fried bananas and how on earth do they stay thin?

sdf
An aspect of eating in Thailand that surprised me when i arrived was the profusion of fried (especially deep-fried) foods here. that, and the constant appearance of hot dogs on the culinary stage. At school most of the snacks the kids buy from the cafeteria have, at some point in their preparation, been bathed in a vat of scalding oil and they're usually drenched in some sort of thick, sweet sauce. Walk for five minutes down a street in Bangkok at lunchtime - or breakfast time for that matter - and I would bet you'll see at least that many vendors selling some kind of fried comestibles. and yet, roam the city for a week and you'll be hard pressed to find even a single obese Thai person. There's the occasional chubby adolescent girl, squat older woman or potbellied man but nothing on the order of the massive weight problem we've got back in the states.

From the vendors I passed on my walk home just this afternoon I saw:

deep-fried bananas, deep-fried chicken, deep-fried fish cakes (served with deep-fried basil leaves), deep-fried dough-wrapped quail eggs, spongy deep-fried squid cakes soaked in sweet chili sauce, deep-fried battered slices of white sandwich bread wrapped around banana and strawberry slices (I find this one particularly intriguing), deep-fried chunks of chicken skin,
AND
hot dogs prepared in about 10 different ways [none of which involve a bun, ketchup or mustard]... some wrapped in white bread and deep-fried, others wrapped in a sweet waffle and skewered on a bamboo stick, most of them (in colors ranging from pale pink to vibrant orange) just chopped up and served in a plastic bag, covered in sauce.

you can't help but wonder.. how do they stay so thin? I'll report if i get any leads.


on the morning of Amelia's first day in Bangkok, after enjoying our rice/coconut balls, we ventured down a tiny alleyway bordered on one side by a chocolate milk canal bustling with long tail boats, row boats, canoes. We passed about 5 vendors, all right next to each other, selling som tam (the famous spicy green papaya salad) - the women pounding away with their giant wooden pestles making that distinctive pok pok pok sound as they worked. Farther down the street was a woman whose dinted metal cart was devoted exclusively to deep-fried coconutty battered slabs of banana. We hadn't stopped to look for more than two seconds when she handed us each a slice to try. Burning hot, crisp on the outside, smooth and sweet on the inside and delicious as always, we bought about half a kilo for 10 baht.

fried bananas

packaged in what looks to be paper recycled from some kid's math homework
kjh