Tag Archives: Food

Kobe, Japan

Julie and I were a bit skeptical about stopping off in Kobe for a couple of days, as we wondered what else there might be to do in this city famous the world over for the quality of its beef. Well, we couldn’t just eat steak all day now could we..

Teppanyaki Kobe Beef at Steakland

Steakland in Kobe, purveyors of the finest, most meltingly delicious beef we’ve ever had

We were all set to visit a restaurant called Mouriya which has fantastic reviews, until we got talking to the folks at our hostel who recommended the theme-park-named “Steakland“, which we were assured was as good if not better.

It was very easy to find, and when we arrived we found out the whole place is set up for teppanyaki – a cooking style where the chef cooks at the table on a large hot plate, which we later found out was invented in Kobe.

Our chef preparing the famous Kobe beef. Mouth watering level at the time this photo was taken: 11

We watched our chef carefully, masterfully prepare our Kobe steak, before he placed the bite-size morsels on our plate. The texture on the tongue was of lightly seared beef, which gave in to our bite with all the resistance of a marshmallow. Then the fattiness and flavour of the beef hit us. Mmmmmm.. bliss. It is, to my carnivorous brain, the final evolution of the art of consuming beef. Yep, even to my well-travelled tastebuds, this is the best steak I’ve ever had.

Kobe beef, in Kobe, cooked in the teppanyaki Kobe style

Kobe Earthquake Museum

The Kobe Earthquake Museum. Why did they surround it with glass?

The Kobe Earthquake Museum, or to give it its full title: “The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial, Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution” (whew!) retells the story of the massive earthquake that occurred on the 17th of January 1995, measuring 6.8 on the Moment magnitude scale (the successor to the Richter magnitude scale).

The Museum starts abruptly with an immersive recreation of the earthquake which happened in the early hours of the morning. The theatre is dark. The scene is set with stills of Kobe’s streets, shops and offices before the video and deafening sounds of breaking civilisation completely disorientated us.

The video includes CCTV footage of shops and offices, and the devastation wrought was unbelievable. As we have travelled for the past 15 months we’ve recognised places and names, mostly because we’ve seen or heard about them on the news, but neither of us recalled anything of this disaster which took 6,434 lives.

Collapsed sections of the Hanshin Expressway caused by the Kobe Earthquake. Source: My photo of a photo on display in the museum

The museum goes on to describe the immediate aftermath, which was explained to us by very friendly English speaking members of staff who added their own stories of the tragedy. It was fascinating to hear that so many rules and procedures have been introduced as a result of the Kobe disaster. Some examples we were told about were that relief efforts were delayed because of hierarchical authorisation which has been changed in the event of earthquakes, and that fires were caused by the electricity being reconnected – now they inspect the power lines and restore it in stages.

Demonstration area in the Kobe Earthquake Museum. Clockwise from the top: Staff teach schoolchildren (and us!) about liquefaction; Liquefaction demonstration – only one house remains standing because it has deep foundations, the coloured balls represent underground services such as water, gas and sewerage; Map of the world showing the tectonic plates and locations of volcanoes, earthquakes, impact craters and plate tectonics

Engineers and support staff from Kobe have provided assistance at subsequent earthquake relief efforts not just in Japan, but around the world. We thought the interactive visual displays were excellent; a simple bucket of sand demonstrated liquefaction, and a vibrating table demonstrated seismic base isolation.

Kawasaki Good Times World

Me having a Good Times™, marvelling at all the machinery Kawasaki have built through the years

With the delightfully translated name of “Good Times World”, the history and accomplishments of the Kawasaki company was pleasantly impressive – for being more interesting than we had hoped, the amount of information on show, and for the breadth of industries Kawasaki has been involved in.

Julie and I take turns sitting on the Kawasaki Ninja 400 Special Edition

We learnt a lot about the company and its creations that we had no idea about before, like they build the Shinkansen bullet trains and the tracks, they still make huge container and transport ships which is how the company started, they own the trade mark “Jet Ski” and they built the machines that dug the Eurotunnel!

The museum has examples of almost everything they make, which we had fun climbing into and playing with.

Good Times. Clockwise from top left: First generation Shinkansen; Me at the controls; Julie taking charge of a much more modern tram; Me on the Shinkansen arcade game / simulator (which I was rubbish at – sorry Uncle Ken!); Julie on the Jet Ski arcade; Me on the Jet Ski arcade

Kawasaki Good Times World – Good Times indeed!

Nunobiki Waterfall, Herb Gardens and Ropeway

Just 5 minutes north of the Kobe Shinkansen bullet train station is a narrow valley between Mt Futatabi and Mt Maya that leads up to the Nunobiki waterfall.

The Nunobiki waterfall, a serene place so close to the bustle of Kobe

A little further up the trail we passed a reservoir which would have been a welcome stop were it not for the annoying public announcement being looped through loudpseakers!

A Kobe reservoir. It holds water. We didn’t stop for long. What more can I say?

We pressed on, and made it to the Nunobiki Herb Gardens and Ropeway, which can also be reached by said ropeway from the lowest cablecar station near the Shinkansen train terminal.

The Herb Gardens purport to be Japan’s largest herb and flower garden, with some 200 species blooming throughout the year. We really enjoyed the variety of the gardens, and as we’ve come to expect in Japan it’s very well laid out too, although as we started at the bottom some of the hills were quite steep to walk up!

Kobe Nunobiki Herb and Flower Gardens, which also have a great view over downtown Kobe

Herbs and flowers at the Kobe Herb and Flower Garden. Clockwise from top-left: Honey bee collecting lavender pollen, round yellow flower (Allium); pretty blue flower (Cornflower); pointy yellow flower (Lupin)

As well as the herbs and flowers, the gardens have a number of art installations, and a lovely greenhouse complete with a herbal foot-bath that Julie couldn’t resist after all the walking we’d done!

Complimentary herbal foot-bath

While she soaked her weary feet, we ate the various flavours of bagel we’d carried from the bakery next-door to our hostel, and admired the view over Kobe.

It was a nice, peaceful end to our couple of days in this fascinating stopover, and a great way to make room for more delicious Kobe beef!

Bangladeshi food

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If I tell you that Indian restaurants in the UK are usually owned by Bangladeshis and hence serve Bengali food then anyone who knows my preference for Indian takeaway at home will immediately know that I really loved the food in Bangladesh! We found the food to be more mellow and with a more rounded flavour than the bright and sharp tastes of the SE Asian countries, and while it can still pack a punch it wasn’t anywhere near as chilli packed as some of the dishes we tried in Thailand.

Breads

After travelling through the almost bread-free zone of eastern Asia where if you get bread at all it is sweet and with an almost cakey texture, it was great to find bread on the menu again. In Bangladesh, flatbreads are eaten at all times of the day and are often cooked on the street outside the restaurant.

The easiest way to spot a restaurant is to look for the guy at the bread station out front

We came across three main types. Rotis are flatbreads cooked without fat, they’re soft and a nice way to scoop up your curry. Parathas were perhaps the most common, again flatbreads but this time fried on a griddle and sometimes with delicious flaky layers like a good puff pastry. Finally, Andrew’s favourite the naan roti which is cooked stuck onto the inside of a domed oven and puffs up nicely.

Rotis, parathas, and naan roti

Rice

Curry type meals in restaurants are generally served with rice unless you specifically ask for bread and a whole plate of plain boiled rice will be placed in front of you with the meat and/or vegetables served in separate small dishes – a difference to the UK where the meat is very much the main part of the meal, here it is just enough to taste, an indication of the expense of meat compared to the amount an average Bangladeshi has to spend on their meal.

A full plate of rice with a little bit of curry and some vegetables

Biryanis were available all over and were a delicious and filling meal. The rice is fried with a small amount of meat (mutton, chicken or beef) and served with a side of curry sauce.

Beef biryani with curry sauce and salad

Dal

Dal, or curried lentils, became a mainstay for us during the month. Breakfast was usually parathas, dal and mixed vegetables. The lentils used were often chana dal (split chickpeas) but split mung beans were also common. It’s usual to have a side of dal with a more substantial meal too to moisten that mountain of rice.

Breakfast! (Dal front right)

We saw a bean stew being served up from street stands on a couple of occassions too but otherwise beans didn’t seem to be commonly used.

Vegetables

Surprising to us was the prevalence of cucumbers. Both cucumbers and carrots are commonly sold on the street (peeled and partially split to form fingers) from big trays as a snack, usually with a hefty shake of salty spice. And a plain cucumber salad appears alongside pretty much every lunch or dinner meal for no charge – I definitely found it useful for reducing the burn on more fiery dishes!

Cucumber side salad, just watch out for the raw chillis!

A mixed vegetable curry (shobji) is a common dish served at breakfast time. Aubergines, cauliflowers, spinach and potatoes are commonly used as vegetables as well as a small bitter gourd type vegetable which looks a bit like a wrinkled up cucumber.

Fruit

On our first day in Dhaka we saw prepared pineapple for sale. Coming from SE Asia where chopped fruit is commonly sold on the street we thought it would be a refreshing snack – we weren’t expecting it be shaken in a mustard dressing before being given to us – it was so potent that I thought it might have left a hole in my tongue! Otherwise fruit was widely available with bananas, oranges, and pomegranates all providing us with much needed vitamins. It’s just a shame that the mangos weren’t in season.

Mustard-spiked pineapple

Meat

Meat was either mutton (goat more often than sheep), chicken or occassionally beef. We didn’t seen any pork – it’s forbidden to Muslims. These are served in one of two ways, either with a curried masala sauce (of which there are different varieties but often only one at a time available in a given restaurant) or marinated and grilled as kebabs.

Meat dishes (clockwise from top left): amazing fried mutton kidney that we had on our first night in Dhaka, chicken masala, mutton kebabs, tandoori chicken leg

Fish

Bangladesh sits astride the deltas of several enormous rivers. With that much water in the country it’s hardly surprising that fish is a staple. We saw stalls selling dried fish, but fresh seemed to be most common. It was usually served in a masala sauce but we also had it fried and grilled.

A proud fishmonger in Srimongol, fried fish as part of a buffet meal, fish curry

Street snacks

There are lots of different kinds of street snacks, usually a parcel wrapped up in dough and deep fried. Samosas and pakoras you might have heard of, but puri (saucer sized rounds with various fillings) and shingra (balls filled with a potato mixture) were new to us. A favourite of ours were mouglai, large sheets of dough wrapped around an often egg based filling to form a kind of flat envelope shape. Freshly cooked with the ubiquitous cucumber side salad they were a fast and filling light meal.

Clockwise from left: Frying up mouglai on a street in Khulna, masala puris with sauce and salad, shingra and samosa, delicious lentil and onion pakoras for an afternoon snack on the Sundarbans cruise

Drinks

Tea (cha) is the drink of choice in Bangladesh. It’s served in small glasses from street stands everywhere. It comes in two varieties, one with milk (dudh cha) and one without (lal cha, literally red tea), both are very sweet. Milk tea is sometimes made with condensed milk, but is better when made with fresh milk kept at boiling point in a big pan next to the tea kettle. Black/red tea is sometimes pepped up a little with the addition of whole spices, we had at various times, a piece of root ginger, a clove, and a piece of Indian bay leaf. The tea is poured from the kettle over fresh tea leaves in a strainer and into the glass.

Andrew enjoying a cup of dudh cha, tea stand with a pan of boiling milk and a kettle of tea, black/red tea with added Indian bay leaf

Alcohol is not widely available in Bangladesh as it is illegal for Bangladeshis (or Muslim ones at least) to buy it. Many soft drinks are available in restaurants from the familiar Coke, Sprite and 7Up to less familiar local brands. A more traditional local drink is lassi, made from yoghurt and served in sweet or salty versions. It’s a good way to cool your mouth down if your meal was a bit on the spicy side.

Lassi, Bengali for ‘Coca Cola’, Drinking from a coconut

Sweets

Bangladeshis definitely have a sweet tooth and traditional sweet shops are common in every town. These sell lots of very sweet small cakes as well as sweetened yoghurt (misti doi) in clay pots – a favourite of ours! We also tried jalebi, deep fried dough swirls soaked in sugar syrup, for the sake of your teeth it’s probably best to only have one, but they’re very good.

A wide array of sweets in a Dhaka sweetshop

All tried in the interests of research – honest! Including jalebi (top left) and misti doi (bottom right)

Not really a sweet, but the bill often arrived with a plate of fried fennel and/or coriander seeds to aid digestion and freshen the breath

Thai food and cooking for ourselves

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Thailand is famous all over the world for its delicious cuisine. We’ve been fortunate to spend three months in the country which has given us time to explore the different elements of it and even try cooking it for ourselves.

Noodles

Rice noodles are a big part of Thai cuisine, often being eaten for breakfast or lunch. The stalls and restaurants selling them usually have quite a small menu meaning that they are served up very quickly after you order – real fast food. They come in two basic forms; in a soup, of which there are many varieties, or stir-fried, the most common form of which is Pad Thai.

The basic noodle soup is similar to noodle soups we’ve had across SE Asia, a clear broth with rice noodles, meat, maybe some greens, and a choice of seasonings. Flavourings such as chilli flakes, garlic and chillies in vinegar, peanuts, sugar, and fish sauce are provided separately so that you can spice the dish to your own taste – a definite plus point if, like us, your chilli tolerance is nowhere near to Thai levels. We’ve also had more complex variants of the noodle soup including a particularly memorable one with crispy pork wontons.

Thai noodle soup of many different kinds

Khao Soi is a local specialty of Chiang Mai, a curry flavoured soup with fresh noodles and meat, topped with crispy noodles. It’s typically served with pickled vegetables.

Pad Thai noodles are coated with a tamarind based sauce and then stir-fried with small pieces of firm tofu, fresh egg, dried prawns and beansprouts, occasionally with the addition of chicken or fresh prawns. They are served with fresh beansprouts, a wedge of lime and a slice of banana flower.

Pad Thai, on the grill, and on the plate

Rice

If you’re not eating noodles in Thailand then chances are your meal will be served with rice. Steamed white rice is the most common. Order it as a side in a restaurant and it will cost you about £0.30. Fried rice is another easy fast food that we love, it’s available practically everywhere and is a safe option if you’re not feeling too adventurous.

Sticky rice is a different variety, more common in northern than southern Thailand. It is usually found in parcels – either barbecued in a banana leaf or in a bamboo stem.

A meal served with steamed rice, chicken fried rice for breakfast, opening a parcel of white and purple sticky rice

Curries

Spices are really important in Thai foods and there’s an emphasis on fresh spices and herbs rather than dried roots or seeds. This results in food which tastes fresh and bright. Common flavourings are lemongrass, galangal, turmeric root, kaffir lime leaves, coconut milk and herbs such as Thai basil, as well as lots of fresh chillies. Seasoning and depth of flavour comes from fish sauce and soy sauce.

The different spices are combined together in curry pastes which you can buy by the scoopful from the market (on a kind of pot luck basis as the vendors don’t usually speak English) or in sachets in the supermarket with enough for one meal. If you want to make your own curry paste then of course it’s possible to buy the whole spices and we’ve often seen them sold as little bundles with a bit of everything.

Curry pastes for sale in the market

We’ve tried various different types of curry and have found the green curry to be the most fearsome in terms of heat. The curries are often quite soupy with lots of coconut milk sauce, or sometimes with a clear spicy soup like Tom Yum. They are usually made with meat but are just as delicious made with tofu or vegetables as we found at Pun Pun vegetarian restaurant.

Meat

On one of our first forays to the market we were surprised to see big coils of sausage being cooked and sold. When we were offered a piece to try we were pleased to find that it was not a heavily processed pureed paste sausage but a proper meaty sausage, the Thai twist being the addition of lemongrass, chilli and other spices, this is another Chiang Mai specialty and is called Sai Aua. Another product that is usually sold alongside the sausage is Kaeb Mu which is fried pork rind, aka pork scratchings.

One of our favourite sausage vendors, she always plied us with free samples!

Chicken, pork and beef are all fairly common as are meat or fish balls, made from pureed meat with no discernible meaty texture – they always make me worry slightly about what might be in them. Even more worryingly, they’re sometimes shaped and coloured to look like Angry Birds characters – our cookery class teacher told us this was to make them more appealing to children… It’s rare to be offered a knife to eat with so meat is always in bite-size pieces and if you order roast belly pork (Andrew’s favourite) or roast duck it will be chopped before being served.

We haven’t eaten a lot of fish but we’ve seen quite a few whole barbecued fish for sale and prawns are usually available as an option when ordering curry.

Clockwise from top left: Butcher in Tonlamyai market, slices of roast duck with rice, beef Panaeng curry, pork with garlic and black pepper

Fruit, vegetables and salads

The hills around Chiang Mai are cool enough to grow temperate fruits so strawberries and apples are just as common in the markets here as local tropical fruits – oranges, papayas, bananas and the dreaded durian. The first hotel that we stayed at in Bangkok actually had a sign on the door forbidding guests from bringing durian into their rooms – it is that stinky! Limes are used for everything from savoury sauces to refreshing sodas.

Forbidden fruit – no durian in Bangkok’s metro, fruit peeled and ready to eat from a street cart, choice of fruit for making fruit shakes

Spicy sour salads made from shredded green papaya or green mango are found everywhere. They’re called som tam and are a delicious fresh way to wake up your tastebuds but frequently spicy enough to make me cry… Vegetarians should beware of these as they usually contain dried prawns as well as the ubiquitous fish sauce.

Vegetables are often served stir-fried with soy or oyster sauce. These can be a mixture of carrots, cauliflower, baby corn and broccoli, or quantities of greens, there’s a type of spinach called morning glory and a type of kale which is very similar to choi sum. There are many kinds of aubergine (eggplant) available in Thailand not just the big purple ones that we’re used to. Everything from tiny ones that look like peas to stripy ones the size of eggs to big green and purple ones.

Vegetables (clockwise from top left): Papaya salad, morning glory with garlic, aubergines in the market, stir-fried vegetables with oyster sauce

Sweet stuff

The most common dessert that we’ve seen in Thailand is mango sticky rice, which as the name suggests is sticky rice with fresh sliced mango and a generous drizzle of coconut milk. There are also lots of street carts selling rotees which are somewhere between a flatbread and a pancake. They’re made from dough stretched incredibly thin and then fried and folded around the filling of your choice – we like banana drizzled with chocolate sauce.

Mango sticky rice, coconut pie, night-time rotee van, banana chocolate rotee

Cakes tend to be very light and well aerated, milk cake is damp and almost dripping with milk while coconut pie is a bit like lemon meringue pie but made with pieces of coconut flesh in the curd.

Coconut cake and green tea cake (it was late in the day and there was no other choice…) at a cafe in Chiang Saen

Street food snacks

There are always lots of stalls selling snack foods when you visit a night market. Mini omelettes, barbecued meat on wooden skewers, and takoyaki, a puffed ball of dough containing octopus, crab stick or other fillings, are all common.

Cooking for ourselves

Having our own kitchen for two months in Chiang Mai has been great for me. I’ve really missed cooking while we’ve been in Asia and it’s always more fun to visit markets when you can buy ingredients to take home rather than just looking and taking photos.

The kitchen in our apartment was small, just two hobs and a microwave with no oven and not many utensils so I’ve been slightly limited by what I can make. Pasta is always a good fall back but fried rice has become a favourite in the rotation and we’ve taken advantage of the curry paste sachets to make various curries as well as pad thai noodles. Buying whole pumpkins a couple of times required creativity to use up, soup and fritters were favourites.

Homemade food (clockwise from top left): fried rice, yellow curry and rice, pumpkin fritters, penne carbonara

Not having an oven really stunted my abilities to make cakes and desserts although we’ve had a few batches of drop scones and also ‘Cake in a Mug’ which is a bit like steamed chocolate sponge but made in a microwave, as well as relying on bought Magnums and Lindt chocolate to satisfy our sweet cravings.

‘Cake in a Mug’

Drinks

Coffee is common and frequently high quality coming from the local area. As well as the espresso type coffees that we’re used to, it is also often iced, served with condensed and evaporated milk, cooling on a hot day but not as sweet as the ones we tried in Vietnam or Cambodia. Tea is also served iced and milky sweet. Street stalls everywhere serve up fresh fruit shakes which are a great cooler.

High import taxes mean that wine and foreign beers can be prohibitively expensive. We did treat ourselves to London Porter at our favourite pub once a week or so but for the most part we stuck to our favourite local brew, Chang (that’s Thai for elephant you know) or made ourselves a cocktail with local rum mixed with iced ginger tea, lime juice and brown sugar.

Watermelon shake, iced coffees, Chang at a street bar in Bangkok

A Lot of Thai food, taking a cookery class in Chiang Mai

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We really enjoyed doing a Street Food tour in Vietnam, so when we found out how many cookery schools there are in Chiang Mai it seemed natural to take a class to find out how to make some authentic Thai food. After a bit of research we picked the ‘A Lot of Thai’ cookery school and booked in for their Friday course.

‘A Lot of Thai’ is run by husband and wife team Yui and Kwan. Yui doesn’t have formal culinary training but she is passionate about Thai food (actually I suspect she’s pretty enthusiastic about all kinds of food!) and has been teaching people to cook for over ten years. There are photos of her more famous students around the classroom, including Gordon Ramsey. Her husband Kwan is a graphic designer and also handles the bookings and transport. The classroom is at the side of their house under a lean-to roof.

Classroom before we started cooking. We were collected and brought to the class in their classic VW camper van.

Stir-fried rice with Thai herbs

We made six dishes during the day, first up was what Yui considers to be her signature dish, fried rice with Thai herbs. Each lesson worked in a similar way, Yui would explain to the ten students a little about the dish and show us how to prepare the ingredients, we would return to our stations to do our preparation and then she would demonstrate the cooking before we went off to finish the dish. At the end we all sat together to eat our creation.

Fried rice preparation: our ingredients plate as we received it, chopped garlic and oil in the wok, finely slicing lemongrass, ingredients plate ready for cooking

Julie stir-frying

Andrew carefully aligns his basil leaf garnish, the finished product – yum!

Papaya salad

Papaya salad is unlike anything I’ve come across in other cuisines. It’s fresh and crisp but with a fiery hot, salty and sour dressing. Traditionally made with unripe papaya, there’s also a version made with green mango, and Yui gave us substitutions that we could find at home – either green pears or Granny Smith apples!

Yui showed us the traditional way of shredding the papaya which involved a lot of fast work with the cleaver. We prepared it the modern way with a kind of wavy vegetable peeler, I don’t suppose people going home with missing fingers would be very good for the school’s Tripadvisor ratings…

The method is incredibly simple, the ingredients are pounded together in about three stages in a big pestle and mortar before being served

Delicious but I might have to reduce the amount of chilli I use next time (or work on upping my tolerance!)

Panaeng Curry

Thai curries are famous all over the world. I was a little disappointed that we weren’t taught how to make the curry paste although there are recipes for the various kinds in our souvenir cookbook.

Panaeng curry: prepared ingredients, reducing the coconut cream in the wok, stir-frying the chicken, finished curry

Andrew ready to tuck into his curry and rice

Visit to the market

By this stage we were getting quite full and were relieved to hear Yui announce that we were taking a break to visit the local market, Nong Hoy. We always love looking around local markets wherever we’re staying and to do so with a local guide is even better.

Nong Hoy market, Chiang Mai

Produce in the market (clockwise from top left): fresh vegetables, marigold garlands, an unusual looking Thai herb, bottles of sauces

Yui explaining the many different varieties of aubergine used in Thai cooking

Stir-fried vegetables with glass noodles

We were encouraged to try Yui’s method of breaking an egg with one hand, we both managed it but I think it’ll take a bit more practice to feel natural!

Yui demonstrating the stir-frying

For each dish the sauce ingredients were set out with little labels for us to mix our own

Adding the egg to the wok

Stuffed cucumber soup

We were intrigued when we saw this on the menu and not quite sure what to expect. It turns out that cooked cucumber is actually pretty good! Everyone prepared and stuffed their own cucumbers, but as they were all cooked together we had to carve a distinguishing mark into the side of each piece.

Julie’s hollowed out cucumbers marked with a ‘J’, stuffing them with the seasoned pork mince, Andrew got a bit patriotic when marking his cucumbers, cooking the soup

Anyone who’s eaten in a Thai restaurant will know that dishes are often garnished with carved vegetables. We got to try our hand at making very simple carrot flowers to be cooked in the soup along with the stuffed cucumbers

Fried bananas

Naturally the final lesson of the day was dessert!

Fried bananas (clockwise from top left): batter ingredients, Yui deep frying them, sadly this wasn’t an individual portion…

We were taken back to our apartment full, happy and keen to try out some of the recipes at home.

Street Eats and Market Tour, Hanoi

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We read quite a few travel blogs and have noticed recently that other travellers take food tours to get to know the cuisine of a new place – for example here and here. This sounded like a great idea to us and so before we arrived in Vietnam we did some research and found that the Hanoi Cooking Centre runs a half day Street Eats and Market Tour which sounded like just what we were after.

We were told to arrive at 9am with an appetite when we would meet our guide and the rest of the group. Our guide, Huế, is head chef at the Cooking Centre and was knowledgeable and enthusiastic about Vietnamese food. The rest of our group consisted of an Australian mother with her teenage son and a German/Canadian couple who live in China and their two young children (aged about 2 and 4).

Phờ and Green Tea

First stop was just across the road for the classic Vietnamese dish of noodle soup, phờ. Andrew went for the beef and I decided on chicken. Huế told us that the beef stock was prepared by first soaking the beef in cold water for 2 hours and then cooking it really slowly, usually overnight, to extract the full flavour from the meat and bones. The chicken stock doesn’t take quite as long but neither is allowed to boil to ensure the soup is translucent.

With the phờ we had green tea prepared from fresh leaves.

Phờ (clockwise from top left): preparation area, squeezing lime into the chicken phờ, not much leftover, beef phờ topped with garlic and chillis

Market

To give us a bit of a breather before the next course, Huế took us to the local market to see the different foods on offer. Similarly to the markets that we saw in China and Hong Kong, everything was very fresh with live fish and lots of crisp greens.

Shopping from the back of your scooter is common practice in Hanoi, Huế showing us a banana flower which is made into a tasty Vietnamese salad, This butcher worked cross-legged from her block!

Rice Pancake Rolls and Essence of Water Bug

After a brief taxi ride to Hanoi’s Old Quarter we arrived at a traditional rice pancake roll restaurant. The pancakes are made from rice flour, are as thin as French crêpes and are cooked with steam rather than the frying that we’re used to. We tried two types filled with chicken and pork, both were sprinkled with dried fried shallots and were very tasty. Huế left us to munch through the pancakes before reappearing with a saucer and what looked a dead cockroach, oh dear it looked like we were going to be thrown into the deep end of Asian cuisine… He explained that it was a kind of water bug and asked who wanted to try it. None of us looked keen, but peer pressure might have pushed us into it if he hadn’t offered an alternative – the bug is squeezed into a sort of essence which we could add to our dipping sauce to try. It tasted surprisingly like a strong almond essence, I’m not sure that it necessarily enhanced the pancakes, but it wasn’t unpleasant either.

The rice pancake chef was rather glamorous

Hovering tentatively over the dipping sauce with added insect…

Green Rice with Banana

I missed Huế’s explanation of the green rice which we bought from a street vendor, but according to vietworldkitchen.com

It is freshly harvested sticky (glutinous/sweet) rice that’s been toasted to bring out its delicate flavor

I did however hear that it’s seasonal and so we were only able to try it as it is autumn.

Green rice with banana, we found the flavour reminiscent of dried fruit

West Lake Prawn Cakes

A definite highlight of the day, these prawn cakes are made from a sweet potato batter and whole prawns. Originally the prawns came from West Lake in Hanoi city hence the name, but the waters are no longer as clean as they were and the shellfish is now sourced elsewhere. They are fried in three pans of oil of varying temperatures to ensure their crispness and non greasy texture. The dipping sauce was made from fish sauce, lime juice, green papaya, carrot and …. Huế told us that Vietnamese eat the prawns with heads, shells and all (it’s good calcium for their dairy-light diets) so we tried them that way and found that it just added extra crunch!

We expressed our liking for these early on and, as everyone else was slowing down as they filled up, Huế force fed us the last of them (arms twisted behind our backs obviously…) by dropping them into our dip bowls. I know, it’s a hard life…

Us enjoying the prawn cakes

Bún Chả

The next street restaurant on the itinerary sold bún chả. Bún refers to the noodles, long, thin rice vermicelli, and chả is the barbecued meat served with it. The noodles come cold (and handily pre-chopped with scissors) and the meat is slices of pork belly and little patties of pork meat served in the ever present dipping sauce. The stand we ate at cooked the meat on bamboo skewers giving it a lovely smoky flavour.

Bún Chả (clockwise from top left): menu, barbecued meat, noodles and meat served separately, tucking in

Ché

After all that it was time to see whether we had room for pudding. Ché is a traditional Vietnamese dessert made from a mixture of beans, jelly, tapioca, corn and fruit topped with coconut milk or condensed milk. The stalls are a bright display of the different ingredients and despite the unlikely sounding combination we found the ché to be tasty and sweet enough to give us a sugar rush!

Colourful Ché stand

Andrew’s ché

Bia Hoi

We had understood that the tour would end with dessert so when Huế called a taxi after we’d finished our ché our stomachs groaned. Fortunately we were now entering the liquid part of the tour and as everyone knows there’s always room for beer! The taxi took us to a traditional Bia Hoi bar, common throughout the city and usually with small plastic tables and tiny stools occupying the pavement outside. The beer is ‘fresh’ and served straight from the keg into glasses which are roughly half a pint. It’s only about 3% alcohol so it’s light and easy to drink on a hot day.

I thought that my photo wasn’t straight until I realised that the glass leaned to one side! Typically the glasses used in Bia Hoi bars are made from this slightly green, bubbly glass

Vietnamese Coffee

The last stop on our route was a traditional coffee house. Vietnamese coffee is strong and usually served with condensed milk which means that it’s also sweet. The stuff served by our guesthouse for breakfast is not really to my taste but the blend at 80 year old Cà Phê Duy Trí was much smoother and the condensed milk had been frothed to create something akin to the latte art that is often seen in fancy coffee shops at home.