Food on Wheels; Eye tim or ice cream
If you live in Thailand or you visit regularly, you most likely have seen the ice cream vendor on his motorbike at some stage.
It's the guy with a fairly normal bike but with a big metal looking box on his on the passenger seat. In this box is his cooled ice or 'eye tim' as the Thai people call it.The interesting thing is however, the way Thais eat their local ice cream. We Westerners are used to a cone filled with ice or a plastic cup or something.
A typical Thai eye tim favorite from this vendor however is ice cream stuffed in sandwich bread, complemented with corn and a sweet milk alike sauce! That's exactly what the vendor in the two pictures above is preparing for the waiting girl! In the picture above he's just pouring the milky sweet sauce onto the ice cream sandwich. Directly behind the big ice cream cooler box is a small row of plastic boxes with the corn and who knows what else goes onto the local eye tim.
That's what I went for and he's filling a cone up right now as we can see in this picture.
A typical Thai eye tim favorite from this vendor however is ice cream stuffed in sandwich bread, complemented with corn and a sweet milk alike sauce! That's exactly what the vendor in the two pictures above is preparing for the waiting girl! In the picture above he's just pouring the milky sweet sauce onto the ice cream sandwich. Directly behind the big ice cream cooler box is a small row of plastic boxes with the corn and who knows what else goes onto the local eye tim.Western taste buds wouldn't befriend this combination too easily I would imagine but as a free from jail card he also sells ice cream in normal cones.
A long plastic bag with cones can be seen on the side of his bike.
That's what I went for and he's filling a cone up right now as we can see in this picture.A couple of more things revealed in this picture is the bell hanging on his left side of the steering wheel, which has an unmistakable sound to the local Thai people, and when they hear it, they know that the 'eye tim' guy is near. Does wonders to my 5 year old son! He gets really excited when he hears this sound and he calls the 'eye tim' guy in who shows up at the back of our house with now way out for us but to buy eye tim for this young fellow!
The wooden stand that prevents the bike from falling over is also a work of local genius and creativeness. Cones, bread and a few other plastic bags are dangling on this side as well. My eye tim in a cone was 10 Baht and it was lovely. I met this eye tim guy on Koh Phangan's Haad Yao beach where I'm currently teaching an IDC about which progress you can update yourself on my dive blog.
Hope you enjoyed this entry of Food on Wheels, it's another nice and interesting aspect of Thai food culture.
Camille
2 comments:
Camille that's a first for me, ice cream man yes, but bread to make an ice cream sandwich.....I have never seen it.
You mention the bell, I am starting to get quite good now and can actually recognise the different sounds each vendor has.
Do you think I've been in Thailand too long?
Hi Mike,
The eye tim man is pretty well known around these shores although all of us in my family prefer the cones over the bread.
Pretty impressive if you start to know the difference in bells!
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