Bang nut jam is a special gift with a bold Con Dao imprint. Setting foot on Con Dao, just a few hundred meters from the Ben Dam Port, you will immediately encounter the Bang trees.
By Thomas Vietnam at vemekong.com | Official Con Dao Visitor Guide
1. Better to Know as a Food Lover
Find them: Con Dao.
Best time: Dusk-Dawn
Don’t miss: Bang nut jam
Local’s pick: Bang nut jam shop
Tourist’s pick: Shop in Con Dao
Blog: https://vemekong.com/bang-nut-jam-con-dao/
Facts: Bang nut jam is a special gift with a bold Con Dao imprint.
2. Better to Know Bang nut jam
Bang in Con Dao has a very large fruit size and leaves exactly like that of an Bang in the sea and island forest. In Con Dao, when they have free time, people here go to harvest Bangs and bring them back to dry in the summer sun, then use a knife to split the seeds and store them in a waiting box to be processed into jam.
When coming to Con Dao, visitors are often invited to taste the specialties of Con Dao, both sweet and salty. It’s called jam, actually it’s like Bang nuts roasted with salt or sugar.
Tasting a little Bang jam will stimulate your taste buds and immediately see the sweet or salty taste mixed with the fat on the tip of the tongue, diners can’t help but admire it: delicious!
Many people like the Bang jam by roasting it with salt. Said to be roasted with salt, but this dish is not salty, but it is a bit stronger than fresh Bang, almost still keeping the original taste of fresh Bangs.
The specialty of Con Dao nut jam is an indispensable gift to bring home
Sugar-roasted walnut jam is very sweet and doesn’t retain much of the original flavor of the Bangs. Salt-roasted Bangs look very firm, dark brown skin, bite to see the ivory-white layer of Bangs arranged close together.
The Bang trees in Con Dao over the time of reproduction also have a source of forest Bang, vitality and resistance to salinity and sea breezes very well, possibly due to harsh conditions, the trunk, foliage and fruit
Con Dao people harvest every summer, then dry and remove the shell to take advantage of the leisure time to separate the seeds. The newly cracked causality is brown, like the color of lacquered wood. Sitting for a few hours with back pain and neck pain, sometimes only a few hundred grams of seeds can be separated. The seeds are separated and roasted with salt or sugar depending on the taste of visitors.
3. Bang nut jam in Con Dao
In the cold winter or hot summer, dried Bang leaves were collected, stored, and brought back to the prison by prisoners in the old Con Dao prison, stacked on concrete and stone to fight the cold and the cold in prison.
Fresh Bang fruit and young leaves are sometimes used as a daily meal to fight hunger, prisoners also use the leaves to transmit messages and write poetry in Con Dao prison, many prisoners who have been imprisoned for many years still use it. Leaves color on the Bang tree to calculate the time, count the seasons and calculate the year.
In the summer around July to the end of August, the Bang tree has the most ripe fruit, the Bangs fall full of sugar when there is a strong wind, sometimes it is also a meal for the bats.
There are days when Con Dao encounters a big storm, the Bangs fall a lot, people gather to harvest like a festival, the Bangs brought back will be dried, used a small knife to split the kernels, skillfully roasted on the fire. All have had a delicious specialty brought to Con Dao tourists to increase their family’s income.
Con Dao not only has a specialty of Bang jam, it also has many other types of dried seafood such as dried squid, dried shrimp, and various kinds of fish sauce.
The way to process Bangs into Bang jam is also very special, not as simple as the way children play with them, which is cut in half and put the seeds in their mouths to chew.
To process the finished products of vacuum sealed bags of Bang jam on the shelves is a feat that only persistent people can do.
So the price of Bang jam is not cheap, about 200,000 VND / kg of roasted sugar and 280,000 VND / kg of roasted salt. If in the winter of Con Dao, their goods are only small, the price can be up to 500,000 VND / kg, but it is not enough to sell to tourists.
4. How to Make Bang nut jam
Of all the stages, the separation of the Bangs is the most elaborate. After picking, the seeds are dried, then split to get the seeds. When chopping, people must do it evenly and gently, otherwise the seeds will be broken. To get 1kg of Bang kernels, jam makers have to split 1 bag of dried Bangs weighing about 50kg. Therefore, the most skilled person can only separate 1kg of Bangs/day [from 8-10 hours]. After separating the kernel, in order to have a batch of jam, the worker must roast continuously for more than 1 hour. When roasting, keep the heat low and stir well so that the Bangs do not burn.
5. Pro tips:
Here are our tips for easing your mind (and stomach) around food-handling environments that you may not be used to.
Make sure the food is freshly cooked. If you’re eating hot street food, it’s always safest (not to mention more delicious) to eat food you can see being cooked to order.
Look for lines and busy stalls. Busy street food stalls are an indicator of popularity, and their high turnover rate means the food is never sitting out for hours and developing dreaded bacteria. Yes, long lines can be discouraging when you’re hungry after a full day of exploring, but it’s not worth the risk of grabbing precooked food from the empty spot next door.
Eat when the locals are eating. The last and most important element here is when to eat. You’re likely already on a weird eating schedule while you’re traveling, but it’s important to try and adjust to the eating times of where you are. A bowl of pho might be lunch for Americans, but it’s breakfast for the Vietnamese. This ensures that you’re eating freshly cooked food and that you can find the best and most popular places to eat.
If you can’t drink the water, then you can’t eat the salad. Most people get so hung up on not drinking the water or skipping ice in drinks that they don’t think about all of the other ways in which water is used in food service. Fruits and vegetables tend to be washed with tap water in most places, rather than the filtered water that locals drink—or sometimes it’s not washed at all. If you’re really craving some produce, try fruits you can peel or cooked veggies.
Trust your gut. If you’re unsure about the food or the way that it’s being prepared, then keep moving. Eating street food all over the world doesn’t make you an expert. Every stall and every country are different, and sometimes the rules can be harder to follow. When something doesn’t look, smell, or feel right, don’t eat it! Trust your judgment. Chances are that there’s another spot close by that’s making something more delicious.
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Can Tho: Co Ut’s Cong cake, Ut Dzach Fine Rice Vermicelli, Thanh Van Grilled Pork Sausage, Crab Noodle Soup At Floating Market, Scorched Rice with Caramelized Fish Sauce, 7-Toi’s Duck Meat Pancake, Banh Mi Thuy, Banana Blossom Salad, Fried Spring Rolls, Fresh Spring Rolls, Fetal duck egg (balut), Honeycomb Cake, Mini Sticky Rice Cake, Cassava Silkworm Cake, Grilled Banana Wrapped in Sticky Rice, Khmer-style Bun Goi Da Soup, Egg Coffee, Con Son Grilled Snakehead Fish, Bun Mam – Fermented Fish Noodle Soup, Lau Mam – Fermented Fish Hotpot, Grilled Snails with Pepper, Magenta Sticky Rice Cake, Duck cooked with Fermented Tofu, Rice Noodle Pizza, Vegetarian Noodle Soup, Snails Stuffed With Pork…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Chau Doc: Chau Doc Fish Noodle Soup, Sugar Palm Fruit, Basa Fish Hot Pot, Mam (Fermented fish), Phu Huong Beef Noodle Soup, Broken Rice with Pork Chop, Long Xuyen Broken Rice, Nui Cam Pancake, O Thum’s Chicken Grilled with Lime Leaves, Stir-fried Shrimp with Sesbania Flower, Sweet & Sour Soup with Siamese Mud Carp Soup & Sesbania Flower, Caramelized & Braised Catfish, Grilled Rice-field Rat with Salt and Chili…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Soc Trang: Pia Cake, Cong Cake (Banh Cong), Bun Nuoc Leo Soc Trang’s Noodle Soup, Soc Trang’s Bun Goi Da Soup, Duck Noodle Soup with black Pepper, Curry Noodle Soup, Grilled Beef on Tile, Khmer-style Tube Cake, Khmer-style Mung Bean Cake (Banh In), Dried Radish (Xa Bau), Stir-Fried Noodles with Seafood (Mi Sua), Soc Trang’s Green Rice Flakes…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Ben Tre: Phu Le Rice Wine, Ben Tre’s Coconut Candy, Flat Banana, Coconut Rice, Snail Pancake, Sea Snail with Coconut Milk, Coconut Worm, Young Coconut Salad with Shrimp & Pork, Son Doc Puff Rice Paper…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Cai Be: Puffed Rice Cake…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Vinh Long: Elephant Ear Fish (fried giant gourami)…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in My Tho: Fried Sticky Rice, Snakehead Fish Rice Porridge, Hu Tieu My Tho (Noodle Soup), Coconut Banana Cake…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Tra Vinh: Macapuno Coconut, Bun Nuoc Leo Tra Vinh’s Noodle Soup, Tra Cuon’s Sticky Rice Cake…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Sadec: Sa Dec Noodle Soup, Sadec Crab Hotpot, Lai Vung Spring Rolls, Sa Giang Shrimp Puff Pastry, Lai Vung Tangerine…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Bac Lieu: Spicy Beef Noodle Soup, Bac Lieu’s Three-striped Crab, White Radish Pies, Bac Lieu Thick Noodles & Creamy Coconut Milk, Bon Bon Pickles…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Ca Mau: Banh tam ga cay (Silkworm rice cake with curried chicken), Grilled Vop clams with salt and pepper, Grilled Mudskipper Fish, Stone Crab Roast With Salt, Young Bee Salad, Nam Can’s Crab, U Minh Forest’s Honey, U Minh’s Fermented Fish Hotpot…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Hau Giang: Cau Duc Pineapple, Cai Tac’s Pork Organs Porridge, Hau Giang’s Bronze Featherback Fish Cake…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Ha Tien: Herring Fish Salad, Spider crab cake soup, Ken Noodle soup, Xoi Xiem (Siamese sticky rice), Steamed Noodle soup, Ha Tien Oyster porridge…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Rach Gia: Stir Noodle Soup, Kien Giang Fish Noodle Soup…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Con Dao: Bang nut jam, Vu Nang Snail, Roasted Pork Bread (Banh Mi), Coconut Ice Cream…
Must-Eat Foods & Restaurants in Phu Quoc: Phu Quoc Sim Wine, Phu Quoc Pepper, Phu Quoc fish sauce…
Hopefully, the above tips will help you to come up with a great plan for your adventure in Mekong River Delta, Vietnam. Have a safe trip!
“Sleep less, travel more, respect more” – Thomas Vietnam – Local travel expert.
Thank you
