What is street food?
Streetfood
The definition speaks for itself: street food is everything that can be bought at a stall or booth and eaten directly on the street. According to this definition, a Chips, a hot dog or a warm waffle is also street food. This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:
“Street food is ready-to-eat food or drink sold by a street vendor or seller on the street or in another public place, such as a market or fair. It is often sold from a portable food stand, food cart or food truck and is intended for immediate consumption. Some street foods are regional, but many have spread beyond their region of origin. Most street food is also called finger food or fast food and is usually cheaper than a restaurant meal. The types of street food vary between regions and cultures in different countries around the world. According to a 2007 study by the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2.5 billion people eat street food every day. A majority of middle-income consumers rely on the quick access and cheap service of street food for daily nutrition and employment, especially in developing countries.
Today, people may buy street food for a number of reasons, such as convenience, to get tasty food at a reasonable price in a cozy environment, fast service, to try ethnic cuisines, or out of nostalgia.”(bron: Wikipedia)
For this course, we have chosen five delicious street food dishes from Asia and the Middle East. Because street food has to be easy to eat, without plates and cutlery, and also satisfying, it often has a starchy wrapping. These are often various forms of wheat bread, wheat or corn wraps, rice sheets or a plant leaf. These wrappings help the food to be eaten easily. In the recipes in this course you will find, for example, three forms of bread dough: steamed wheat yeast dough for the Indonesian bapao (not bapao bread because pao already means bread), bread dough for the Turkish pizza and bread dough for the pita for the falafel sandwich.
Sauce
No street food without tasty sauces, so in the lesson on sauces you will find a number of delicious recipes that you can combine to your heart’s content. In some cases, a particular recipe calls for one or more specific sauces (the falafal for example, it is accompanied by green spicy sauce and tahina), in other cases we leave it up to you whether you want to add another sauce. If a particular recipe calls for a specific sauce, we have mentioned it and you will find the recipe.
Originally, the Turkish pizza (Lahmacun) is not served with sauce, but in countrys in Europe outside Turkey where the Lahmacun has become popular it is often topped with a variety of sauces and extra fillings.
Street food recipes are always subject to change, so feel free to vary them to your heart’s content once you have mastered the basic preparation. Improvising with recipes before you know and have tasted the basic preparation is a recipe (pun intended) for disaster. Fortunately, in the world of cooking, you can always start all over again.