Dalat is known as the city of honeymooners, with couples mooning around flower gardens and images of swans abound.
Coffee trees take two years to produce their first harvest, and continue for about 25 years, when they are cut down and another planted. The only sort of pest problem is the possibility that a cicada makes its home in the soil, where it eats the roots, but again, the tree is just cut down and another one planted. Without predators, the crop is extremely easy to grow.
Beans are harvested by hand when they are mostly red, but green ones come off at the same time. These are then spread out to dry in the sun for three weeks, after which they have turned black. A roasting machine can handle 50kilos in 4 minutes, then, after another drying session, they are roasted again and ready for market.
Five hectares of land will produce 20 tons of coffee, making it extremely profitable. Being an industry only 14 years old and a mere two years traded on the world exchange, Vietnamese coffee is relatively unknown on the world stage. But we can attest to its taste and strength - it's fantastic.
And what meal of insects is not complete without 70% proof rice wine, fermented in buckets, put through a homemade still withthe resulting liquid condensed into a pot in the ground, but beautifully bottled for mass consumption - only $3 a bottle.
All well and good but having been married awhile what we really like about Dalat is the coffee! Alexandre Yersin, the French rennaissance man (doctor, medical research pioneer, explorer, botanist, biologist, entomologist, photographer, astronomer) introduced coffee to Vietnam. After so many wars and other intrusions, about 14 years ago, coffee plantations took off in this 'mountainous' area (and we use that term loosely speaking as Canadians familiar with real mountains). There are three main types of coffee cultivated here: Aribica, Moca and Robusta. There is also "weasel coffee" where the beans are eaten and excreted by a weasel-like animal, but the cultivation for that is slightly different! (think 'regularity report'!)
Coffee trees take two years to produce their first harvest, and continue for about 25 years, when they are cut down and another planted. The only sort of pest problem is the possibility that a cicada makes its home in the soil, where it eats the roots, but again, the tree is just cut down and another one planted. Without predators, the crop is extremely easy to grow.
Beans are harvested by hand when they are mostly red, but green ones come off at the same time. These are then spread out to dry in the sun for three weeks, after which they have turned black. A roasting machine can handle 50kilos in 4 minutes, then, after another drying session, they are roasted again and ready for market.
Five hectares of land will produce 20 tons of coffee, making it extremely profitable. Being an industry only 14 years old and a mere two years traded on the world exchange, Vietnamese coffee is relatively unknown on the world stage. But we can attest to its taste and strength - it's fantastic.
The Vietnamese drink a lot of it, usually either black with lots of sugar or with sweetened condensed milk. There are a ton of local coffee houses, full of people sipping the small glasses of coffee that has filtered from small aluminum cups, so it's not piping hot, but it is strong and round in flavour. And it delivers quite a kick. They laugh when you describe decaf.
Dalat is also know for its teas (our favourite was artichoke tea, caramel in colour and slightly sweet while at the same time delicate) , fruits (and resulting jams, juices and dried fruits), Dalat wine (which no one seems to know how or where it is made, but which is quite decent I assure you), flowers (familiar roses, gerberas, chrysanthemums, carnations and others), vegetables (mostly European varieties introduced by the French who came to live here in the early decades of the 20th century to escape the heat, as again suggested by the illustrious Alexandre Yersin), and silk.
Silk is made here as everywhere - the coccoons are destrung onto machines, which are then spun onto spools, dried and then worked into patterns determined by looms fitted with old-style computer cards, then died and dried. The left over stuff is dried above a furnace (heated with old coffee husks - nothing wasted!) then later made into canvas. The worms at the centre of the coccoons are a by-product. They sell in the market for people to fry and snack on. (Our cooking class teacher in Hoi An bought some for her grandmother - there's a photo in the Hoi An part 2 diary entry)
Dalat is also know for its teas (our favourite was artichoke tea, caramel in colour and slightly sweet while at the same time delicate) , fruits (and resulting jams, juices and dried fruits), Dalat wine (which no one seems to know how or where it is made, but which is quite decent I assure you), flowers (familiar roses, gerberas, chrysanthemums, carnations and others), vegetables (mostly European varieties introduced by the French who came to live here in the early decades of the 20th century to escape the heat, as again suggested by the illustrious Alexandre Yersin), and silk.Silk is made here as everywhere - the coccoons are destrung onto machines, which are then spun onto spools, dried and then worked into patterns determined by looms fitted with old-style computer cards, then died and dried. The left over stuff is dried above a furnace (heated with old coffee husks - nothing wasted!) then later made into canvas. The worms at the centre of the coccoons are a by-product. They sell in the market for people to fry and snack on. (Our cooking class teacher in Hoi An bought some for her grandmother - there's a photo in the Hoi An part 2 diary entry)
Another snack also high in protein is the cricket. Crickets can't jump far, so they cannot escape the shallow plastic buckets they are grown in, while being fed a diet of corn powder and water. A few of the adult crickets are put in a bin with a small round cement container of soil where they lay their thousands of eggs after mating. These eggs grow one month before hatching and the cycle continues. Again, a lucrative and easy crop, as the whole process - from egg to adult - only takes 2 1/2 months and 1 kilo of insects can realise $20 in the market. What to do with them? Why deep fry them and eat them of course!
And what meal of insects is not complete without 70% proof rice wine, fermented in buckets, put through a homemade still withthe resulting liquid condensed into a pot in the ground, but beautifully bottled for mass consumption - only $3 a bottle.
1 comment:
When you mentioned the coffee, it just dawned on me when I go out to Vietnamese pho places. Yummmmmm. It's all in the terribly rich sweetened condensed milk. Extra yum on poo coffee & fried crickets.
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