon

The Wok Hei Economy

One of the great mysteries of eating in Penang is the economics of the hawker center. A group of vendors cluster around a kedai kopi, a cafe serving drinks and work almost independently of the cafe. Some pay rent, others are owned by the cafe, some seem to have agglomerated at a single point in an organic manner like a coral reef of wok burners accumulating on a restaurant atoll. The cafe often provides electricity and an awning to make monsoonal downpours tolerable for the vendors. Each cluster of vendors seems to be in competition, but there is value in assuring that the competing stalls all perform good business, thus attracting overflowing customers to your stall. The proper etiquette seems to be to order at the vendor at the front, then at least buy a single drink from the roaming waiter so that the kedai kopi owner gets their piece of the action.

Two hawker centres loom large. The Lorong Selamat center (above), with its reputation for serving the best char kway teow in Penang (and by inference, the world) and the ramshackle collection of hawkers on Swatow Lane (for ABC Special and Ice Kacang), just off Jalan Burma.

I’m apprehensive about the approach to anything as hyped and as personal as this char kway teow (above). I tend to place more value on the nubs of deep-fried pork fat, prawns and cockles that go into the dish (and the smoky wok hei flavour), than I value the core element: noodles. The noodles here are creamy and soak up charcoal smoke aplenty, a real lardy highlight. The only valid criticism is price. At RM7.50, the dish is roughly double the price of the average plate of char kway teow on Penang, a point that locals tend to debate and then eat on Lorong Selamat anyhow. It is too good not to eat there and the price serves as a talking point rather than deterrent.

We finished with a plate of lor bak, marinated lean pork wrapped in bean curd skin then deep-fried, served with a starchy bowl of broth thickened with egg and another bowl of chilli sauce. In this case, it was plated on top of an array of other deep fried delights and a local sausage.

Location: 84 Lorong Selamat, Penang, Malaysia

The laziest food writer in Bangkok

I’ve never written about eating in Bangkok because my approach to Thai food there has been completely shameful. Living in Phnom Penh made Bangkok a weekend getaway, a 25 dollar sardine class seat on AirAsia and a dash from the cobra-ridden Suvarnabhumi to congested Sukhumvit. I never went there for the Thai food; I went to soak up as much Western luxury that I could fit into my tiny budget and four-day weekend. This involved having as many Mexican meals as possible (Charlie Browns, the absurdly named Señor Pico’s of Los Angeles), hitting Chatuchak and MBK to refresh my BAPE supply, and not much else. There was the occasional street snack and quick side visits to wet markets but little worth writing home about.

This time I had no excuse: Austin from RealThai was involved as were some of the crew from Gut Feelings. I had to represent.

The Gut Feeling’s first portion of eating involved an experience in Thai-German cultural crossover: crispy and moist deep-fried schweinhuxen at Tawandang German Brewery washed down with litres of their disappointing Thai microbrew, while their cover band belted out rock hits not quite execrable enough to be hilarious. Our request for them to play Sweet Child O’ Mine, sadly, did not go unheeded.

Much like Tawandang’s house band, Austin took me out on a greatest hits’ tour, albeit of Chinatown street food rather than of the guitar heroics of the past three decades, with the added degree of difficulty that Bangkok was in the midst of a vegetarian festival. The street vendors about Chinatown were not taking the festival at all seriously: most had substituted fried gluten for their meats and the fare was distinguished by its complete absence of green vegetable matter. My pick of the vendors – a rehydrated gluten satay vendor – managed to serve as a reminder as to why I eat meat. The attempts to fashion whole chickens and ducks from soy alone happen only once a year for a good reason.

Austin’s picks were far more fruitful and leaning towards the carnivore. At the intersection of Thanon Yaowarat and Thanon Yaowaphanit sits Mangkorn Khao, purveyors of some of Bangkok’s finest kiaow naam, shrimp and pork wontons packed with black pepper and coriander root served in a thin and subtle broth; as well as bamii haeng muu daeng, fresh Chinese-style wheat noodles with succulent barbecued pork. Any combination of broth, wonton, pork and noodle is possible and each is more gratifying than the next. It is always good to find a noodle place where the noodles have a distinctive fresh flavor of their own, not just the fried blandness direct from the Maggi factory.

Just around the corner on Thanon Plaeng Naam, a man conjures hellfire with a charcoal broiler from which he summons wok hei for oily oyster omelettes (hoy tawt(?)), curries and noodles, of which we managed about three chilli-laden plates.

We ended the evening with a few Chang beers at a dive bar whose purpose is to serve as a retirement home for elderly drunken Thai pimps with a taste for singalongs to improbably saucy karaoke videos. I don’t know how Austin finds these places, but he assures me that will make the cut for the next Lonely Planet Bangkok.

Less lazy Bangkok eating to come.

Let’s consume ethnicity!

Each Sunday in Bac Ha in mountainous Sapa, Vietnam, subsistence farmers from the surrounding hills descend on the normally sleepy market to watch tourists perform feats of amateur ethnography and find new ways to trivialise their culture.

Local hilltribes get into their Sunday best to hit the market mostly for mod-cons and consumer durables: new lightbulbs, fabric printed in Flower Hmong patterns imported from Hanoi, kitchen implements, traditional musical instruments (above). At the entrance of the market is my favourite moment of staged authenticity: a photo booth where tourists can pose for a shot with their selection of garishly-dressed local women and children against an equally garishly printed waterfall backdrop. Travellers are then shuttled off into the nearest village so that they can capture the smiling local kids for posterity in their more authentic setting.

Because I feel uneasy treating subsistence farmers as a tourist attraction by virtue of their silly hats, I hit up the (mostly) ethnically Vietnamese vendors for food.

The weekend meat of choice seems to be slabs of incredibly fatty local pork. I don’t think that I’ve ever visited a market so pig-centric, with a long line of pork-only butchers displaying their cuts on a row of wooden trestles.

This little pig went to market. Belly seems to be the popular cut and butchers cut each slab into more manageable slices to order.

On the ready-to-eat front, I found a vendor selling these small disks of orange rice flour batter, deep fried until crispy on the outside but still chewy. The whole batter is infused with a mandarine/citrus flavour, giving them a slightly tart and sour edge as well as (I assume) their lurid orange color.

The market also does good business in live buffalo, the going rate reported to be around $600 per beast. There is much quiet discussion and consideration of each animal and very little hustle to indicate that a sale is actually taking place.

Location: Bac Ha Market runs on Sundays in Bac Ha, North of Lao Cai in Vietnam.

Pimp my regional cuisine: Hoi An

Hội An in Vietnam openly pimps out its regional specialties with flagrant disregard to public taste, be it inferior tailoring, Vina-Franco-Sino-Japanese architecture or local food. The tourist-focussed restaurants that don’t offer bland facsimiles of hoanh thanh (wantons, generally fried), banh beo/banh vac (a steamed rice-flour wonton) and cao lau as an incongruous and brazen set menu are thin on the ground; the 60,000 dong carte du jour de rigueur.

Good cao lau is a pork battleground with slices of char siu-style roast pork, lard-heavy croutons and noodles, and a thin porcine stock fending off the intrusion of bitter fishwort and cress. Like Hoi An’s rich architectural heritage, it is hard to pick which influence came from where and whence. Unlike the buildings, it’s hard to find an exemplar; an edible equivalent of Tan Ky House.

The above cao lau was flaunted from a specialist stall on the eastern edge of Hoi An’s central market for the hours from early breakfast through late brunch alongside banh khoai, a miniature crispy omelette of egg, rice flour and turmeric filled with prawn and bean shoots. The banh khoai are rolled in a square of rice paper with a sliver of starfruit and some more fishwort, served with a peanut and sesame sauce. Their soggier cousin banh xeo is a different, but equally tasty beast.

The cao lau couldn’t be more local: every ingredient is on sale within twenty metres of the vendor, noodles for bun alongside the fatty yellow cao lau noodles. The dish’s official history dictates that the water used in the dish must be drawn from a single well in town.

Slices of crouton in their pre-deep-fried state

Price: bowl of cao lau, 10,000VND; banh khoai, 5,000VND per roll.

Last Appetite welcomes New York Times readers

Not exactly the section for which I’m aiming but I welcome you with open arms nonetheless.

Korea: French fry-coated hot dog

If Coney Island witnessed the birth of the hot dog, Seoul in South Korea saw subsequent generations mutate into a an entirely new genus of animal. An animal coated in a skin of batter and french fries then presented deep-fried on a stick. See the best sex parties here xxx !

After first witnessing this monstrosity on Newley Purnell‘s site, I thought that chasing it down would be difficult. That it would be the type of food that only demented South Korean carnies sold for a scant few days of a State Fair until their consumers ended up in the waiting queue for a heart bypass. The taste is about as obvious as it looks: greasy but still crispy fries glued to a hotdog with a thick, neutral batter.

It turns out that Seoul is packed full of artisan hot dog vendors. Vendors wrap them in bacon, mashed potato, corn batter or what looked to be seaweed then invariably deep fry them. I spotted three french fry-coated hotdog vendors in the narrow alleys of Myeong-dong alone and a few more in the neighbouring Namdaemun Market.

home-made budae jigae

I blame this mutation on the Korean War. When meat was scarce in the years during and after the war, Koreans made do with whatever they could scavenge from the surplus from the US armed forces bases – Spam and hotdogs. To make these items edible for Koreans, the locals mixed them together with the paste gochujang in a makeshift stew named “Budae jjigae” (부대찌개) – literally “base stew”. Over the subsequent fifty years, the locals have grown to love the processed meat-flavored soup and it now graces franchise restaurant menus, the only difference being that the stew now contains actual meat along with the mechanically-separated variety.

There seems to be no particular rules to making the stew, insofar that you need gochujang and hotdogs to start, and then whatever seems to be lying about the average Korean kitchen to continue: kimchi, frozen dumplings, greens, ramen, rice cake, actual meat. 50 years of hotdog flavoured broth has to do strange things to your palate and drive you towards experimenting with hotdogs in an obscene and deep-fried manner.

Recipe

Try: French Fry Coated Hot Dog on a Stick Recipe

The Last Appetite

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