Cheroot, Cheroot, yaddada daddada daddada daddada
It's cheap, it's organic, it's everywhere...if you want to smoke, try the local cheroot.
For more posts from Myanmar, click here. For more posts from Southeast Asia, click here.
The favorite smoke on the streets of Myanmar is what they call a cheroot. It’s a small hand-wrapped hybrid of a filter cigarette and a cigar, costs about ten cents at almost any food stall, and smokes in about 20 minutes.
Now, we have been known to try a cigar occasionally. And we found out about the local cheroots on our first day in Myanmar, at a street noodle stall in Yangon. There one of the sous-chefs was smoking one, saw us eyeing it and offered another to us.
You should know how difficult, if not impossible it is to find a cigar in SE Asia. People just don’t smoke them in the other countries, so maybe you could find a ridiculously expensive one at a resort hotel or those stinky Dutch Masters cigarillos. Anyway, once we were offered a cheroot, it was hard to refuse. And it was pretty good, like a mild and pleasant Dominican one.
Many days later, we saw them being made, and I am pleased to report that the cheroot is not only much more complicated to make than a cigar, which is usually just a few tobacco leaves rolled up, but all the cheroot’s many components are fully organic. Here is the recipe:
Prepare chopped tobacco
Mix in a variety of natural flavorings if you prefer, usually anise or mint
Roll up 5 tobacco leaves on a stick
Fill the tobacco leaves with desired quantity of chopped tobacco
Brush prepared rice paste as glue on the leaves and roll around the chopped tobacco
Attach a filter made of corn husks spiced with tamarind and pineapple
Cut the filter to the right size
Attach a rice paper band
Light it up.
So, go organic; try a cheroot.
Cheroot market image source: [I, Doron, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons]
(For more pictures from Myanmar, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the Myanmar itinerary page.) The post Cheroot, Cheroot, yaddada daddada daddada daddada first appeared on Adventurephiles.