Mont di
Rakhine mont di salad with garnish | |
Alternative names | Rakhine mont di, Mandalay mont di |
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Course | Breakfast, Lunch |
Place of origin | Myanmar |
Region or state | Rakhine State, Mandalay Region |
Main ingredients | rice vermicelli, any white fish(mostly Daggertooth blade conger), ngapi, lemongrass, pepper, garlic, red chili sauce, green chili paste, crisp garlic garnish, coriander |
Cookbook: Mont di Media: Mont di |
Mont di (Burmese: မုန့်တီ [mo̰ʊɴ tì]) is a collective term for Burmese cuisine dishes made with thin rice noodles. The vermicelli is used fresh, as it ferments quickly in Myanmar's tropical climate. There are a number of mont di dishes and the Rakhine mont di of the Arakanese from western Myanmar is the most popular. Mandalay mont di is another well known dish.
Variations
All the variants of "mont di" are often accompanied by deep-fried vegetables, "a kyaw" (အကြော်), of one's choice.
Rakhine mont di
Rakhine mont di (Burmese: ရခိုင်မုန့်တီ) is the most popular dish in association with the Rakhine people. It is a semi staple dish of the Rakhine State. It comes in two forms: salad or soup.
The soup is the more common version, in which rice vermicelli is mixed with a thin soup made of daggertooth pike conger,called thinbaw htoe (သင်္ဘောထိုး) in Arakanese, nga shwe (ငါးရွှေ) in Burmese[1]), Rakhine ngapi and lemongrass. Dry roasted pike conger eel flakes, fried onion and garlic, fresh coriander, red and green chili paste are added. It is also called arpu sharpu (အာပူရှာပူ) which roughly means 'hot throat, hot tongue', due to the green chili paste. Some add fried pulverised nga phe and pork rind.
In the dry salad form, the same ingredients are mixed into a colourful combination. The green chili paste gives the white rice vermicelli a slight greenish in colour.
Mandalay mont di
Mandalay mont di (Burmese: မန္တလေးမုန့်တီ) is quite different from Rakhine mont di. It uses meat instead of marine fish, as Mandalay is an inland city located in Central Myanmar. The meat is cooked as a sauce and added to the noodles like a salad. Another difference is that larger rice noodles is used instead, similar to nan gyi thoke.
Yangon "mont di"
Yangon mont di (Burmese: ရန်ကုန်မုန့်တီ) is very similar to the Rakhine mont di. The only difference is that oil is added added to the salad, reflecting the Burmese preference to oiliness.