Scraping the bottom of the pork barrel

Once you’ve seen how pork floss is made, you’ll probably be much less suspicious of it. It seems quite simple: add a huge pile of boiled and shredded pork meat into a vat, then slowly dry fry, stirring constantly so that the pork doesn’t stick to the bottom of your vat. No weird additives (apart from that full bottle of soy sauce), no strange technique as you’d expect from a meat dish that is as light and fluffy as fibreglass insulation.

As for fried pork skin, a Northern Thai staple, it is a two stage frying process. Pork skin is cut into fine shreds, warmed (and rendered for lard (?)) in a cooler fryer, followed by a few seconds in a hotter fryer to puff up the pork skin shreds en masse.

If you’re keen to make your own pork floss, Umami has a pork floss recipe.

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.

The Ribs of Sapa

My worthless superpower is the ability to step into any city in the world and find a joint that serves barbecued pork ribs. Sapa in Northern Vietnam is not a street food mecca but ribs were there to be unearthed, alongside the usual assortment of chicken parts and other innards prepped for the grill on the street just north of Sapa’s central market. The ribs had the heavy charcoal flavour that comes from a long period of rest in a sugar-packed marinade followed by a short and brutal blast over the coals.

One of the barbecue innovations that you see around Vietnam is superheating the charcoal barbecue with an electric fan. I never saw this in Cambodia (possibly as a result of extortionate electricity prices), but it seems to be more common in Thailand as well, especially as a technique for heating a charcoal-fuelled wok burner.

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.

Cha Cha Cha

Putting the char into bun cha

bun cha is a blunt instrument. For all the subtlety engendered by Vietnamese cuisine, bun cha acts as a counterpoint: blackened rissoles of pork teamed with charred slices of pork belly in a thin fish sauce, vinegar and sugar stock with sides of bun noodles and assorted greens. Depending on season, either slices of green papaya or chayote (choko) are set afloat upon the stock.

The emphasis however is on the barbecued meat. After mixing components, loose charcoal from the pork is suffused through and suspended in the stock, leaving a thin black ring of charred detritus around the bowl and clinging to every slurp of noodles. The dish is omnipresent at lunchtime in the north of Vietnam, tough to find in the south, practically impossible to stumble upon overseas without guidance or a moment of serendipity. The above bowl was from Bun Cha Dac Kim on Hang Manh Street, Hanoi, not quite “utter bollocks” as one of my favourite food writers denounced them but certainly not the best bowl. The bun cha at 20 Ta Hien St is a much better bet – their fish sauce is punchy and lively, and leaves Dac Kim in its fragrant wake.

I’m beginning to suspect that the quality of food in Vietnam is inversely proportional to the height of the plastic chairs at the restaurant or stall. If a restaurant has stools short enough for your elbows to knock into your knees each time you slurp at your bun then it’s a good find; if plastic chairs are absent then all the better. I’m not sure how folding metal tables work into this equation but they’re somehow vital to it functioning at all.

The sides

What Dac Kim lacks in vim, it compensates with bulk. The greens are plated a foot high, the damp bun noodles weighing in at about two pounds, and a spare bowl of stock and papaya is at hand just in case your bowl runs dry. I noticed a trend down south in Veitnam for pho joints to list that “Bill Clinton ate 2 bowls” on the door, regardless of whether he ate there at all. I’m hoping that Dac Kim will follow the trend and list “Bill Clinton ate 2 bowls, then lapsed into a food-related coma”.

the servery

Location: Bun Cha Dac Kim, 1 Hang Manh St., Hanoi. A better bowl can be found at Bun Cha, 20 Ta Hien St. hanoi.

Price: 35000 VND with a plate of spring rolls for good measure.

Defeated in Hue

I generally don’t fail when I’m hunting for street food. I take wrong turns, missteps into blind alleys, but for the most part I find something worth eating.

Hue in central Vietnam defeated me.

My schooling in Vietnamese cuisine is more weighted towards the South than the North, due to the flow of southern refugees to Australia after the American War. My idea of central Vietnamese food tends to stretch as far as the occasional bowl of bun bo hue, although I had heard rumours of an Imperial cuisine, of sticky rice cakes in multitude variations, of a spicier and rich Vietnamese food. I still don’t know where that is located but I doubt that it is in Hue. The last vestiges of local restaurants that I could find seem to have been rendered bland by the constant stream of uncritical tourists; my efforts to find anything out in the ‘burbs fruitless and futile. Imperial cuisine seems to only exist as part of a day tour.

My small moment of success was on Truong Dinh St at Ba Hoa, a smallish street restaurant that sells nought but Hue regional specialties.

Ba Hoa trades in what I’d describe as a Hue Rice Cake Happy Meal. Banh beo, circles of rice cake topped with minced dried prawn and pork, corralled by gelatinous banh bot loc, rectangles of steamed tapioca flour each containing a chilli coated and slightly crispy whole dried prawn. The banh bot loc are are steamed in a rectangle of banana leaf and served cold and topped with a few strips of pork crackling. The plating reminded me of an upturned jellyfish, who prior to their beaching had a predilection for pork and fried onion. It seemed like a minor victory.

Location: Ba Hoa, 7 Truong Dinh St, Hue, Vietnam. Opposite is an identical restaurant; further down the street is a stand doing a roaring trade in sweet iced drinkche and local shellfish specialty, com hen.

Did I miss something in Hue? Is there a street food secret there waiting to be uncovered?

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.

The Last Appetite

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