Sapa salmon
It is also known as rainbow trout or salmon, often living in stagnant water with low temperatures.
Rainbow trout meat has an eye-catching orange-red color, each muscle is firm and evenly arranged, soft and fatty but not at all greasy. You can eat rainbow trout as sashimi (raw fish dipped in mustard), mixed with salad, cooked with pepper, grilled, etc… everything is delicious. One of the delicious dishes in Sapa that is most popular with tourists – it must be mentioned – is salmon hotpot. Fresh salmon meat mixed with sweet and sour broth, dipped in hot pot with all kinds of fresh Northwest vegetables. The flavor must be said to be “a bite that lingers for a lifetime”.
Roasted Chesnuts
Sold along the streets of Sapa, roasted chestnuts will be the perfect choice for you to bring home as a gift after your trip. The sweet taste of chestnuts makes it a popular Sapa specialty in many families and is often used as a snack during holidays or processed into a filling for many other pastries. In the cold weather of Sapa, holding a hot chestnut in your hand, fresh from the oven and still steaming, is truly nothing like it.
Thang Co
When walking around the market, you will encounter Sapa’s famous specialty dish “Thang co”. This is a soup made from the meat and organs of horses combined with meat from livestock such as cows, pigs, and buffaloes.
Thang co is cooked in a large pot, over a charcoal fire. When cooking, people add spices such as ginger, lemongrass, cardamom, cinnamon, anise… to create the unique flavor of the dish. You can eat this dish with green vegetables and dip it with a typical Muong Khuong chili. When eaten, thang co has a rich, fatty taste. However, this dish has a strong smell and the characteristic bitter taste of horse blood, so not everyone likes it.
Seven-color sticky rice
According to dining experience in Sapa, you cannot miss seven-color sticky rice when coming to this land. This is a dish that is often cooked and sold at Tet markets or the 1st day of the 7th lunar month. Sticky rice has 7 colors including dark red, purple, yellow, brown, blue, bright red, green and is made entirely from natural ingredients such as kitchen ash, sticky rice leaves, chopsticks,…
Lam rice
Lam rice is a dish made from sticky rice. Specifically, the cook will wash the rice thoroughly and put it in a bamboo tube with one end cut off. Next, water and salt are added to the rice, then the tube is sealed and grilled on a charcoal stove. The rice used to cook Lam rice in Sapa must be upland sticky rice, with round, white and fragrant grains. This type of rice is grown in high mountainous areas with a cool climate, so it has a more special flavor than sticky rice grown in the plains.
To enjoy bamboo rice, you need to peel off each layer of bamboo one by one to reveal the white rice. This dish has the characteristic taste and aroma of sticky rice. You can eat rice with sesame salt or grilled meat depending on your preference.