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… Continue reading Scraping the bottom of the pork barrel
Tag: pork
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… Continue reading The laziest food writer in Bangkok
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… Continue reading The Ribs of Sapa
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… Continue reading Let’s consume ethnicity!
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… Continue reading Cha Cha Cha
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… Continue reading Defeated in Hue
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… Continue reading Pimp my regional cuisine: Hoi An