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Mainland Southeast Asia · Volume 61, The Dry Bowl, the Ash Noodle and the Jar Drunk Through a Reed

Canh bột lá bép

The M'nông and the Ê Đê, Đắk Lắk

Canh bột lá bép, a thick dark green soup of pounded forest leaf and rice with pieces of stream fish, in a blackened pot on embers: a blackened clay pot on red embers holding a thick dark green soup with pieces of small grilled fish in it, a wooden spoon.

Illustration

The strongest highland dish here, from the Đắk Lắk provincial paper's 2017 visit to Buôn Đắk Tuôr in Krông Bông, where Bà H'Dre Mdrang cooked it and Y Tang Niê, the culture officer, explained it. The M'nông call it biêp epai, as the paper gives it; the Gia Rai have a canh bột of their own and the Ê Đê a Tết version with lá yao; neither is covered here. The older the leaf the better; the dried banana peel gives the salt and the dish's own taste, she says. The one time stated is the soak.

As tradition built it

Serves a family.

Ingredients

The tradition's method, with the ingredients named. Quantities follow as we verify them.

  • lá bép, rau nhíp, fresh and dried, the older the better
  • ½ bowl rice, soaked 2 hours
  • dried banana peel
  • as needed warm water
  • as available meat, or stream fish
  • to taste salt

Method

  1. Pound the dried lá bép and the dried banana peel with the soaked rice in a wooden mortar to a fine powder.
  2. Stir the powder into warm water in the pot and set it over even red embers, never too strong and never too weak, stirring all the time so it does not lump.
  3. When the starch is cooked, add fresh leaf pounded just before, and season with salt.
  4. Add the meat or fish and cook it through. Serve with cơm lam.

What a modern chef changes

The thickener made in a grinder, the heat in a number

Rung 6

Method

  1. Dry the leaf and the banana peel in the dehydrator at 50 degrees overnight and grind them with the soaked rice in the spice grinder, which is the mortar's work without the arm.
  2. Hold the pot at a bare simmer on an induction ring at the lowest setting, whisking, which is the even embers the cook asks for.
  3. No British stand in for lá bép is offered here; the dish needs the leaf.
  4. Use a stream fish's nearest cousin, a small brown trout, grilled first so it holds in the soup.
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