TGL – Don’t ask how Nem chua is made, once you know you may not want to eat it again, and that’s a shame because eating it is good.

Don't ask how it's made, it's fine fermenty fare.

Animal, Mineral or Vegetable:

Pretty much entirely animal. There’s a small bit of vegetable (a herb leaf) stuck into the side, but other than that, its just pig.

Position on the periodic table of foodstuffs:

Sausages are a real grey area when it comes to positioning, because you never really can be sure what’s in them. Traditional sausages involve shoving all the bits you wouldn’t normally eat inside the intestines of the slaughtered animal. Nem chua on the other hand is made strictly from pig’s ear. Salivating yet? You should be.

Atomic weight:

Wrapped in leaf, coming in bunches of two, bound together with natural twine, they feel heavy in the hand and on the tongue, but the flavour is light compared to some other meats.

Description:

Take a pig’s ear and add some fresh meaty morsels, mash it to bits, and pound it over and again with a big wooden pestle. A quick fermentation process makes it nice and rubbery, roll it into sausages and wrap it up. Serve it with ridiculously hot chilli sauce in a small bowl. The rolls must be left for a dy to ferment, or else you face the lockjaw nasties associated with raw piggy meat.

Many foreign people don’t like it, but nem chua is the best food with bia hoi when you need something more than a handful of peanuts. Chewylicious they are, and the over hot chilli sauce will sear out the taste of bad bia.

So nem means like any kind of roll thing that you eat, like spring rolls for example. Tack on chua which means something along the lines of sour and you get the idea. The propensity for something to go horribly wrong with the meat preparation of what is lightly cured pig flesh is seemingly high. Yet in all this time, few or no cases of nem chua poisoning have occurred in the expat community. Go figure.

Don’t let the possibility of getting lockjaw put you off though, for the nem chua is the meaty version of pretzels. Head to the bia hoi and have a munch. Don’t like it? More for us then.

Inert with:

Bia hoi, other dinner foods. Is highly recommended as an appetiser before dinner. 

Reacts with:

People who don’t think you should be eating that kind of thing. Keeping something as dodgy as a pig’s ear sausage in the sun for several days before eating doesn’t help much either.

The Good Life