Jaow - Smoky dip (this one is aubergine, Champassak style)

Jaow is eaten all the time in Laos. It can be tomato, mushroom, peanut, pork crackling, onion, chilli, aubergine, etc. This one is aubergine, but with mint stirred through the finished product.

 

 

 

 

For the aubergine dip, thread some garlic and chillies on to a skewer and put on the barbecue together with several aubergine. Once the skin is blackened and burnt, remove it to reveal the tender vegetable underneath.
Put the deskinned garlic and chillies into a pestle and mortar with some salt and pound it. Add the aubergine flesh, some MSG if you want and some baa dek (fermented fish) or nam pla or Vietnamese soy sauce or soy sauce for a vegetarian non fishy tasting option and, for the southern version, throw in a generous handful of mint leaves. Pound once more and serve with sticky rice which you roll into balls and dunk.

Mango with black, purple and white sticky rice

Sticky rice is as Lao as it gets. It’s part of the ritual of life here and no day is complete without it. Before bed, or early in the morning it is washed and soaked. An hour or two is necessary, overnight is better, and then the rice is steamed in a bamboo basket over boiling water and the house fills with the fragrance. When it’s ready, it’s piled into a bamboo rice basket and served with the rest of the meal.
For special occasions, and particularly for desserts, black sticky rice can also be prepared. Uncooked, this whole grain looks similar to wild rice, and is nuttier and chewier than it’s white counterpart. It’s healthier too. One cup can provide up to 10% of the recommended daily fibre for an adult. It can be prepared on its own, in much the same way as the white sticky rice, but with a slightly longer cooking time (taste a grain or two after thirty minutes to see if it’s ready, but it’ll probably take around forty minutes until it’s done), or with the regular sticky rice - generally two cups of white rice to one cup of black rice will give you a sticky nutty rice. Don’t be fooled by the name. Once cooked, you can see that it is actually deep burgundy, making it an attractive accompaniment to the rest of the meal.
One of the most wonderful desserts found here is Mango with Sticky rice. When mangos are in season, their rich sweetness works perfectly with sticky rice cooked with coconut milk.
 

To make this dish, soak some sticky rice for an hour if you are in a hurry, but overnight if you can wait. Around 500 grams should be plenty for a family. Once soaked, steam it, preferably in a bamboo steamer, but if you don’t have one, in a metal steamer (lined with cheesecloth if the holes are big enough for the rice to fall through). It takes around for around twenty – twenty five minutes. When it’s ready, take it off the heat and prod the rice with chopsticks to release any trapped steam. Set this to one side.
Heat 250ml coconut milk in a pan. When it’s boiling, add 100 grams of sugar and stir until it’s dissolved. Next add half a teaspoon of salt and stir some more. Take out a spoonful of this liquid and put to one side for later. Add the sticky rice to the pan and keep stirring gently until it takes on a glossy gooiness. Cut a ripe mango into strips and arrange these around (or on) the sticky rice. Pour over the coconut milk that you put to one side earlier and sprinkle with black sesame seeds. The heat of the rice forms a lovely contrast with the cool mango, but it’s just as good eaten with cold rice. Don’t leave it too long before eating though. The rice definitely tastes best soon after cooking. Anyway, who can resist it?
If you don’t have black sesame seeds, toasted almond slices are wonderful too.
Try it with other fruit. Durian works particularly well with the coconut sticky rice but isn’t for the faint hearted (or sensitive nosed)! Bananas, plums and peaches can be good too.
For a delicious comfort food, add a little more coconut milk to the rice and create a porridge. This is particularly good if you stir in chunks of mango just before serving and it’s wonderfully warming during the cold season.
Sticky rice is true to its name. Now proven to have been used by the Chinese for building many ancient walls, including the city wall of Xi’an, it is also believed to have been used on the Great Wall of China, over 2,000 years ago. It is believed that the strength it provided is one of the reasons the Great Wall is still standing today.
If two colours of rice aren’t enough, how about three? For purple sticky rice, steam the white and the black rice as normal. Once ready, take equal measures of the two grains and mix them together in the coconut milk. As they cook, and mingle, the rice will turn purple.

Laap

One of the joys of living in Vientiane is the food. From the Lao food, low in fat and crammed with herbs, chillies, garlic and fish flavours, to the amazing food we’ve acquired from our Asian neighbours, and to the nod back to colonial times, both in terms of the bread which is available around the country and the plethora of amazing restaurants, we are truly spoilt for choice.
With an abundance of affordable fresh fruit and vegetables, and more and more shops selling products previously hard to find here, it is becoming easier to cook these dishes for ourselves, and with some basic knowledge, we can recreate Lao dishes around the world and cook our favourite western dishes here.

Of course the national dish of Laos is laap, a spicy chopped meat and mint dish, without which no Lao repertoire is complete. It is traditionally made with chicken, pork or fish, but one of the joys of cooking it for ourselves is to try alternatives. Tofu and mushrooms both work well for a vegetarian version. Nam pha (Thai fish sauce) is a traditional substitute for baa dek, the fermented fish ubiquitous to Lao cooking, but if this doesn’t work for you, substitute soy sauce which will give you the same saltiness without the fishiness. Add the chillies slowly, tasting as you go to get the perfect balance of spiciness for your palate. Most Lao folks will enjoy it served with far more spice than the average westerner. Of course, if you are making this in the west, it may be difficult to put your hands on a banana flower. In this case, a savoy cabbage will work fine. Laap does normally contain mono-sodium glutamate but you may skip it, if you prefer.
We made chicken laap, (laap gai) the traditional Lao way.
For this, you’ll need:
a whole chicken,
a couple of cloves of garlic,
a teaspoon of mono sodium glutamate,
some fermented fish (baa dek),
a generous handful of mint leaves, separated from the stems,
ten chillies and a spoonful of dried red chilli powder,
a small handful of coriander, attached to the stems, and chopped
a banana flower, sliced finely
ten spring onions,5 finely chopped, 5 left uncut
two large limes
a cucumber,
some baby aubergines (eggplants)

Cut open the chicken and slice the kidneys, heart and liver into strips, around 5mm wide. Remove the skin from the chicken and cut this into similar strips. Fry this. You won’t need oil as the chicken fat will provide plenty. Add the garlic and a teaspoon of MSG. Cook for around five minutes until the chicken is cooked and the garlic is soft, then take off the heat.
Put about a litre of drinking water in a bowl and add a dozen mint leaves, the juice of half a lemon (and the squeezed fruit), and the banana flower (preferably the yellow one as this has a delicious nutty flavour whilst the red one is more bitter). Leave this to soak while you prepare the rest of the laap.
Next, put a cup of baa dek (fermented fish) into a saucepan and bring to the boil. Boil for around 3 – 5 minutes to increase the flavour. (If you are using a substitute, you can miss out this step).
Squeeze the banana flower mix, chop and add to the meat, together with the juice of one more lemon
Add a heaped tablespoon of dry fried rice powder to the mix.
You can buy the rice powder at the market, but if you wish to make it, fry a handful of uncooked rice in an otherwise empty pan and stir it while it browns, taking care not to let it burn. Remove from the heat and leave to cool. Remove any burnt bits and pound to a powder with a pestle and mortar.
Strain and add a couple of spoons of the cooked baa dek, the chilli powder, five chopped up birds eye chillis, a handful of unchopped mint, the spring onions and the coriander. Stir this and serve with raw baby aubergine, peeled and sliced cucumber, the rest of the spring onions, the chilli peppers and, of course, some sticky rice.