Recipe for ‘pure’ Vietnamese coffee:
coffee essence plus water
A seller introduces a
bottle of coffee essence at Kim Bien Market in Ho Chi Minh City.
In Vietnam,
dubious outlets may serve you a delicious, flavorful cup of coffee made of
nothing more than a few drops of coffee essence and water.
Besides mixing coffee with soybeans and corn and selling
the final products as ‘100 percent pure coffee,’ the coffee business in
Vietnam, one of the world’s biggest coffee exporters, also involves making it
from coffee essence.
On June 29, Tuoi
Tre (Youth) newspaper visited a grocery store in Buon Ma Thuot, the
capital of Dak Lak Province in the Central Highlands, known as the country’s
coffee hub, and asked to buy some coffee essence.
The storekeeper agreed to
introduce her products – several plastic bags of ash-colored powders and
bottles of blackened, glutinous liquid, in a dark corner, beneath the
stairway of the house.
“Pour these into fresh
water and you will have ‘pure coffee’,” she said, pointing to the bottles.
At the store, in addition
to the ‘magical’ coffee essence, there were also other flavorings and
ingredients used to make bun bo and cha lua, or
Vietnamese beef noodles and pork bologna, without those kinds of meat.
All were stored in
plastic bottles and bags that were either unlabelled, or with labels written
entirely in Chinese lettering.
The storekeeper revealed
that all products were sourced from Kim Bien Market, infamously known as the
‘market of death’ in Ho Chi Minh City, where myriad kinds of chemicals are as
easy to buy as candy.
Because the media have
widely denounced the sale of chemicals at Kim Bien, vendors have become more
cautious with strangers.
Consequently Tuoi
Tre’s attempts to buy coffee essence at the market in District 5 had
repeatedly failed, until the owner of a booth named N.N. accepted the
reporters’ request.
A bottle of coffee essence on sale at Kim Bien Market in Ho Chi Minh City
She offered two types of
essence; one fetching VND200,000 (US$8.93) a kg, and the other at double the
price.
The owner then asked her
daughter to take out a 5kg bottle of the black, condense liquid that had a
strong coffee smell.
The store owner stressed
that the product was only essence, and mainly used to increase the flavor of
real coffee.
“It is not meant to
completely replace authentic coffee as rumored,” she said, before explaining
that the best way to use the essence was to “add a few drops to brewed
coffee,” which will make it tastier and more delicious.
The store owner also
warned the reporters not to touch the essence with their bare hands because
the smell would be hard to remove.
“Inhaling too much of
this essence will also result in a headache,” she added.
The owner of a nearby
store at Kim Bien Market introduced similar coffee essence products, and
stated the same disclaimer that it was impossible to make coffee using only
the essence.
However, it is not clear
what dishonest coffee sellers do with the essence, as they are not obliged to
follow warnings from chemical traders.
A recent survey revealed
that more than 30 percent of coffee consumed daily across four Vietnamese
provinces and cities actually contained miniscule caffeine content, or no
caffeine at all.
TUOI TRE NEWS
|
Thứ Tư, 20 tháng 7, 2016
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