Burmese Food/Myanmar Cuisine: Curry, Rice, Noodles...........Tea?

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My first exposure to Burmese food was some years ago when our Burmese language teacher at Chulalongkorn University, Ms. Kitty, would invite us out for some curry and noodles at a small restaurant near her apartment in the Ramkhamahaeng University area of Bangkok. Outside of that, the only time I have ever been to another Burmese restaurant was in Chiang Mai and in Boston. Neither of these did much to illuminate the mystery of what exactly makes up the food of Myanmar.

Since then, I have realized that Burmese food may or may not be the same thing as Myanmar Cuisine, as I like to call it. Many people when referring to Burmese food think of rice and curry or mohinga noodles or perhaps tea and crispies. Though rice and curry is a very traditional meal in Myanmar, many of the ethnic groups have distinct food traditions of their own and get subsumed under the limited title of Burmese food. For example, I enjoyed a few Kachin chicken dishes, numerous Shan creations and a fair share of Indian meals during my trip to Myanmar last month.

Curry, rice, noodles and tea would be a good place to start when thinking about Myanmar's cuisine, but it would be like condemning all Western cuisine to the realm of burgers and pizza or to eating mostly 'bread' as many rice lovers in Thailand like to imagine.

Given Myanmar's poverty, it is not always the best place to sample different foods, but I found in cities like Yangon, Mandalay, Bhamo, Inle Lake and Pagan the choices were quite varied. Yangon, especially, has lots of good food. Two of the best meals I had were in fact in the small trading city of Bhamo on the Irrawaddy River in the north. It is helped by having a huge military base located there as well as by a small but steady tourist trade.

Right behind my hotel in Bhamo an aged Indian man with an apparent cataract sidled slowly over and suggested I order some of his curry with biryani rice. The best part was the mango chutney for my mutton curry. Lathered on a little Nan bread with some curry and dal beans, it gave the curry a little piquant zing and spicy bite that it had lacked. The man, who was the owner, introduced me to the chef, his daughter in law, who came out briefly and smiled after I complimented her cooking. Several generations of the family lived with him at his home/restaurant.

The following day, I was mulling around in my hotel lobby over Burmese vocabulary words to try and ask directions when a couple of elder Indian Burmese men came over and invited me to lunch. They took me inside the military base in their cousin's truck to a small outdoor restaurant right near the university which is part of the military encampment. Lots of students eat there apparently, and the Shan noodles they serve, Khao Swe, are quite delicious. The noodles had a distinct pasty but also sticky, gooey texture that was complemented well with a hot and sour fish broth on the side that you could add at will-the pastiness of a wet dough and sticky like sticky rice. The taste was salty and a bit sour with a slight bite that filled your mouth after a few small mouthfuls. Condiments in small little bowls were placed around the table featuring a choice of spicy, salty, sour and sweet tastes. The bowl with a small clump of spicy pickled dark green leaves were my favorite.

Although not likely to be considered traditional Burmese food, Indian curry and Indian food, are certainly part of the cuisine you would find in many towns or cities throughout Myanmar. I had an assortment of delicious chapattis on the streetside on several occasions. Watching the crafting of the dough, much like watching a pizza maker at work, is part of the fun. There is a very local flair invested into what I always assumed was a strictly Indian specialty. Shan style noodles were even more widely available in town and city. They were a common sight wherever I went and seemed to be a favorite.

Even more visible was tea drinking in little cafes that line the streets all over the country. Low square tables cluster in shaded cafes where men often sit, talk and drink tea while eating fried pastries and noodles. You can often get thin crispy bread, called crispies, to drink with your tea. With that comes a little bowl of soft dal beans sitting in oil that you can lather on the crispies. It's a little bit like putting soft cooked garlic in olive oil on Italian bread. It is one of the simplest, but one of my favorite snacks in Myanmar...much better and healthier than the sweet and popular oil fried pastries that are always served with tea.

Equally common is mohinga, a popular noodle soup. I imagine its many incantations to mirror the results of ordering pizza in different parts of the U.S. Where I spent most of my time, in northern and eastern Myanmar, the mohinga has a chicken and egg based broth rather than a fish foundation used in Yangon and in the southern parts of Myanmar. The best time to eat it was in tea shops or food stalls early in the morning when it would be freshly made. After that, the noodles would be soggy and the broth not fresh. Mohinga was some of the best breakfast I had on the trip. Thin rice noodles with a salty but savory broth filled with little bits of crunchy bean paste and freshly cut scallions. Mohinga has a simple complexity, like bacon and eggs, but it's so tasty and very easy to get accustomed while drinking your morning tea. Outside of tea and pastries, mohinga was the food I enjoyed most often during the trip.

Perhaps my favorite taste during the trip was some very delicate and fragrant kneaded coconut rice, steamed and wrapped in a banana leaf and fluffed lightly to just the right consistency. It had a hint of sweet jasmine flavor intertwined with its flowery aroma and it practically melted in your mouth. It had been served as part of a set menu at a semi swanky looking Shan restaurant overlooking the river that leads into Inle Lake from the town. It was complimented with a sour, sweet and crunchy green tomato salad. The tomatoes grow in the water on Inle Lake and you can see them being brought in on baskets being carried by local boats. An overly salty rich butterbean soup, green bean salad with crispy garlic and a braised beef with tomato sauce and mint topped off a very artfully prepared meal using the most basic local ingredients. The meal could have been a still life painting much like the landscape of the town featuring houses on stilts and rice paddies in the water as far as the eye could see all surrounded by low lying mountains, only the evidence of the deforested mountain tops might have spoiled the images perfection. One of the bar's rum cocktails with freshly cut mint and squeezed limes would soon allow you to gloss over that.

Inle Lake had some of the best food on the trip. The local market had delicious chapattis and noodle soups with a variety of local green vegetables mixed in. Veggie pizza from a wood fired oven and even a wine tasting at a local vineyard were part of the culinary delights available at Inle Lake-the sweet wines made with local fruit were by the far the best. Every morning at the hotel featured a different freshly squeezed fruit juice, pineapple, mango and papaya were all good. A steamed stuffed fish fresh from Inle Lake complemented by soybean crisps and a tomato salsa mix and mintfish soup were a superb meal for my last evening on the lake. White steamed fish, like this, seemed to be popular everywhere in Myanmar and my friend Eric, in Yangon, had something similar prepared for me when I visited his house on my last night in the country.

In Mandalay, I sampled quite a bit of street food, mostly sweets, and had a traditional Myanmar meal with rice, boiled vegetables and curry. I even spent one morning learning to cook Shan noodles and chicken curry while trailing along with my moto-taxi tour guide Gypsy. The Shan noodles take no time at all to prepare as the noodles are strained in hot water, the sauces added and the broth, already cooked, is put to the side. The curry requires more preparation as the garlic, chilies and onions need to be pounded in a mortar and pestle and the chicken, eggplants and tomatoes then need to be cooked in oil before being combined. As most people often notice, Burmese curry, made with peanut oil, is overly oily. Said to protect the food, from a country not blessed with extensive refrigeration facilities, the peanut oil, for me, just overpowers the other flavors. Outside of reducing the quantity, the best way to counter the peanut oil's effects are to mix the curry with lots of freshly boiled vegetables and rice. The amount of meat and curry supplied is often quite meager compared to that of the vegetables and rice so this shouldn't be a problem. If you prefer lots of meat, the amount or type of oil might need to be altered.

For a novice, Yangon is the best place to start. One restaurant features a buffet full of dishes behind the counter. All you need to do is point and they will bring it to your table. This was where I spent my first evening in Myanmar. Fried rice with peas, dumplings with pork and corn cakes were among my favorites there. Streetfood stalls are another good place to start here. Little pancakes cooked with shredded coconut and glutinous rice baked in a big round pans-almost sickly sweet-were my favorite snacks. There is plenty of expensive and sophisticated fare, on Strand Road along the Yangon River, for more discerning palates.

After three weeks on the road, I am still not entirely clear that food in Myanmar is not curry, rice, noodles and tea. Simple rice and noodles were in fact some of the best food I had. However, like any good painter, I have tried to provide some color for this crude sketch. I don't know if I brought the abstractions of curry, rice and noodles to life but their various tints now hang near the tastebuds of my culinary memory.

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Photos

Mohinga
The broth is kept on the side and you add as desired

Mohinga at the cafe in Mandalay
Served with the soup....a little soggy as I had it just after lunch

A Traditional Burmese Meal
Rice, Curry, Vegetables and Soup

Inle Lake Tomatoes
Freshly grown floating in the lake

Simple Shan Noodles
These were made in front of me in less than 2 minutes

Comments

[Revat]

Great, I think it must be delicious Bali Islands Asian Noodle