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Khao Jee Pate: The Lao Baguette Sandwich

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Khao Jee Pate: The Lao Baguette Sandwich Photo: Van Life Wanderer Morning in Pakse starts with bread. Before the heat settles over southern Laos, the baguette stalls are already busy — baskets of small, golden loaves, still crackling from the oven, split open and smeared generously with pate. A vendor works fast and without a menu: pate, a slick of mayonnaise, thick slices of white pork sausage, pickled vegetables, cucumber, tomato and a fistful of coriander, then the sandwich is pressed shut, wrapped in paper and handed over still warm. That is khao jee pate, the Lao baguette sandwich — breakfast, lunch and travel food in one crisp loaf, and in the south, around Pakse and Champasak, it is a point of real local pride. A French loaf that became Lao The baguette arrived in Laos during the French colonial era, and Laos, characteristically, made it its own. In Lao, khao jee can mean grilled sticky rice in other contexts, but order khao jee pate at a market stall and there is no con...
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The Complete Guide to Isan Food: Northeast Thailand on a Plate

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Cross the Mekong from Vientiane to Nong Khai and almost nothing about the food changes. The language stays Lao. The sticky rice still comes to the table in woven bamboo baskets. The papaya salad still arrives loud with fermented fish, and the heat still makes no apology. You have entered Isan — Thailand's northeast, some twenty provinces and roughly a third of the country's people, most of them ethnically Lao. Bangkok will tell you this is Thailand's spiciest, funkiest, most exciting regional kitchen, and for once Bangkok is underselling it. It is the Lao table on the Thai side of the river, shaped by a dry plateau, deep poverty turned into ingenuity, and a pride that seasons everything. That is exactly why the Isan tab lives on this blog: to eat Isan food is to eat Lao food's closest sibling, and the argument between them is the friendliest one in Southeast Asia. One People, Two Banks of the River The Isan plateau — the Khorat Plateau, walled by hills and drained by ...
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Gai Yang: Isan Grilled Chicken, Charred and Juicy

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Gai Yang: Isan Grilled Chicken, Charred and Juicy Photo: The Woks of Life Follow the smoke in any Isan town in the late afternoon and you will find gai yang. Whole chickens, butterflied and flattened, glow over low charcoal grills outside shophouses and market stalls, their skins blistering to a deep amber, fat dripping and hissing into the coals. The vendor fans the fire with one hand and turns the bird with the other, and the smell — lemongrass, garlic, turmeric and woodsmoke — does the advertising all by itself. When it is done, the chicken is hacked into pieces with a cleaver, still steaming, and served the only way it should be: with a mound of sticky rice, a fiery bowl of som tam, and a small dish of jeow for dipping. It is Isan's grilled chicken, charred at the edges, juicy in the middle, and quite possibly the best chicken on earth. A chicken built for the roadside Gai yang belongs to northeastern Thailand — Isan — the wide, dry plateau that borders Laos and shares ...
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Location: Udon Thani, Mueang Udon Thani District, Udon Thani, Thailand
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Hokkien Mee: The Old Town's Fried Noodle Icon

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Hokkien Mee: The Old Town's Fried Noodle Icon Photo: AutourAsia Walk into a busy food shop in Phuket Old Town at lunchtime and listen. Under the fans and the clatter of plates you will hear the same order called out again and again: one Hokkien mee, one more Hokkien mee, extra egg. What arrives is a bowl of thick, golden yellow noodles, glossy with a dark, savoury sauce that is not quite a soup and not quite dry — wok-fried, then braised for a moment in rich prawn and pork stock so every strand drinks it in. Tucked through the noodles are prawns, squid, slices of pork, fish cake and leafy greens, and on top, in the houses that do it properly, sits a soft egg, its yolk ready to break and enrich the whole bowl. It is Phuket's signature noodle, the dish locals measure a new shop by, and one of the clearest tastes of the island's Hokkien Chinese heritage. A noodle that crossed the sea Phuket's food cannot be understood without its tin-mining past. In the 19th and ea...
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Location: Phuket, Thailand
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Larb: The Dish That Defines Laos, Every Style Explained

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Ask a Lao cook to name the country's dish and you will rarely get a debate. Curries belong to other people's kitchens. Noodle soups are breakfast. Larb — minced meat or fish tossed warm with lime, toasted rice powder, herbs and chilli — is the dish Laos claims as its own, the one made when there is something to celebrate, someone to honour, or a guest to feed properly. It appears at weddings and funerals, at house blessings and New Year tables, in market stalls at dawn and in beer gardens at midnight. To understand larb is to understand how Lao people think about flavour, luck and each other. This is the deep guide: what larb actually is, why the toasted rice powder matters more than any other ingredient, how the styles change from Luang Prabang to Vientiane to across the river in Isan, and an honest account of the raw version — where it comes from, and what you should know before you eat it. What Larb Is At its simplest, larb is a salad of minced protein. The meat — pork, c...
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Drunken Noodles: How Los Angeles Rewrote Pad Kee Mao

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Drunken Noodles: How Los Angeles Rewrote Pad Kee Mao Photo: Whole Foods Co-op Order Thai food in Los Angeles — or almost anywhere in America — and one dish is guaranteed to be on the menu, usually underlined, starred or marked as a house favourite: Drunken Noodles. Wide, silky rice noodles glossed in a dark, savoury sauce, tossed in a screaming-hot wok with chillies, garlic, Thai basil and your choice of chicken, beef, prawns or tofu. It is fiery, a little sweet, deeply savoury and completely addictive. In Thailand the same dish is called pad kee mao, and it has been a street-stall and late-night favourite for generations. What Los Angeles did — and then the rest of America copied — was not invent it, but rewrite it: wider noodles, bigger portions, a glossier sauce, a fixed place at the top of the menu, and a name in English that nobody could forget. First, the name — nobody is drunk, and there is no alcohol Every first-timer asks, so let us settle it at the start: there is no ...
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Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
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Khao Mok Nuea: Thai Beef Biryani

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Khao Mok Nuea: Thai Beef Biryani Photo: Mitr Thai Some dishes travel the world and put down roots. Biryani is one of them — born of Persian and Indian kitchens, carried by Muslim traders and cooks across Asia, and in Thailand it became khao mok: fragrant rice cooked in one pot with meat and warm spices, coloured gold with turmeric, and served with a sharp green chilli sauce and a small bowl of clear soup. The chicken version, khao mok gai, is the famous one. But ask a Thai Muslim cook which version is richest, deepest and most worth saving for a special day, and many will point to this one — khao mok nuea, made with beef, the meat braised until it surrenders, the rice steamed in its spiced cooking liquor until every grain smells of the pot. A biryani that became Thai The name gives the game away. Khao is rice, mok means to bury or cover — the meat is buried in the rice and the pot is covered to steam — and nuea is beef. Muslim communities have cooked in Siam for centuries, i...
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Location: Bangkok, Thailand
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