Streetfood: Com Tam

Do you know Vietnam is the third rice export country in the world after Thailand and India? Rice is an important ingredient to cook dishes in Vietnamese meal daily. Normally good rice will be selected and tested to export to other countries while the farmers plant rice who only keep rice that has medium quality or broken to eat. However, by creativeness and cleverness they make a delicious food to cook from broken rice. It is named "Com Tam".

These broken rice are cooked within 20 ~ 30 minutes with water, depend on different kind of rice they will pour and adjust level of water to be sure that rice is not overcooked. Eat along with this dish is rib of pork that will be sliced enough thin but not be too small, ideally as same an adult's hand and then they will marinate it with fish sauce, chilli, sugar, salt, other mysterious spices to make their own traditional flavor. Normally it takes a time within 30 minutes ~ hours or also put it in fridge. Lately they will fry it on pan with a little oil. Cooked rice is served to the plate, and put rib on and sprinkle a dish with onion oil.

This dish will be eaten with cucumber, tomato, someone prefer adding salted egg or grinded meat,... If you like spicy, you can add more fresh chilli into fish sauce and pepper. The rib is enough spices, soft, smell eaten with broken rice made a delicious food for adult and children. You can eat Com Tam as your breakfast, lunch, dinner or brunch. Honestly, I can only have it with three meals a day, from day to day without bored. The salers also sever a small vegetable soup and ice tea. Com Tam is feature Vietnamse cuisine, specially Saigon and other Mekong provinces.

It's not difficult to find a Com Tam store in Saigon so you can find them everywhere from pavements to restaurants, from big streets to narrow corners. It is needless to say that Com Tam is spirit of Saigon. Easy to be addicted on it one day!

#Miss #Saigon

#Comtam

#pic from Jane