Well the weekend is upon us and I am finally feeling better. I rarely ever get sick, but I usually get hit once a year around May. I was shaking, sweating, scatterbrained and all the while trying to teach children how to write a final essay. It was an awful experience, but I'm glad to say I'm on the mend. In fact, today is the first day I feel like I have my appetite back, so why not tempt fate once again by eating some Sa Giang! What's Sa Giang you say? I have no earthly idea. This was the one item from the Asian Market that I truly had no idea what it was or what it could possibly taste like. The English depiction says Special Crab Chips, so my assumption is that it's like a shrimp chip - a starchy, crunchy snack with a faint flavor of shellfish. The box itself paints a different picture. It shows a giant crab atop a bed of lettuce next to a beer. I'm also told that it is of premium quality and contains NO PEPPER. Is that a thing in Vietnam? They hate pepper? I looked to the ingredients and tapioca starch? is the main one followed by 13% crab which seems like an ominous and random amount of crab. What's weird too is that on the side of the box it tells me exactly the type of crab used: mud crab, and where it was caught: FAO area 71, Pacific Ocean. I guess if I really like this product I can, like, go get it fresh?
When I picked this up at the store and it said crab chips, I figured, like I said, it would be like a shrimp chip or at least similar to the crunch fish rolls; an out of the bag snack. But as I looked over the back of the box, it appears I need to prepare these mystery crustacean crunchies. I'm given three different options in three different languages: Vietnamese, English and apparently Latin. One thing I can do is soak the chips in oil my official Sa Giang wok while the third option is to boil the chips with shallots, bean sprouts and blood curds. Neither of these seem like a viable option for a round-eyed American like me, so I'll try option 2 - "use the viba oven at a rate of micropower from 40 to 60 seconds." I assume/hope that a viba oven is the same as a microwave oven. Let's open these up and get them on a plate to see what they look like pre-viba. 
There's definitely more than I thought there would be, and they're solid as a rock. I tried to bite into them just for kicks and it was impossible. They are also odorless. I don't see how in just 60 viba seconds this can become a delicious crab chip, but "when it Vietnam..." TO THE VIBA OVEN!
Sweet Jesus what have I created? They didn't all pop. My guess is, like the picture suggested, I was only supposed to add a few at a time instead of pouring the whole bag into a bowl. The crap smell is certainly apparent now, and they look like my original assumption of shrimp chips. They're smoking hot, but the curiosity is killing me let's go in for a bite.
I have to contribute this taste test to human error. I put way too many in the bowl and as a result, almost each chip has parts that "popped" and parts that didn't. The parts that popped were actually pretty delicious. Good crab flavor that wasn't overpowering and a tasty treat. I'd like to do these again the right way someday. I just need to save up some more Vietnamese Dong to buy my Sa Giang wok and do it the right way next time. And let's leave tonight with a recognition that the Vietnamese currency is called dong. DONG! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
No comments:
Post a Comment