 |
| Edible decorations: At the Red Bridge Cooking School, visitors try their hand at making cucumber fans and tomato roses. Dorothy Aksamit |
A bridge to Vietnamese cuisine
One way for visitors to understand Vietnamese culture is to take a cooking class.
By Dorothy Aksamit | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the October 31, 2007 edition
Page 1 of 2
Hoi An, Vietnam - "Ladies and gentlemen, to your stations!" Those words, spoken with great flair by Chef Hai, made me smile and wonder if he was an aficionado of TV cooking shows.
Earlier that day, our class of 21 foreign visitors had gathered at Hai Scout Café in Hoi An, Vietnam, a riverside town about 18-1/2 miles south of Da Nang. We chatted and got acquainted as we sipped fresh juice, cappuccino, latte, or Vietnamese filtered coffee.
Several of us were American – one couple was bicycling through Vietnam – but the majority were Australian. Most were under 30, but the class also had attracted a few retired couples, which is representative of tourism in Vietnam.
First we would visit Hoi An's large central market. Then we would take a boat ride down the Hoi An River to the Red Bridge Restaurant, the site of the cooking school where we would be taking a half-day class.
Rain didn't dampen our spirits as we unfurled umbrellas and gingerly sidestepped puddles on our way to the market, which offered everything from fresh fish to kitchen equipment.
At the fruit stand, Thanh, our guide, introduced the exotic dragon fruit. It's smooth-skinned, with scales that hint at the cactus that it is. Thanh said that the cactus "stems" (think of a Christmas cactus) can grow up to 20 feet long.
He moved on to show us knobby, yellowish-green custard apples. Inside are creamy-white, custardlike segments. Each segment surrounds a hard brown seed, which we picked out and discarded. Then we sampled the segments. Mmm, good.
In the vegetable section of the market, Thanh chose what looked like a cucumber with ridges. "This is bitter melon, used often in soup," he told us. "It's very good for you, and you must try it 10 times before you decide you don't like it!"
Pausing at a rice stall, we learned that rice paper can be softened by soaking it for a second in tepid water or by wrapping it in a banana leaf for up to 10 hours.
We passed on "the best coffee from Dalat, at 50,000 dong [about $3] a kilo," but most of us bought small metal vegetable graters with tiny loops at one end used for making the slivers of carrot found in the national sauce, nuoc mam. Many of us also purchased tiny three-part gizmos for making drip coffee.
At the fish market, we learned that the fish sold in stalls inside the market are from the sea, while vendors in the outside stalls by the river are selling river fish. Thanh lingered by a huge mound of squid. "The flesh of a fresh squid should be hard and white," he explained.
The rain had changed into a fine mist as we got into a wooden boat that would putt-putt us down the Hoi An River for a 25-minute tour.
RSS feed
