Until now, ‘com lam’ is known as unique cuisine, attracts a lot of travelers by its unforgettable flavor. Its name makes many people curious; even they have never tasted it. Why does it have the name ‘com lam’ instead of any names else? We usually have many methods to cook a dish, such as frying, baking, boiling, grilling, steaming, etc. And the reason is in Thai language, grilling means ‘lam’.
Therefore, we can understand partly how to cook ‘com lam’; rice is put in bamboo tube instead of in a pot or a cooker, after that it will be grilled until it smells pleasant. This kind of rice will keep the pure fragrance of rice blended with the flavor of bamboo.
In terms of its origin, ‘com lam’ is a unique and creative food of ethnic minorities. When they go to the forests, from one hill to another one for many days, they usually bring rice to cook everywhere for convenience. They cut down young and fresh bamboo tree to take some bamboo tubes to put rice in, wrap the tube with banana leaves or ‘dong’ leaves and burn it on fire. They can use it for some days.
It is easy and convenient to make ‘com lam’ but the most important ingredient is rice, usually upland sticky rice in the mountainous areas. The kind of rice has small, long and fragrant seeds from provinces like Hoa Binh, Lai Chau, Dien Bien and so on. Rice is compressed in a bamboo tube but not too tight in order to create distance from both sides of tube so that rice can expand regularly. When grilling, the cook should remember to turn the tube around frequently until the cover of tube is dried and it begins having the fragrant flavor.
Before enjoying it, you should use a small knife to split the black bark skillfully so that there is a thin cover left with the rice, remove all banana leaves at the both sides of tube. After that, cut the tube of sticky rice into five or seven pieces. Beside rice and bamboo tube, some cooks can add some scrapped coconut or sesame to make more delicious and strange taste. You can enjoy it with sesame salt or grilled chicken and grilled wild boar.
Nowadays when you travel to Vietnam, it is not difficult to get Vietnam visa on arrival. Along with experiencing the wonderful sceneries, you can be easy to find a lot of restaurants serving ‘com lam’ as you visit the northwestern traveling destinations.
(Source :: http://getvietnamvisa.org)