For a long time, bamboo sprout has been considered as a typical product of the forest for its natural sweet and bitter tastes.
Rainy season is also the time when there are a lot of bamboo sprout grow up, and they are all very delicious.
Bamboo sprout appears very often in Vietnamese meals. From it, we can make various dishes. We can fry bamboo sprout with lolot, stew it with flank meat, simmer it with duck meat, and cook it with fish, frog or use it to make sweet and sour grated salad, ect…
Bamboo sprout has mild character; therefore it is easy to be combined with many other kinds of food. Especially with vegetarians, bamboo sprout is very preferable for its natural flavor.
Not many people know that there are a lot of nutritive substances in bamboo sprout. It includes some necessary elements such as cellulose, calcium…and helps to prevent high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and so on.
However, based on the way of processing, bamboo sprout would have different effect on your health.
Although we can preserve bamboo sprout by making it salty or drying it to use in a long time, it is best to use bamboo sprout when we have just pick it. With a fresh bamboo sprout, we can be sure that it is either delicious or nourish.
According to traditional experience, it is better to pick the bamboo sprout in days that have thunder, since the bamboo sprout is not too bitter.
When we use fresh bamboo sprout, it tastes sweet and a little bitter, but very crunchy. We can also soak fresh bamboo sprout into water in about two days until it become soft, and the bamboo sprout then would remain only sweet taste.
After cleaning bamboo sprout, we can cut it into small pieces or slices, depending on how we will cook it. Bamboo sprout fried with lolot is a simple but very delicious dish. We can also enjoy it when drinking beer. The dish either has the crunchy taste of bamboo sprout or the fragrant of lotot. This combination of the dish helps us to reduce our body heat as well as cure headache and inflammation.
Those who prefer bitter than sweet usually choose to boil bamboo sprout and then serve it with chili and salt, shrimp paste or fish sauce.
With the soup of bamboo sprout cooked with fish, if we add some salt, green onion, ginger, pepper, wine, it can even cure measles and indigestion.
Bamboo sprout also taste delicious when we bake it. The baked bamboo sprout has a strange taste which is a combination of sweet and bitter. The fresh bamboo would be baked on wood-embrs.
When baking, we will remove each layers outside gradually and keep the fat while bowel inside. It would taste best when it is still hot, and we can serve this baked bamboo sprout with paste shrimp.
With various ways of processing, we can enjoy bamboo sprout through many different dishes. All of them all both delicious and nourish. That is the reason why bamboo sprout has become a main ingredient in many typical dishes in Vietnam.
