Southeast Asia's best street food

Updated: 2015-01-08 15:26

By Natalie Paris(China Daily USA)

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The region is known for its astonishing array of cheap and delicious dishes. Here, writers and food bloggers pick their some of their favourites.

Southeast Asia's best street food

A vendor arranges a display of fresh traditional snacks for sale at a market in Jakarta. ROMEO GACAD / AFP

Thailand

My favourite street food is a typical Thai rice and curry at the Jatuchak weekend market in Bangkok. I can recommend a stall called Prik Yuak, which is relatively smart compared with other places in the market. Its best dish is the rice vermicelli with fish ball green curry, which is well prepared and always tasty.

Another dish that is particularly good here is white or brown rice with spicy stir-fried crabmeat and fresh yellow chillies. It’s an old-time classic. The sweet crabmeat is paired with yellow chillies (not other colours, for the yellow gives a particular aroma) and garlic. And that’s it.

-Sirin Wongpanit, food blogger at ohhappybear.com

Som tam, a salad of grated green papaya and dried shrimp, is deliciously fresh and crunchy and served spicy. Palm sugar adds sweetness, while fish sauce comprises the sour element. It may seem strange to order salad at a street stall but this is addictive.

Hot and sour, tom yum is another signature Thai dish that can be whipped up in a second by street vendors. Lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves and galangal are essential ingredients. The soup is rumoured to even cure colds.

-Natalie Paris

Vietnam

Originating in China, pho tiu is a noodle dish that captures the essence of Vietnamese cuisine – salty, sweet, sour and spicy.

Contrasting textures are provided by silky fresh rice noodles, tender lean shoulder of pork, the crunch of peanuts and crispy shallots. It’s aesthetically pleasing, too, when delivered to the table with the freshest tangle of noodles on top.

-Mark Lowerson, guide at Street Eats Hanoi (streetfoodtourshanoi.blogspot.com)

Pho is the most famous Vietnamese street food. You can find steaming bowls of it in the city and the countryside, but it is more popular in the north.

The dish is made using fresh flat rice noodles, with a good broth made from oxtail bones or marrow bones. It needs to be clear, not muddy and dark, and fragrant with beef, anise and ginger. You can serve this soup with several toppings of beef, chicken and pork, adding spring onion, beansprouts, basil and a piece of lemon.

Hu tieu soup is so popular that local people have it for breakfast, lunch, dinner or even a late night meal. It is made of round yellow or skinny white rice noodles. Similar to pho, it can be made with beef, prawn, chicken or pork.

-Huong Tran, guide for Urban Adventures’ Saigon Street Food by Night tour

Laos

Khao tom is an addictive steamed dessert sold on the streets and made with a mixture of sticky rice, black bean and fresh coconut cream which is then steamed in 4in-long banana leaf parcels. It can also be made with ground rice powder, and other ingredients can be substituted in the mix, such as peanuts.

Kaipen is a Luang Prabang dish made from Mekong River weed that is dried and flattened and may be topped with vegetables, then sprinkled with sesame seeds, and then fried. It’s as thin as rice paper and as crunchy as a light crisp. It’s eaten as a snack on all occasions - from beers on the river with friends - or at weddings. It’s cheap and very moreish.

Claire Boobbyer, author of Footprint Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos

Malaysia

Penang is justifiably proud of assam laksa, the delicious fish noodle soup that may or may not originate there (variations can be found all along the coasts of northern Malaysia) but has since poured, in a mouth-puckering, spicy-sour tide, across the peninsula.

The sourness comes from tamarind or, sometimes, sour mangosteen; the wonderful marriage of textures from the soft noodles, the hot liquid thickened with flaked, usually poached fish and the fresh garnish – mint, cucumber, occasionally pineapple – sprinkled on top to round it off.

-Nina Caplan, food and drink journalist

Cambodia

On som ang – grilled roasted bananas – are my favourite street food in Cambodia. Sweet bananas are encased in sticky rice that has been cooked with coconut milk and palm sugar, then the whole package is roasted inside a banana leaf on a mobile, open-air grill. The rice caramelises and forms a hard crust while the banana melts inside.

-Rebecca Luria-Phillips, food writer at realfoodcambodia.com

And some others you may think twice about trying

Cambodia: An arachnophobe's worst nightmare comes fried and crunchy in Cambodia. In Phnom Penh markets and in the town of Skuon, traders deep fry spiders for locals and adventurous tourists alike. The abdomen is only for the truly brave and is said to taste like "licking damp cobwebs."

Philippines: Balut is definitely not for the queasy of stomach, these are fertilized duck eggs, hard boiled. A delicacy in the Philippines, the shell is picked off and the embryo inside eaten.

Thailand: Durians may look innocuous but these fruit are known for their stench. Julia Child, the American television chef, famously described it as: "something like a cross between dead babies mixed with strawberries and Camembert." Yum.

Locusts, silkworms and grasshoppers are just some of the edible insects tourists love daring themselves to try elsewhere, with the biggest selection most readily available in the backpacker haven of Khao San Road. Reliably crunchy.

(urbanadventures.com)

(China Daily USA 01/08/2015 page10)

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