BASICS - The Rough Guide to Laos - page 55

VEGETARIAN FOOD
Although very few people in Laos are vegetarian, it's usually fairly easy to persuade cooks
to put together a vegetable-only rice or vegetable dish. In many places that may be your
only option unless you eat fish. If you don't eat fish, keep in mind that most Lao cooking
calls for fish sauce so when ordering a veggie-only dish, you may want to add “ baw sai
nâm pa ” (“without fish sauce”).
Flavours
In addition to chillies, coriander, lemongrass and lime juice, common ingredients in Lao food
include ginger, coconut milk, galangal, shallots and tamarind. Another vital addition to a
number of Lao dishes is khào khùa , raw rice roasted in a wok until thoroughly browned and
then pounded into powder; it's used to add both a nutty flavour and an agreeably gritty tex-
ture to food.
The definitive accent, however, comes from the fermented fish mixtures that are used to salt
Lao food. An ingredient in nearly every recipe, nâm pa , or fish sauce , is made by steeping
large quantities of fish in salt in earthen containers for several months and then straining the
resulting liquid, which is golden brown. Good fish sauce, it has been said, should attain the
warm, salty smell of the air along a beach on a sunny day. Most Lao use nâm pa imported
from Thailand.
While nâm pa is found in cooking across Southeast Asia, a related concoction, pa dàek , is
specific to Laos and northeastern Thailand. Unlike the bottled and imported nâm pa , thick-
er pa dàek retains a home-made feel, much thicker than fish sauce, with chunks of fermen-
ted fish as well as rice husks, and possessing a scent that the uninitiated usually find foul.
However, as pa dàek is added to cooked food, it's unlikely that you'll really notice it in your
food, and its saltiness is one of the pleasurable qualities of the cuisine.
Use of monosodiumglutamate (MSG) is also common. The additive, which resembles salt
in appearance, sometimes appears on tables in noodle shops alongside various other season-
ings - it's generally coarser and shinier than salt.
Standard dishes
If Laos were to nominate a national dish, a strong contender would be larp , a “ salad ” of
minced meat or fish mixed with garlic, chillies, shallots, galangal, ground sticky rice and fish
sauce. Traditionally, larp is eaten raw ( díp ), though you're more likely to encounter it súk
(cooked), and is often served with lettuce, which is good for cooling off your mouth after
swallowing a chilli. The notion of a “meat salad” is a common concept in Lao food, although
in Luang Prabang you'll find Lao salads closer to the Western salad, with many falling into
the broad category of yam , or “mixture”, such as yam sìn ngúa , a spicy beef salad.