Buzz
Nature has generously endowed Hòa Bình with hills, rivers, creating a land rich in exotic culinary delights.
Braised Water Buffalo with Sour Leaves
This dish is popular among the Mường people in Hòa Bình. The buffalo meat is tenderized and simmered in a clay pot after being carefully prepared.
Sour leaves (a type of sour leaf) are crushed, and rice grains are added to the pot, simmering together with the buffalo meat. Keep the fire going until the rice grains expand and become sticky. The slow-cooked buffalo meat absorbs the tangy flavor of the sour leaves and the aroma of the rice, making it a delightful dish to savor.
Grilled Fish from the Đà River
Freshly caught fish from the Đà River, grilled over glowing charcoal. Before grilling, the fish is skewered with small bamboo sticks from mouth to tail, then secured with green bamboo clips to prevent it from falling or breaking.
The grilled fish is seasoned with salt, wrapped in banana leaves, and then enjoyed. The combination of fresh bamboo, banana leaves, and the rich flavor of salt blends together, making this dish truly enticing. Travelers will find it hard to forget the taste of this dish when savored with sticky rice.
Sour bamboo shoot soup with chicken
In Hòa Bình, Lạc Sơn chicken is considered the best. Living on the limestone mountains and drinking water from the Bưởi River gives the chicken firm, aromatic, and unique meat. This makes it an ideal ingredient for the specialty sour bamboo shoot soup with chicken – a must-try dish in Hòa Bình.
To prepare this dish authentically, the chef selects young chicken, preps it, removes the giblets, and then chops it into small pieces. Next, it's marinated with sour bamboo shoots and various spices, taking only half an hour for the flavors to infuse. Cooking over a wood fire for about 1 – 2 hours with even heat is essential. Additionally, when the chicken and bamboo shoots are tender, some finely ground roasted sesame seeds are added to enhance the flavor.
Betel leaf-wrapped pork rolls
Perhaps only in Hòa Bình will you find this unique dish. Pork belly, after minimal preparation, is not finely minced like other sausages and is not overly seasoned. It is thinly sliced, lightly seasoned with fish sauce and onions, then wrapped in betel leaves and grilled over glowing charcoal.
Diners can distinctly smell the enticing aroma of the meat blending with the oil from the betel leaves. Due to the grilling process, the meat is not overly greasy but rather firm and richly sweet. Moreover, the charred and crispy betel leaves add an extra dimension to this sausage. After enjoying a piece, you'll feel a tingling sensation on your tongue, not necessarily spicy, not discomforting, but rather an unforgettable experience.
Herb-stuffed sausage
Driven by the desire for a dish that is both refreshing and nutritious, the Muong people ingeniously created the herb-stuffed sausage. Its rarity lies in the fact that the herb, rau đáu, is a medicinal plant challenging to cultivate, only naturally growing in stream crevices during cold and humid weather like Spring or Winter.
The unique aspect of herb-stuffed sausage compared to other dishes is the meticulousness from ingredient sourcing to preparation. To obtain fresh and flavorful rau đáu leaves, the maker has to spend an entire day searching around streams in the forest. Thus, those who wish to savor this dish at a Muong household must notify the host a few days in advance for proper preparation.
Cao Phong Orange
Cao Phong Oranges start ripening from the 8th lunar month and last until after Tet. There are up to 6-7 varieties grown here, including Canh orange, Golden-hearted orange, Red-flesh orange, Xã Đoài orange... Among them, the Golden-hearted and Canh oranges are more favored for their juicy sweetness.
Along the roads in Cao Phong town, numerous stalls sell oranges to passing travelers, but these might not be fresh and could be mixed with other orange varieties. So, if you're willing to explore the inner paths, you'll discover orchards covering the hillsides, allowing you to enjoy them right in the orchard or purchase them as gifts.
Grilled Bitter Bamboo Shoots
For delicious bitter bamboo shoots, choose fresh and tender shoots, grill them over wood until slightly burnt, tighten them, and gradually peel each layer to dip in the 'cross-dip' package (including salt, chili, ginger leaves, sichuan pepper, garlic leaves, and crushed garlic). When eating, you'll experience the sweet bitterness of the shoots, the rich taste of salt, the spiciness of chili, the warmth of ginger leaves, the tingling of sichuan pepper, the pungency of garlic, along with the distinctive flavor of sour bamboo water and grilled bamboo shoots.
Salted Sour Pork
Seemingly, pork in Hòa Bình always undergoes unique processing. Although it's still pork, salted sour pork gives us the sensation of savoring both grass and forest flavors due to its distinctive preparation.
The dish of salted sour pork is meticulously crafted and combined with various forest leaves, all of which are readily available and considered precious remedies for the body, such as cinnamon leaves, jackfruit leaves, betel leaves... The initial impression when guests arrive at a Muong house is the presentation of a platter of salted sour pork with a basket of leaves. When eating, one must use their hands to roll the meat in the leaves, chew slowly for a rich, fragrant, and uniquely delicious experience.
Loóng Soup
It's a soup made from boiling meat with the soft inner part of wild banana stems. The wild banana stems are peeled to extract the inner part, thinly sliced, sprinkled with salt to remove the bitterness, and then added to the boiling meat on a wood stove for about 50-60 minutes. Before serving, sprinkle grilled and crushed dổi seeds and finely chopped wild betel leaves into the soup.
As per Ngoisao.net
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Reference: Mytour Travel Guide
MytourNovember 17, 2015
