Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Vietnamese coffee - part 2

With the Vietnamese coffee filter now in my possession, I had to go out and find some ground coffee, and a can of sweetened condensed milk, to be able to make a good coffee, Vietnamese style.
I was in a 人人乐 (Ren Ren Le) supermarket just a few days ago, and noticed they sell both, so I made a mental note without buying it, since at that time I did not have the filter, so no use for it. Today I googled the store to find the locations of all of its branches in Nanning, to locate the nearest one. The one I visited earlier was in the Eastern Langdong district, very far from where I live. The nearest one appeared to be on Beihu Beilu, not too far. I went there with Xiao An, who also lives in that area.
This supermarket is huge! By far the biggest I have seen in Nanning, covering two floors of close to 10.000 square meters each. Selling everything from baby food to large screen LCD tv's. It took us a while to find the right aisle for the coffee, but there it was. Surprisingly a different brand than in the other store.
A tin containing 340 grams of Vietnamese ground coffee (Vinicafe) for a very reasonable 27 RMB. A few aisles down we found condensed milk, by Nestlé (370 g, 12.90 RMB). I bought two of each, also for my classmate who got me the filter.
Back home it was exciting to brew the first cup, following the procedure of the Vietnamese cafe on campus: pour a layer of condensed milk in a glass, put the filter on top, load the filter with coffee, compress it with the internal perforated cover plate, and fill it up with boiling water, then close the lid, and wait. After a few seconds the first drops drip into the glass. It takes about a minute or two for all coffee to drip down. Stir, and enjoy. Nice and strong, great taste!

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