Tapping into the taste of Laos

You can tell a lot about a country from the ingredients in its best-known dishes. For example, the good ol' US of A: corn oil, orange cheese and turkey. That's probably not fair – you could say Australia is known for kangaroo, beer and beer. Let’s try somewhere easier. Italy: tomato, olive oil and basil; or Japan: soy, rice and fish.

If I were to ask the same of Laos, what would you think of first? Mostly you’d be channelling dishes from its neighbours, like Thailand, Vietnam and even China. And sure, they do use a lot of the same ingredients, like lemongrass, galangal and tamarind, but they have a wealth of other ingredients from the jungles and fields that are distinctly Lao. These include bamboo shoots, sticky rice, betel leaves and rice paddy herbs, along with the ubiquitous fish from the Mekong, which looks very much like carp and fish sauce.

In a country that doesn’t really have refrigeration outside the capital Vientiane, the food found here is a wonder of freshness, delicacy and flavour. We’ve had experience of seasonal workers making profoundly good dishes from catching local game and fish and having a well prepared garden. So it wasn’t too much of a surprise to see the food of Laos being so distinct and beautiful.

My life partner (aka wife) is involved in a charity, Abundant Water (www.abundantwater.org), which has solid roots in Laos. She recently visited and came back with images, stories and a terrific cookbook. I thought long and hard about trying to bring this experience to a broader audience, and finding a recipe that is distinctly Lao.

A quick story about the man behind Abundant Water (you can read more detail on the website). Sunny Forsyth is a young guy with a big heart and even bigger plans who makes you feel like you’ve really wasted your youth on booze, broads and booze. As a youth ambassador to Laos in 2007, he saw the need for clean water in this very slowly developing country. Its development, it has to be said, was made all the more slow by the more than 2 million tonnes of bombs dropped here, plus millions of carefully placed mines, during that war four decades ago. These all form part of the "UXO problem", as in un-exploded ordnance (www.uxolao.org). And it’s a huge understatement, calling it a problem. This is not like breaking your shoelace; having thousands of unexploded bombs everywhere is something entirely different.

So Sunny, with the help of a few others, came up with an easily made clay water filter that can use coffee grounds as the basis for the filtration. He and his team in Australia and Laos have got funding and education to where it is needed. The Laos project is a blueprint of what can be achieved wherever water quality is an issue in development, which is just about everywhere, it turns out.

So this cookbook, From Honeybees to Pepperwood, Creative Lao Cooking With Friends, produced by, yes, another charity, Friends international, is based on the dishes produced at the training restaurant called Makphet, in the capital. Here’s a recipe for a dish you see as an appetiseraround the country. It's a spicy sausage with a lovely tomato and shallot dipping sauce.

Spiced Lao pork sausage

(based on the same in the From Honeybees to Pepperwood cookbook).

500g pure pork sausage, skin removed, meat broken up

2 stalks lemongrass, white part only chopped

8 spring onions, chopped

6 shallots, peeled and chopped

4 coriander roots, scrubbed

1/2 cup coriander leaf, chopped

2 chillies, finely chopped

4 kaffir lime leaves, shredded

20g cooked rice (sticky or other)

1 tsp black pepper

1 tsp sugar

1 tbsp chilli powder

1 tbsp soy

2 tbsp fish sauce

1 tbsp oyster sauce

Salt

In a mortar and pestle arrangement or blender, grind or blitz a paste from the lemongrass, coriander root, shallot and spring onion. Mix everything together to form a mass of pasty forcemeat.

Pack the meat neatly into a lined loaf tin. Bake in a 150C oven for 25-30 minutes; it doesn’t need to be cooked through just set. Let this cool completely and chill. Cut into 6 sausage-sized oblongs (you can pre-empt this by making the cuts before you cook). To serve, heat a charcoal grill up with good embers, brush sausage with oil and grill on both sides until they look the part. Slice and serve with the grilled tomato dip and sticky rice, both below

Grilled tomato, garlic and shallot dip

5 tomatoes

8 shallots

12 garlic cloves

10 chillies

1 tsp sugar

3 tbsp fish sauce

1 tbsp lime juice

Coriander leaves

Salt

Grill tomato, garlic, shallots and chillies until charred, peel shallot and garlic, grind everything else in a mortar until mushy, season with sugar, lime and fish sauce, garnish with coriander. Taste and balance with salt and extra lime juice if needed.

Steamed sticky rice (or any steamed rice will do)

500g sticky rice (available from Asian grocers)

1.5lt water

Soak the rice in the water for at least three hours or overnight. Drain and three-quarter fill a sticky rice steamer set up on a wire rack over boiling water in a pot large enough to cover and steam for 15 minutes. Turn basket over and cook for another 15 minutes. Once you’ve mastered this, you’ll use it often.