crisp, barely ripe green guava sliced and dipped in a fierce mixture of salt, sugar, and pounded dried chilli, the crunchy sour-sweet-salty fruit snack of the Thai and Southeast Asian street
Origin: Thailand
From the journey of Guava.
Across mainland South-East Asia the guava is eaten not as a sweet but as a crisp, sour, savoury snack, and nowhere more so than in Thailand, where the fruit is called farang, the very word for a Westerner, because it was Western foreigners, the Portuguese, who first brought it. The Thais eat the guava green, firm, and barely ripe, when it is at its most crunchy and tart, sliced into wedges and dipped into phrik kap kluea, a fierce dry dip of salt, sugar, and pounded dried red chilli (and, in some versions, a little of the funky-sweet nam pla wan, a sticky sauce of fish sauce, palm sugar, and chilli). The seasoning is the point: the salt and sugar draw the juice from the fruit and the chilli sets a fire against its cool, faintly sour crunch, turning a plain green fruit into something craved, sold by every street fruit-cart from a tray of cut fruit and a twist of the chilli-salt mix. The same snack is loved across the region, shaken up in Vietnam as oi lac. It is the guava at its most everyday in Asia: raw, crisp, and bracingly seasoned.
The dip varies across the region: a simple sugar-salt-chilli mix, or the stickier nam pla wan (fish sauce, palm sugar, dried shrimp, chilli) of the Thai street. Green mango, tamarind, and other firm sour fruits are eaten the same way. In Vietnam the snack is ổi lắc, the guava shaken in a bag with chilli salt. Use the firmest, greenest guavas you can find.
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