Carbohydrate update

As is well known, I’m a committed consumer and defender of carbohydrates and have a particular interest in bread. As I readied myself to travel through South East Asia, I readied myself to forego effectively this dietary staple. Substituting rice and noodles for bread is no particularly arduous task and it is one to which I resigned myself without much fuss. After all, I’ll be in France in the not-too-distant future and there able to eat my body weight in baguette and fromage on a very regular basis. The bread in Burma was beyond awful: so sweet that it required salting to be palatable; so soft and aerated that it crumbled to nothing in a second and often mouldy. It was a great relief to discover the excellent breakfast soup, mohinga, and thereby obviate any need for bread. Thai bread was better than Burmese bread and it was possible in the big cities to find some decent loaves. Still, the default sliced bread wasn’t anything to get excited about.

Laos, however, has distinguished itself immediately by virtue of the available carbohydrates. Even though the current state of Laos didn’t exist in the colonial era but the area was the centre of French Indochina. Finally, we can isolate one unambiguously positive bequest of the colonial masters: the baguettes are spectacular! Bread which is chewy and salty and crusty and hearty all at once! I hadn’t realised that I had been so sorely deprived. Even better is that they are available everywhere and that butter seems to mean something beyond sweet margarine. I am very happy about all of this.

I cannot abandon myself completely to bread, however, as sticky rice, as opposed to plain old steamed rice, is a ubiquitous accompaniment. I am very partial to sticky rice. Some call Laos the Land of Lemongrass and Ginger. Me, I name it the Paradise of the Twin Carbohydrates, a title which sounds far more exotic and mysterious in Laotian.