Lao and especially Luang Prabang food must not be missed as a culinary experience. Luang Prabang food is a wonderful and diverse cuisine and incorporates the Lao taste for sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Also surprisingly it revolves around their liking for texture in their food.
The Lao love their food. They are a convivial people who love nothing better than sitting around with their friends and family eating, chatting and drinking. Any excuse for a party and they always include lots of food.
Lao food is diverse and the variety is vast. Their cuisine is unique and does not relate to other cuisines of Asia. They have their own way of mixing flavours that is unexpected and unusual and makes their food so unique. They do not cook with a lot of chili in their food and say, "Everybody's chili taste is different", so they have a vast array of side dishes made of chili, ginger, soy with chili or ginger and sweet and sour dips and more. They like squeezing lime juice on some of their dishes – for the sour taste. They often have an array of salad leaves and they put the meat, chili, garlic in the leaf put in a dip and pop it in their mouths. They appear to be the only people in the world who use such things as banana flower, an array of dried buffalo skin, fungi such as woodear fungus and even wood in their dishes to achieve their liking for texture.
The Lao are the only people in South East Asia who use "sticky rice" as a staple part of their diet. They also have a wonderful array of sweets made out of it, which they make for the monks and special occasions. Other cuisines in South East Asia use sticky rice for special foods or sweets. It can be purchased in the west under the name of "glutinous rice".
They enjoy the mix of sweet, sour and bitter. A favourite is green mango dipped in a mixture of salt, sugar, chili and fish sauce. People peddle around town supplying sweet and sour fruit which is dipped in the above mixture.
The above is a very brief overview of the Lao people and their food.
