Part two of Lao Food what’s that? by Xaixana Champanakone at Khop Chai Deu Restaurant. This article was featured in Lao Airlines Inflight Magazine – Champa Holiday.

Lao Food what’s that?

by Xaixana Champanakone
at Khop Chai Deu Restaurant

Finger Food – a typical fun way to enjoy food at leisure

Pan Mieng – Pan means to form a
cup made of a salad or cabbage leaf
with your fingers. while mieng is the
name for the way this assortment is
presented and subsequently eaten.

Family members, friends and guests
joining in the meal wrap pieces of
grilled fish, sausage or any meaty
bits on hand in a leaf or a in thin rice
paper sheet soaked in water.

To this pan add pickings from the
keuang kiang – mint, spring onion,
peanuts, chilli, garlic, shallots, star fruit,
ginger, lemon grass, white rice noodles
- crispy pork skin for fish – round
eggplants and whatever waiting to be
smothered by a sauce (jeow).

Proceed to pop this little package
into your mouth – one bite different
from the next. This languorously
extends the mealtime to allow for
talk and gossip to pass the time
of the day in a most leisurely and
convivial atmosphere.

The typical jeow is a dip made
of pineapple, chillies and garlic,
tamarind paste and fermented fish,
sugar and salt.

Pan Mieng ‘Pa’ (fish) is the
most common version given the
number of rivers in Laos which, as
the providers of fish, are the principal
source of protein for people’s daily
diet; it’s available in abundance and
inexpensive – go fishing.

The most popular fish nowadays is Pa Nin (an import, admittedly – tilapia – thanks to one Cleopatra) ever so easyly raised in floating water farms up and down the Maekong. The meat is firm with a pronounced flavour and a bone structure that accommodates amateurs.

Push an honest stalk of lemon grass down its throat, coat it with a generous layer of coarse salt and … well, grill it … slowly and gently.

Yoh Khao, that’s ‘wrapped rice’ according to the country of origin, Vietnam, or ‘spring rolls’ to you and me, like in spring – like in fresh. Basically it is any kind of mixed salad minus dressing rolled up in soft rice paper and eaten as finger food. It is served with some out of this world sweet & sour peanut or fruit & honey sauces. For choice you may want to add glass noodles, sliced omelette, minced pork or smoked salmon.

The greasy fried kind has no place in Lao cooking though tourists love them, in flagrant contradiction to their name!

See you for the next issue

Lao Cooking & The Essence of Life – the book by Xaixana Champanakone is available at Monument Books in Vientiane, Luang Prabang and Pakse or online at tropicaldesignfz.net/book.

Khop Chai Deu, located next to the Fountain in the center of Vientiane, serves all these exotica in a very cosmopolitan way; here you only have to be adventurous enough to use your fingers and Go For It.

Copyright © Vincent Fischer-Zernin 2010.