EatingAsia

Jealous

A word that succinctly describes what I feel when I look at these photos, taken by Dave in northern India last July.

This afternoon we stopped by Brickfields (a 'Little India' in Kuala Lumpur) to check out the Deepvali market. Aiyo! (That's a Chinese term but I don't know the equivalent in Hindi or Tamil. Readers?) The market is a sad shadow of what it was during first Deepvali season we passed in KL, four years ago.

It's so much smaller. In 2005 the market sprawled over the walkway between KL Sentral Station and the Brickfields Monorail Station; there were sweets sellers and a biryani vendor all the way from India and fresh roti being flipped and chapati being patted and laid atop griddles.

At the other end of the market, further up Jalan Tun Sambanthan in the direction opposite to Chinatown, you could buy five or six different varieties of wonderful handmade pappadum and delicious kulfi in flavors like saffron and pistachio, both shipped in for the occasion from India.

In 2005 the Deepvali Market was packed from afternoon to evening with happy shoppers and eaters. It really felt like a festive season was upon us.

The next year the biryani and other interesting eats vendors behind KL Sentral were gone. The next year, nothing at all food-ish was sold in the KL Sentra-Monorail walkway.

By last year the Tun Sambanthan stretch of the market had lost much of its character. Many small vendors had been replaced by stalls selling same-same cookies and savories packed in big plastic jars ridiculously labelled 'homemade'.  At least we still had our opulent Punjabi sweets, made by a talented cook from Pakistan.

Alas, this year he's gone too. There is one stall run by a couple of youngish guys selling what look to be homemade sweets. A few are excellent, especially the 'milk cake', a moist, crumbly milk sweet that tastes a lot like caramel, and a chocolate-y sweet that, in a weirdly palatable way, tastes alot like Carnation Breakfast Bars.

But all in all the Brickfields Deepvali Market just ain't what it used to be.

We've no idea if this is down to the sluggish economy, or if City Hall's determined to 'clean up' (read: homogenize and dullify) markets in general. But it is sad to see the lead-up to what is such an important holiday for Malaysian Indians become so toned down.

While some concern themselves with staking a claim on nasi lemak and Hainan chicken rice in the name of national pride real, live Malaysian culinary traditions are disappearing right in front of us.

All I can do is look at these photos and envy Dave for his opportunity to enjoy Indian sweets, in India, on a daily basis. And I think it's time to consider an India excursion to coincide with Deepvali 2010.

One Up on Cracker Jack

On Sulawesi, wrapped and twisted rectangles of dried corn husk hide baje kacang (bah-jay kah-jahng),

irregularly shaped balls of roasted peanuts glued together with aren palm sugar.  The combination of savory-salty nuts with smoky, slightly bitter sugar is something like the best part of Cracker Jacks (c'mon former Cracker Jack eaters, go ahead and admit that you picked through the caramel popcorn for the candy-coated peanuts) -- only one thousand times better, because small-batch Indonesian palm sugar puts mass-produced American molasses to shame.

Another minimalist Indonesian sweet that's beyond delicious.

A conservative estimate of how many baje kacang we consumed over the course of 10 days in Toraja would put the number at, oh, 100 each. And we carried a few bags home (they quickly disappeared). If we came back from Sulawesi with cavities (I feel a twinge in lower molar), baje kacang are the culprit.

After dedicated, extensive sampling we can assert with confidence that Rantepao's best baje kacang are sold by two female vendors on the Pasar Bolo (the big morning market, not the one by the river). They can be found outside, on a corner of the market at the opposite end from the tuak (palm wine) sellers, sitting or standing behind their table piled high with baje kacang in yellow plastic bags (28 pieces for Rp10,000.) Their baje feature super-fresh, crunchy peanuts and gula that's glossy and crackly rather than old, dried out, and crumbly.

Cholon

 

Today we take a break from Sulawesi, and head to Saigon. On our last visit I researched a walking-riding tour of the city for Wall Street Journal Asia; it appears in today's 'Weekend Journal' and online, here.

The walk starts in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown. It's a part of Saigon that took a while to grow on us. We visited Cholon maybe two or three times in all of the more than two and a half years we lived there, never finding much to pull us back. But distance and perspective have their advantages, apparently, because now everytime we return to Saigon spending one or several long mornings in Cholon is a priority.

There's a good amount of food and travel press devoted to Yaowarat, Bangkok's Chinatown, but relatively little written on Cholon. I suspect that's because the former, with its bountiful Chinese-character signage, is much more identifiable as a Chinese neighborhood than the latter. Cholon is in fact a huge area sprawling over Saigon's Districts 5 and 6. It's been in existence for hundreds of years but really began to grown in population when the French incorporated Vietnam into Indo-China in the late 1800s.

Cholon's most obvious markers are Cho Binh Tay (Binh Tay Market) and its many Buddhist temples. You need to spend some time poking around a bit to find other indicators of its Chinese (Hoa, in Vietnamese, probably from the Mandarin word 'hua') identity. And this requires doing alot of walking in what is admittedly not Southeast Asia's best walking city. But it's a worthwhile effort. Everytime we return to Cholon we're more enamored of the place.

'Weekend Journal' runs just a few photos with its Walking Tours (to see Dave's photos, click the dots on the map) and space contraints precluded me from including all of my favorite bits of Cholon in the article. So here's a highly haphazard selection of what are, for us, some of the neighborhood's highlights. Consider it a supplement to the Walking Tour.

Any visit to Cholon should start at Cho Binh Tay. We try to arrive by 7:00am, 7:30 at the latest. At this hour the covered part of the market is just waking up, but the informal market out back, on Phan Van Koe Street, is very much alive.

We absolutely love this part of the market. It's 'wild and wooly' (our friend Andrea Nguyen's apt description for Saigon itself, but especially applicable, we think, to this buzzing lane), all of Saigon's chaos, frantic energy, and entrepreneurial zeal squeezed into one tight little space.

There's lots of pushing and shoving, shoppers jostling with sellers, hawkers barking at passers-by, and endless bargaining. The smells of fresh seafood, leafy vegetables, and fresh herbs mingle with the scent of freshly baked baguettes and prawn fritters sizzling in oil.

Every time we step onto this street I pick a spot and just stand there, not moving, for a very long time, drinking in everything around me in gulps.

There are no regular stalls here. Sellers just plop themselves down on both sides of the street, whip out their wares, and get to selling. Some vendors move often, picking up their tiny plastic stools and rattan baskets or metal trays or plastic pans of veggies or prawns and whatnot and ambling up the street a few paces, where they plop it all down again and get back to business.

The sea does part for motorcycles, and monks.

There's some good food to be had on this back lane, including vegetarian banh mi (admittedly, meat lovers will find it not quite as satisfying as a pork-stuffed baguette), prawn toasts, and turmeric-scented, tofu-studded vegetarian 'broken rice' served with chili-spiked fish sauce. 

By eight, the energy here starts to flag as vendors depart with their empty baskets, and shoppers head back home to their kitchens with full ones. Suddenly, after all that racket and chaos, the lane is quiet.

Now is a good time to duck back inside the market and seek refreshment in its 'food court'. We always start with a few coffees and fruit shakes (strawberry is a favorite),

before moving on to something more substantial. You're spoiled for choice here -- there are rice-and-dish vendors, chao (porridge) makers, and bun and pho stalls, and everything looks and smells good. But time and time again we opt for a plate of noodles prepared by an always shirtless, never smiling wok jockey who likes to play with fire next to his can't-miss corner stall.

His chow mein-like deep-fried noodles topped with choy sum, prawns, pork, a bit of liver, and deep-fried bean curd skin in a thickish black pepper-spiced gravy is wonderful, boasting that scent of char that only the kiss of a red-hot wok can deliver.

On one side of the food court are a row of stalls selling whole fish and boned and skinned fish for fish paste and fish balls.

Here a vendor employs a great method for detaching fish meat destined to be pounded into a paste from its skin: fillet, then grasp the fillet at the tail end while you use a spoon to scrape the meat free. I've yet to try this at home but it makes a heck of a lot more sense than removing skin from fillets with a knife. Less waste too.

From Binh Tay we walk in the general direction of Nguyen Trai Street, an east-west thoroughfare dotted with temples. We rarely go in a straight line, instead diverting from main streets down an alley or short lane or two for a quieter glimpse of daily life.

 
We're always on the lookout for material traces of Cholon history. Many of the district's old Chinese shop houses are hidden behind signage, but they are there. Just look up.
 

In front of a fruit market on Nguyen Trai we meet Lam Ai Phuong, a Cholon native who's lived there all her life. We try conversing in English, then switch to Mandarin (I'm always surprised by how many Cholon-ites speak Mandarin), and she tells me that the first floor of the building pictured above used to be a Hainanese coffee shop. It closed after Liberation.

Phuong's husband, who was 'involved with the US military', fled Vietnam by boat after Saigon fell. She hasn't seen him since. He now now lives in the US. Didn't she wish to join him? I wonder.

'By the time it was possible I was too old. This is my home. I prefer to stay here.'

Across from the fruit market, on Phung Hung Street, is what the owner claims is Cholon's oldest roast meats shop, dating back to the late sixties. We just love the weathered look of the place, and the bas relief duck on its golden interior sign (just visible behind the lantern).

This may be the only roast meats shop where the butcher/slicer works at his chopping block while standing on top of a meter-high stool.

His positioning is strategic: he has a clear view of the street. When a customer pulls up to the curb on their motorcycle they needn't dismount; they can just shout their order up to him. He chops and slices and hands the order to his assistant, who delivers and takes payment.

A baguette seller is conveniently stationed right outside the shop. Buy a baguette from her and shout your order to him. She ferries the baguette to the shop, he splits and fills it with your choice of meat. A perfect symbiotic relationship.

On your way up Nguyen Trai you'll pass several temples,

where you can make a donation and have incense coils or a rectangle of magenta paper hung with a wish or a prayer.

We usually end our visits to Cholon with a slow stroll up and down Trieu Quang Phuc Street. This is short street is a Chinese opera and lion dance supplier zone -- there are custom scissor makers,

mask and prop makers,

and cape and costume makers like this woman, whose grandfather established the family business eons ago.

Trieu Quang Phuc Street also houses many Chinese herb shops.

You can't miss them: just look for the leaves, rinds, rhizomes, horseshoe crabs, and questionable reptilian body parts (I'm not advocating, just describing) being dried out front.

A good reason to start early in Cholon: by noon it's mostly unshaded streets are beastly hot.

Now is th time to  hail a pedicab (or a taxi), head back to your lodging, and nap through the sweatier part of the day.

 

And the Revolution Will Have Fins

Seafood vendor, Saigon, December 2008. Photo © David Hagerman

We've been collecting Chinese propaganda posters since we lived in Chengdu in 1984-85, so I suppose it's no wonder I feel a special affinity for this photo.

Flower Power

After making a project of frequenting Southeast Asian markets over these many years, we're still making discoveries.

The other morning we stopped by a Malay stall at our local market to pick up bamboo shoots for a Burmese curry and there, nestled amongst the bunches of various green leafy vegetables we've seen a million times, were these gorgeous turmeric flowers. I can't recall having seen these before at any market - perhaps it's a seasonal item?

At any rate, the friendly guy running the stall advised us to pick the leaves off of the stalk and eat them as we would any other ulam (the fresh and blanched veggies that accompany a Malay meal, to dip in sambal or not).

These babies don't keep well in the fridge, so we had at them as soon as we got home. The leaves have a delicate butter lettuce-like texture and taste bright and 'green'. Not surprisingly, there's a hint of turmeric flavor and the root's characteristic astringency.

I can think of a few other uses for them - mixed with grated coconut, chopped dried chili, and a bit of fish sauce for a 'salad', or stirred into Indian-style 'congee'  flavored with the root (or turmeric powder) and fried curry leaves. This morning I made a sort of Indian yogurt rice - leftover rice softened in the steamer, stirred into lots of yogurt seasoned with popped mustard seeds, a bit of turmeric powder-enhanced mustard oil, salt, and chopped cilantro - and as I ate it I couldn't help but think what a nice addition this flower would have made.

One aspect of Southeast Asia's culinary culture that continues to fascinate me is how, in many cases,  every bit of the plant is used. Here we have the turmeric flower, which is eaten as a vegetable. The leaves and root are used too, as flavoring agents. (And the whole plant is fantastically good for you.) Nothing is wasted.

Sounds like a prescription for frugal eating that long predates current economic woes.

Coming up soon - cooking a part of the banana plant that you might never have thought of as food.

Good Old Old Town

A friend visiting from the States once observed that Kuala Lumpur is a lot like Los Angeles. I've not spent much time in Los Angeles, but from what I've heard about the place I reckon he's right.

To whit: KL is a Car Town (or, at least, a motorcycle town). Our train system may look impressive on a map but at ground it's an overall disappointment. There's buses, but they don't ply enough routes to be super convenient and on many of the routes the vehicle travels in one direction only - meaning that if you want to get from point E to D you'll have to sit through stops F, G, A, B, and C first. As for taxis - don't get me started.

Also: Kuala Lumpur is a spread-out city, a collection of neighborhoods linked by a tangle of freeways masquerading as 'roads'.

And: There's not alot happening, culinarily speaking, downtown. The Petronas Towers are awesome but I'd really rather eat elsewhere.

Like in the 'hoods.

Which brings me to PJ, an acronym (it's a fact that Malaysians, given half a chance, will acronym-ize anything) for Petaling Jaya, a collection of satellite neighborhoods called 'sections' (seksyens) that bear numbers corresponding to the order in which they were built: Section 17, Section 2, etc. If you're staying in KL for any length of time you owe it to yourself to grab a taxi (yes, unfortunately, only a taxi will get you there) and head out to PJ, because the various sections boast plenty of good eating.

I suggest Old Town - more slang for PJ 1, the first section to be hacked out of rubber estates way back in the early fifties. The best word I can think of to describe Old Town is 'funky', and I mean that in an entirely agreeable way. It's streets are lined with old wooden and concrete single-story bungalows, its 'downtown' is a mish-mash of fast-food restaurants, hawker stalls, and kitchen and household goods stores stocked with a mind-boggling assortment of items, and many of its eateries have been around for decades.

You might start at Old Town's market, which is jumping and heaving most mornings, weekends especially. Prices are low-to-the-ground cheap, so folks from outside Old Town come to shop there as well. It's one of those authentically Malaysia-Truly-Asia kind of places, not a product of official muscle but just the sort of scene that arises when folks of different races, left to their own devices, happen to end up sharing a neighborhood, or just an affinity for good fresh foods at rock-bottom prices. A trip to the PJ Old Town morning market always reminds me that Malaysia, among its ASEAN neighbors, is really a pretty special place.

On Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays only you'll find, in a dingy rear corner of the market, husband-and-wife team Mr. Chang and Mrs. Kok, purveyors of a memorable nasi lemak. The dish's barely coconut-scented rice (grains intact and distinct) is garnished with Mrs. Kok's locally famous chicken curry with potatoes, two types of sambal (one hot and spicy, made with ikan bilis or tiny dried anchovies, the other comprised of mini prawns in a mild tomato-chili sauce), and a piquant dried condiment of dried prawns ground with shrimp paste and chilies.

 

Mr. Chang was born in Old Town some 59 years ago and, with his wife, has been selling nasi lemak from the same spot in the market for over thirty years. Both are retired. I once asked Mr. Chang about their abbreviated business hours. Why not also sell during the week? His answer: 'Why bother? We make good enough money, and Monday to Friday we can relax with the grandkids. We could work harder and get more money, but what for?'

I can't help but admire his attitude.

If you arrive in Old Town too late for breakfast then there's always the possibility of a home-cooked lunch. An old house on Jalan Pasar 1/21 is an open secret among local eaters for the fabulous pork noodles that are served, unadvertised, out back (you can also eat in the family's kitchen). You don't need a sign. Follow the crowds.

Novelty value aside, these are some seriously good pork noodles. The supremely porcine broth is packed with choy sum (Chinese mustard) and crowned with a little mound of fried garlic and crispy crackling. Yong tau foo (stuffed bean curd, fried bean curd skin, etc.) is an optional go-with, and it's all fantastically fresh. And then there's the siu gao (boiled dumplings), bursting at their seams with minced pork and nubs of water chestnuts and carrots.

Noodles, of course, can be had wet (in soup) or dry (mixed with dark soy, soup on the side). Unless you're a regular you won't get the warm and fuzzy here, but the place is PJ Old Town personified: characterful, old-style, and well worth the discerning eater's time.

Just up the street you'll find Chan Lee and her tong sui and herbal teas stall. Mrs. Lee - usually kitted out in Chinese auntie pajamas, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and thick-framed dark sunglasses that would inspire envy in the heart of any Chinese Communist Party cadre - has been an Old Town fixture for 45 years, which would make her business nearly as old as the place itself (her son takes over late in the afternoon).

I'm a late but fervent convert to tong sui, or sweet soups. As incongruous as some of their ingredients may seem to the Western palate, they're in actuality not too sweet, light, refreshing, and - though usually served warm - really do, as advertised, cool you down on a hot day. Ms. Lee's standouts include her tong yuen, smooth, chewy glutinous rice balls filled with sesame paste and floating in a spicy ginger syrup; I also like the white cloud fungus and longan in herbal broth.

Her five herbs tea, however, I just can't countenance. The thickish moss green concoction - a favorite with lorry drivers, judging by the number of trucks that stop at the stall whenever I'm there - is so awfully bitter I could only manage a swallow (this of course means, according to the logic of Chinese herbal medicine, that it's incredibly good for you) before returning the glass to Ms. Lee, who offered it as a freebie the last time I visited.

I felt like an uncouth ingrate, but Ms. Lee understood my limitations: 'Not many foreigners,' she said, nodding, 'can take that drink.'

Where Am I?

That's what I think to myself as I drink in this gorgeous view: a winding river backed by low mountains, trees showing their limbs while others sport various shades of brown, all of it lit by a weak sun, and not a coconut palm in sight. I could be taking in a summer day in northern California (where, by the way, summer occurs when much of the rest of the US is sliding towards winter).

That was our favorite time of the year when we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it's a sweet bit of fortune to find it here in on a February day in northern Thailand. Yesterday we drove from Lampang to Mae Chaem, a scruffy village on a diversionary road off the Mae Hong Son Loop. It's a relatively short journey - just 2 1/2 hours - but the last leg cuts through Doi Inthanon National Park, home to Thailand's highest peak, and for the final ninety minutes or so the road is all twisty turns.

We drove with our windows open (something we never do at home in Kuala Lumpur) and, at the road's highest point, gulped in wonderfully crisp air as the sun began to fall behind the mountain. As the elevation dropped the air heated and the scents of dry brush, dead leaves, and deliberately-set fires filled the car. When we arrived in Mae Chaem, which is nestled in a parched (at this time of the year) valley, the temperature was on that delicious cusp between daylight sauna heat and moist, nighttime coolness. After finding a room for the night we walked to the wet market (what little of it was still up and running at half past seven) and celebrated our arrival, seated roadside at a rickety table, with Sang Som and soda poured by a boiled peanut vendor.

 

There's not much to Mae Chaem and we'd rather be at higher elevations anyway, so this is just a pitstop - but we want to make the most of it so we're up early, to take in what little there is to take in before the valley heats up. At seven the market is surprisingly quiet, just a few vegetable and kanom vendors and others selling pork, beef, and chicken in a glassed-in 'meat room'. There's no real coffee either, so we down our Nescafe with our noses scrunched as if it were medicine (and in a way, it is) and then walk for a bit along the river before turning into village's 'suburbs', a neat grid of residential streets.

Sleepy doesn't begin to describe the dozey feel of this place, but the residents are friendly and the roads are lined with some lovely old wooden houses.

 

When we return to the market an hour later it's bordering on kind-of lively, with more vendors of prepared foods and a woman at the back cooking up laab khua to order.

 

She flavors her laab not with spice paste but with ground chili, a powdered spice mixture heavy on the prickly ash, and fish sauce; her laab is chunkier - the meat and 'parts' cut into larger pieces - than most, and it's studded with plenty of generously sized pieces of crackling.

 

We pad our breakfast with a spicy chicken, vegetable, and mung bean vermicelli gaeng purchased from a nearby vendor, and grilled, banana leaf-wrapped fish sourced from another.

 

The former is wonderful but the latter I can't abide. The tiny fish are too bony and the paste they've been mixed with before grilling contains an ingredient that puts me off somehow. This is frustrating and very unusual  - I can't recall the last time I tried something that I couldn't bring myself to continue eating. But Dave is happy to finish it off by himself.

At the far end of our table a woman chops pork fat into big chunks and tosses them into a huge wok. As we eat we admire the patience of one Mae Cham resident for whom hope springs eternal.

Northern Meat

As I've written before, northern Thais love their meat.

Oh, they enjoy their plants too. Fresh and blanched vegetables are eaten at almost every meal - stirred into soups, pounded into a dtam or mixed into a saa (the northern version of yam), combined with other ingredients to make a nam prik or 'dip' (into which more veggies and sticky rice will be dunked), or left fresh to nibble alongside  laab or toss into kanom jeen. Visit a northern Thai wet market and be amazed by the sheer number of varieties of cultivated and wild vegetables on offer.

But meat dishes, often very hearty meat dishes, are also ubiquitous in northern Thailand, and on every visit we invariably end up eating much more of the red stuff than we do at home. We don't mind. We go with the flow.

 

The northern Thai love of beef is exemplified by gaeng om, a specialty we became acquainted with two years ago at a morning market in Lampang, a pleasant town boasting of lovely old wooden buildings and a laid-back vibe. On that morning we followed our noses to a makeshift wood stove supporting a clay pot in which burbled something deep, dark, and undoubtedly (we figured) delicious. When I leaned in for a good sniff (and Dave for a photo) the pot's owner led me to a plastic chair and motioned for me to sit.

'Gaeng om!' she said, handing me a bowl brimming with coffee-hued broth, bite-sized chunks of beef, and various beefy bits and bobs. Wow. It was - incredibly deep, beefier than the beefiest beef stew, beefier than a slab of grilled steak, but also complex, with full-on heat from dried chilies, subtle spice from Sichuan peppercorns, black pepper, and jakan (a peppery, woody stem that also flavors Lao dishes), and a hint of citrus from wild lime leaves and lemongrass. Though certainly rich, it wasn't all that heavy.

We devoted a good bit of time during the rest of that northern Thailand sojourn looking for a gaeng om as wonderful as the one that vendor fed us on that Lampang morning. We failed. And we never forgot that gaeng om.

So, here we are after nine days in Chiang Mai, ready for a break, eager to hit the road. We want clean air, green landscapes, and room to breathe. We're itching to get out into the countryside, but our first stop must be Lampang, for the gaeng om we've been thinking about for thirty months. We're up with the sun and ready for a bowl - no,this time  we're going to make it three bowls (hey - they don't make gaeng om in Kuala Lumpur, you know). We hightail it to the market, primed for beefy goodness.

And the vendor's not there. No sign of her, no empty stall indicating she's merely taken a day off. She's just gone and left and taken her heavenly gaeng om recipe (which I'd planned to extract) with her. 'Dejected' doesn't describe it. But marketing always makes us feel better, so instead of wallowing we wander. We buy spices, stop for a couple glasses of good, strong coffee, and snack on excellent miang kham made by a vendor we remember from two years ago. 

And then without even looking, we find gaeng om. Not the gaeng om, but a pretty close contender.

It's part of a two-act show that also features northern-style beef laab, made with blood and eaten fresh or cooked (in the latter case it's called laab khua). The couple pictured below has been serving their respective beef specialties (he does the laab, she does the gaeng) in a shadowy, smoky (from coal cooking fires) annex to Lampang's Wisonin market for years.

Time has honed their skills. The gaeng om is everything we'd hoped for - rich, intense, almost too meaty to believe, the perfect thing to warm the soul and wake the belly on a February morning. IT's got a few more chewy odds and ends than I'd like, but the flavor is superb. A side order of khao niaow (sticky rice) is essential, for sopping up the dish's broth and tempering its heat.

When a laab order is placed the vendor pulls out his knives and sets to work, rhythmically hacking a piece of beef into uneven bits (no machine-ground meat here), mixing in a little coagulated blood during the process. While our fellow diners - male laborers, mostly - take their laab fresh, we go for the cooked version.

The blood undoubtedly adds to the dish's hard-core meatiness (there's blood in the gaeng om too), which is complemented by a host of ground dried spices. There's no Isaan laab-style tartness from lime, and we don't miss it. This dish isn't about sweet, sour, salty, hot - it's about savoriness, pure and simple. Fresh cilantro on top and a plate of mint, cabbage, and water spinach on the side cleanse the palate and ease lurking guilt about excessive red meat consumption (this wasn't our first laab of the trip).

Having sated our gaeng om cravings we push on. And a good thing we stopped, too; though our journey will entail more laab khua encounters, that bowl of gaeng om proves to be the last of the trip.

Chiang Mai's Tasty Friday Morning Market

 

We are in Bangkok, physically, but still up north in our heads. We love Bangkok. We lived here, quite happily, for a little under a year. When we left it wasn't at all willingly, but with heavy hearts and great regrets about everything we didn't have a chance to experience. We've always thought we'd come back here to live, eventually. But after the North Bangkok seems hot and crowded, if still very delicious.

At any rate, we're still thinking about Chiang Mai and environs, about the people and the food and the vibe and the vistas. Let's start in the 'big city', at a place we feel most at home: a market.

If you've no Thai language skills but can manage a bit of Mandarin you'll do quite all right at Chiang Mai's Ciin Haw market (actually, you'll do fine there with only English, too), held every Friday morning in a parking lot across the street from a mosque near the night bazaar. Ciin Haw are descendents of Chinese Muslims who migrated south from Yunnan in waves centuries ago. Chiang Mai's most well-known dish - khao soi - is usually attributed, in some way or another, to their presence in the region.

 

Even if you don't speak or understand Mandarin, certain visuals might tip you off to the presence of Chinese or Chinese speakers - such as the row of jars above, condiments produced by Guizhou's Lau Gan Ma Company. We're quite partial to the chili paste on the left, an oily emulsion of black beans, garlic, and crushed dried and roasted chilies peppers that, combined with Chinese black vinegar, sugar, and soy sauce, makes a mean dip for shui jiao (boiled dumplings).

Our love for Lau Gan Ma (which we call 'old lady hot sauce'), blossomed in Shanghai, when our ayi's flight attendant daughter gifted us a jar after a run to Guizhou. (Our continuing affection for the stuff might also have something to do with the fact that the stern-faced, severely-coiffed woman pictured on the label is a dead-ringer for our stern-faced and severlely-coiffed, but soft-hearted, ayi.) When we returned to the San Fran Bay Area from Shanghai in 1998 we hand-carried 6 jars with us. Now you can buy Lau Gan Ma just about anywhere, but beware - the rumor is that copycats abound.

In addition to jars of Lau Gan Ma you might see, at Chiang Mai's Ciin Haw market, faces that look, to us, as Chinese as they do Thai,

 

containers of homemade fermented (and spiced) bean curd, otherwise known as 'Chinese cheese',

 

and dishes that sing with the lip-numbing tingle of hua jiao, or Sichuan peppercorn.

But now we're mixing our ethnicities, because the huajiao-spiced dishes we ate at this market are actually of Shan, or Tai Yai origin. The one pictured below is an utterly delicious and comforting combination of thin rice vermicelli (laying unseen, at the bottom of the bowl), doused with a paste made from soy flour (according to the vendor, who described herself as a Shan from Yunnan - but gram flour, according to this wiki entry) and seasoned with crushed toasted soy beans, sesame oil, la jiao (sandy chili paste of dried chilies, salt, and oil), huajiao you (Sichuan peppercorns steeped in hot oil), and lots of fresh coriander. It's bizarrely viscous and gloppy but in a good, warming way - just the thing to fill the stomach and spread heat through the body on cool Chiang Mai winter mornings.

Next to the vendor dishing up this bowl of goodness is a pickle seller, and if you're so inclined you can nab an empty bowl and ask her to fill it with the pickle of your choice, to eat with your noodle 'porridge'.

And there's another Shan specialty worth keeping an eye out for here: donuts.

The sweets, made with ground glutinous black rice, give Malaysian kueh keria a serious run for the their money.

After frying, the donuts are dipped in molasses, which they absorb like sponges through their porous  skins.

Despite their soaking the donuts remain crispy outside, but within they're soft and creamy, almost custardy. The molasses cools them down quickly, so you don't have to wait too long after they're done to take a bite - and when you do, molasses spurts into your mouth. Sounds sweet, but all that sugar is  tamed by molasses' bitter edge, and the rustic flavor of the black rice dough shines through.

We're thinking that these might just be the world's most perfect (sweet) breakfast food. We went through two bags of five each in the blink of an eye, and I spent a good portion of the rest of our time up North searching for more (in vain, unfortunately).

Other eats at the market include mohynga, which is not Ciin Haw or Shan but Burmese, a thickish fish soup-stew with rice vermicelli. This version was made with thick slices of pickled banana tree trunk, which lent a slightly funky (but tasty) fermented edge, and topped with crunchy daal fritters.

The vendor of this Burmese dish told us that his father was a Ciin Haw who migrated from southern Yunnan to Shan state, in Burma, before finally settling down in Chiang Mai. So although this market is known as Chiang Mai's Ciin Haw market, many of its specialties have some relationship to the Shan, who've long been a point of contact between Burma, Thailand, and southern China.

After many, many donuts, several bowls of noodles, and a lot of vegetable ogling (fresh fava beans! how we wished we had a kitchen) it was time to head off and ponder .... lunch.

Pho, the Hoi An Way

                                               A pho delivery

They do pho a little differently in Hoi An.

We eyed this popular stall on our first morning at the market, then returned the next day to find the vendor absent, his space empty. It was the first or the fifteenth of the lunar month and most of the market's prepared food sellers - save our favorite cao lau purveyor - had gone veggie or stayed home. When he didn't appear the next morning, or the next, we feared we'd missed our chance. But on our last morning there he was, back in business, sending out tray after tray packed with steaming bowls of pho.

He does a simple beef pho, with what we can only assume is a central coastal twist: after noodles, meat, and broth are in the bowl he adds a hefty spoonful of viscous fermented bean sauce (the pot in the center, below).

And with his noodles he serves a plate containing a jumble of fresh herbs, wide slices of pickled green papaya, and a mound of roasted dried chili flakes.

Diners douse the contents of the saucer with soy sauce (some also add fish sauce directly to their noodles), mix the lot up, and eat it with their pho. (Just dumping the green papaya et al directly on top of one's pho is simply not done.)

What we like here are the the herbs, which are varied (Thai basil, rice paddy herb, teensy-weensy watercress, mint leaves and a parsley-like green) and plentiful, the richness-sans-sweetness that the bean sauce adds to the soup (super-sweet hoisin is more common in Saigon and around), the full-on heat of the dried chili flakes (reminiscent of Thai guayteow nam, for us), and the sour punch of the green papaya which, eaten together with the chewy noodles, makes for a crunchy/soft, steaming-hot/cool texture-temperature contrast tour de force.

We're generally not pho-natics, but this is a great version.

Pho vendor, Hoi An Market, in a corner of the covered seafood section, right near the water