Stuff I Ate In Vietnam

My first trip to Vietnam I was really intent on trying foods that are unique or uncommon compared to common fare here in the US. On my fifth trip I really didn't do gastronomic exploration. Even so I had some opportunities this time that I didn't plan for.

This particular lunch Hương and I were meeting a friend of hers for some chit chat and to talk about introducing her to a friend of mine.

As I often do I asked Hương to make the order for me. My Vietnamese is very limited and I only recognize some dishes at this point. She'll generally ask if I like this meat or that, what sort of noodles I want, etc. and then make the selection.

In this case she asked if I wanted to try pigeon and of course I said sure. This is a portion of what was delivered to the table.

It really is quite tasty meat. I was surprised at the breast. I like dark meat best and am always eating the legs and thighs of chicken instead of breast. The breast was the meatiest part of the pigeon and really quite dark. It reminded me in many ways of a good chicken thigh. Tender and savory and dark. Not at all dry.

The thighs and legs were good too. Being a pigeon though there really wasn't that much too them.

For good measure, and not to miss an opportunity eating unusual food, I ate the head too! How do you eat the head?! Just put it in your mouth and bite. It's like a soft little ball. The skull gives no resistance and doesn't break into sharp bits of bone like you might think. The brain is about the consistency of chicken breast but doesn't have the fibers. I didn't notice the eyes separately at all. I didn't eat the beak but did get the tongue.

Certainly the way this was prepared I'd eat it again, head included.

One other thing before I forget we also got a serving of pig uterus. Sorry I didn't get a picture. I think most of it was eaten before I knew what it was. Suffice to say it was tasty also and for sure I'd have more prepared the same way.

Eating better than ever

I have to say I think here I'm eating better than ever, sorry mom. The meals are very simple but balanced. Breakfast is the only meal that doesn't routinely include all four of meat, vegetables, fruit and some starch.

mmm... breakfast - phở bò (beef soup)

Meals nearly always include rice in one form or another, plain, noodles, a cake or paste. Then fresh meat, as in never frozen or refrigerated, most often pork followed by fish, beef and chicken. Then any of a variety of dark green vegetables. The vegetables are often boiled or softened by simmering in a hot pan with vegetable oil and then served alone or they are combined with carrots and potato or tarot and some meat in a soup. Greens are also served uncooked on a plate to pick from. If the green has a large leaf then it may b,e used as a wrapper for the other items on the table.

lunch - spiciest meal I've had, curry in this one

After the main meal some fruits are cut up and served. Mango, guava, papaya are the mainstays. There's nhan, also called longan, and rambutan. Both are very sweet with soft juicy flesh no fiber and a large single or multi-segment pit in the middle. The skin is easily removed and the flesh separates easily from the pit when you pop it in your mouth. You end up with a nice tender morsel to eat and a seed to spit out, kind of like eating a cherry.

I like pretty much everything I've had every trip here. This is the first repeated exposure to home cooking and it's very good.

Sweet desserts or cakes are not served very often. And they aren't laying around on the shelves at home to pick up and snack on. The sweet desserts I've had are mostly some variety of che dau trang. Sweet, sticky (glutinous) rice, cooked with coconut milk and various kinds of beans. Several different individual sized servings are presented and you pick the one you want to eat. Of course I've been offered a taste of all the ones I didn't pick and they have all been very good.

Dinner itself is put on the table with each dish in an individual bowl or plate. Each diner gets a small bowl, maybe 3/4 of a cup, that's filled with white rice. Then you pick a bit of food from one of the common serving bowls, move it to your bowl of rice or just hover it over your bowl and then bring to your mouth. There is no portioning of servings to each diner. Basically each mouthful goes from common plate to your rice bowl to your mouth.

dinner - fish, beet leaves, cucumber, scallop spring rolls, soup

I've read that one way to reduce what you eat is to use small dinner plates. It seems to me the small bowl for rice and single mouthfuls carried over from serving dish to rice bowl to mouth have the same effect. At least I find I feel full and am not stuffing myself and believe I'm eating less than I would normally or at least fewer calories. We're not eating any processed foods.

Forest pig for dinner

A friend of my wife, Linh, and her husband, Ket, invited us to dinner. Linh helped keep Huong sane while preparing for the marriage party back in July. 

I got to know Linh a bit through emails we exchanged about preparing for the party. I also sent her a few pictures of Huong in the USA which Linh got included in the slide show played at the marriage party.

When I heard we would have a small forest pig for dinner I imagined a pig served on a platter at the table. 

We were seated and I missed a photo I really wish I'd gotten. At the far end of the table a small scale was placed on the floor. And then a sack was laid on the scale so Linh could read the weight. Up to this point I was only peripherally aware this was going on. Then the sack moved and caught my attention! Seems there was a live forest pig in the sack and it was about to become dinner! 

The sack and scale disappeared before I gathered my wits and thought to take a picture. My bad.

When the first serving of pig came to the table it was steamed meat served with lemon grass, ginger and a leafy green. So no pig on a platter to photograph. After the steamed meat came liver and sausage from the small intestine. That was followed with grilled meat and finally soup containing bone with meat on it.

I have to say, just like every other wild animal I've ever eaten, the pork was gamy and not a flavor I enjoy. On the other hand, and much to my surprise, the intestine and liver were very tasty. And the soup was good as well. For some reason the meat in the soup didn't have the same gamy flavor as the boiled or the grilled meat.

The drinks, so many to try

One of the enjoyable things being in Vietnam is the very tasty variety of drink options available. There just doesn't seem to be such a variety of choice in the USA. If there this variety it isn't in my area.

You'll see about a month's worth of samples in this collage. If I looked harder I could probably find additional options but they would be things that aren't commonly found in Ho Chi Minh City. I'm going north to Hanoi and Ha Long Bay this week and maybe I'll find some new items there. If I do I'll post an update.

Quite a few of the drinks, like the Aloe and the Bird's Nest, are viscous. And viscous or not many have little gelatin like bits suspended in them. That's an unusual drinking sensation compared to America. There viscous drinks are mostly limited to milk shakes, frappes and smoothies. Drinks with chunks, especially suspended chunks, are not to be found. The closest I can think of is bubble tea with the tapioca balls at the bottom of the glass.

With all the varieties I've tasted so far I can honestly say the only thing I wouldn't, haven't, gone back for more of is the Ginseng drink. Everything else I enjoyed a little or a lot. The Ginseng I didn't like a bit. Not gag me bad but definitely not choosing to drink any more.

...and an update. Nearly forgot these drink tablets! Artichoke flavored effervescent tablets. Drop them in cold water and enjoy your artichoke flavored drink in a few minutes. They appear to be made in Germany, either Munster or Frankfort. Can't read either language on the label, Vietnamese and German, well enough to say for sure. The store package is two tubes of tablets with 20 tablets per tube. I think I've had about 5 tablets so far. I like the taste so I'm sure I'll use all the tablets. Who'd a thought artichoke would be a good drink? Another thing from Vietnam that I'll miss.

More food - duck embryo anyone?

My former father-in-law ate fertilized duck eggs. I've forgotten what the believed value of eating the fertilized egg is. However the egg simply being fertilized didn't necessarily make the egg desirable. The more desirable egg had a well defined duck embryo inside!

I can remember seeing him relish eating eggs with a clearly identifiable duckling, head, eyes, bill, webbed feet etc. all clearly visible. The eggs are eaten hard boiled.

Well, I never ate one and neither did any of his other sons in law.

Yesterday Huong took me to a hot pot restaurant. Never seen anything like it before except in a video game my kids had. You order a hot pot with broth which goes into a recess in the counter at your seat. There's a conveyor just beyond that which goes past all the seats in the restaurant, like an airport baggage carousel. On the conveyor are dishes with various ingredients that you pick off and dump into your hot pot to make your own meal. This conveyor had the fertilized duck eggs on it.

I was at the restaurant with my Huong and her oldest daughter. She asked me if I wanted one of the duck eggs and said it is one of her girls' favorites. Before I could think about it there it was in my hot pot. So I ate it. As it turned out mine didn't have a really well formed embryo so there was no visual of a little duckie being eaten. There were lots of veins in the egg and plenty of downy feather filaments though.

Now that I've overcome my reluctance to eat a fertilized egg I may need to try again, and again, until I get an egg with duckling inside. Then I'll know what it's like to eat one of the really desirable eggs.

More Food

I like to try all kinds of food. George Carlin set me off on a quest for the "blue food" ages ago. Like him I still haven't found it but I've come across plenty of mighty tasty things in the search.

Last night I went to a food festival in Hochiminh with my fiancee and her daughters.

Huong broght back to our table some grilled meat on skewers. Turns out one was deer and the other crocodile.

I've had deer before in the US. It's usually a bit gamey and tough. This deer was much the same.

On the other hand the crocodile was tasty. I would definitely enjoy having more. "It tastes like chicken" is often used to describe unfamiliar meats. In the case of crocodile it actually does taste something like chicken. The meat has a texture like beef though. It makes for an enjoyable combination of flavor and texture. I'll be having me some more of that!

And now that I'm back in Vietnam I need to get back on track sampling the unusual meats I didn't get to sample last visit. So still to come cat, rat, snake, cricket (bugs are meat, aren't they?), horse and I'm probably forgetting some.

The food, oh the food!!

I've signed up for a one morning cooking class that will be Tuesday morning. Any westerners reading this will be sleeping, or watching football, Monday night while I'm learning and cooking Tuesday morning. 

Beside the uncommon meats I've already posted about I've eaten lots of other more conventional food here in Vietnam. I've been trying to decide how to write about the food without creating a single giant post. I haven't really figured out what this will be like over the next several food posts. For starters though here's my impression of the fresh fruits.

First, WOW, I can't imagine there being any better variety or flavor and texture choices. I wrote about durian that I tasted fresh for the first time ever on my first night here. Beside the durian there are other fruits with familiar and unfamiliar names. For the unfamiliar names I will get them and put them in the photo captions. 

There are fruits common to US supermarkets like watermelon, grapes, oranges, limes, pineapple, mango and grapefruit. I'm sure I'm forgetting some. For the most part the watermelon, grapes, oranges and limes haven't seemed different. The pineapple, mango and grapefruit are definitely more succulent.

Then there are the fruit that are not found or extremely uncommon in the US market. This includes a number of them that I've only heard and then forgotten the Vietnamese name. Tastes and textures run a gamut from soft to firm, no fiber to fibrous, moist to "turn off the faucet!" and small seeds to large pits.

dragon fruit

 Dragon fruit meat is soft and a bit grainy with no fibers and visible but not tasted or felt seeds and a very mildly sweet flavor. The skin looks nasty but can be cut easily and easily separates from the meat. There are red and white, đỏ & trắng, meat varieties. White is more common. Red is supposedly "better" and so is more expensive. I've had both and prefer the white. It's meat is a bit firmer and there is less juice. Apparently the premium for red is based on the color.

red & white (đỏ & trắng) dragon fruit

jack fruit

jack fruit

jack fruit

I mistook jackfruit for muskmelon/cantelope when I first saw it. The first pieces I had where much more orange than these pictures. Each little piece is a seed jacket inside the fruit. A single fruit can be larger than a person's head. It's got a tough bumpy exterior and hundreds of the seed wrappers inside. The most common way I've seen it sold is in packages that contain only the seed wrappers. It is succulent, sweet, moist and firm like a not quite ripe muskmelon. The meat isn't fibrous and is textured a bit like a gummy bear without the stickiness.

durian

Durian I've described before.

durian

on left mangosteen, on right rambutan 

mãng cầu, the sweet kind 

mãng cầu, the sweet kind

Other fruits I've tried have all been sweet to MUCH sweeter with larger seeds. I haven't gotten the names down yet so won't name them here but will come back and caption the pictures with names once I get them again and write them down. UPDATE: thanks to anonymous for the info about mangosteen, rambutan and mãng cầu.

I killed it...

...well not really. But it's my fault it is dead. I pointed to the turtle that I wanted for dinner. The restaurant staff took it from the aquarium and cooked it for me.With the lizard I just asked for a lizard. The restaurant staff then grabbed one and grilled it up. I didn't eat them all by myself. They were shared with Tam, the guy who brought me to the restaurant.


Was actually going out for rat tonight. The restaurant was selected by Tam because he knew it served rat. They didn't have any though :-(. Second time I've gone to a restaurant for rat and not been able to get it.

Split in half lizard. Yup that's both halves of the head at the bottom of the plate.

Unidentified turtle organs. I ate them!

I know what part of turtle this was and I ate it!

Anyway my friend Tam says next time we'll go to his friend's restaurant where horse is served. I'm sure it will look like an ordinary piece of meat on the plate not like a turtle or a lizard or a rat or a pigeon, yes I've eaten pigeon, or anything recognizeable.

A side note, I've seen very few pigeons in Ho Chi Minh.

I'm going to have the horse and will still try and get rat. Also going to see if I can find cat and dog.

I don't think they'll be any different than the turtle, lizard or pigeon. They won't taste special. I'm begining to think that would be true of anything beside domestic animals. Domestic animals have been raised for years to be eaten. So they have been being selected for taste for many years. I'm beginning to find it hard to believe an animal not raised for slaughter would taste better than one bred for it.