Vegetables of southeast Asia

Vegetables at the market

While I'm not too keen on trying various creepy animals and animal parts that are served as food in southeast Asia, it's quite the opposite in the vegetable department. I'll try anything that's green and comes out of the ground, as long as it’s not poisonous.

Generally, eating fresh vegetables in Asia can be risky because they may not be washed or are washed in unsafe water. But I've taken my chances so far and haven’t had any problems. Actually, tap water in most parts of Thailand and in Phnom Penh is officially safe which means that salads are most likely safe as well.

The markets around here are overflowing with green vegetables. I can taste most of them in food that I order in restaurants. I still haven’t identified all of them so it’s a work in progress. I can’t Google a vegetable to find out what it is, how would I describe it? Someone should come up with photo matching search algorithms. Does anything like that exist already?

Asking the locals about the vegetables is no good either, they just tell me the name of the vegetable in their language and I’m no better off knowing what it is. The most helpful resource in identifying vegetables so far has been going to a supermarket where the various fruits and vegetables are labeled in English. But even there, some of them are called just “herb” or “greens”. It seems not all of them have English names.

Typical lunch in Laos, clockwise from bottom right:
green papaya salad, fried rice, weeds and cabbage, Beerlao

Here is a list of some of the more interesting vegetables that I have tasted so far and for which I was able to find out what they are:

• water convolvulus or kang kong, used in soups and stir fries
• mustard greens, used in soups
• flowering cabbage, it seems this plant group includes Chinese cabbage as we know it back home as well as pak choi, a smaller, darker green variety and everything in between, including yellow flowering stalks
• luffa or some sort of cucumber, resembles a cucumber in taste and texture, used in salads and stir fries
• pea eggplant, I got this in a stir fry once and I thought at first it was undercooked peas. I found out later they were tiny eggplants.
• Thai basil, delicious tasting large leaved basil used in copious amounts in some stir fries
• sour mango, I’m still not sure whether this is just unripened sweet mango or a different cultivar of mango. It’s dark green on the outside and light green on the inside, it tastes sour and it’s eaten as a salad.
• green papaya salad, a typical Laotian dish, made from unripened papaya, nicely sour and spiced to the death with chilies. I like.

One mystery still remains. With papaya salad, they always serve these stalks with green leaves on them. I have no idea what it is. Here is a closeup from the plate with my lunch. (The other vegetable on the plate is good old cabbage.)

Unknown green leaves