$100 Vietnamese Night Market Challenge!! Super CHEAP Street Food in Saigon!!

In this video, you're going to see me attempt to spend $100 on street food in one of Saigon's famous night markets. The name of this market is Ho Te Ke. This market is mainly on one big street that is completely lined with different food stalls. It's become so popular now that anywhere you can fit a mini kitchen, people are putting food and selling food. It is 5.40pm right now, and so the sun is going to keep going down, and more and more food vendors are going to come out, as well as hungry patrons. I'm very excited. Let's do this. This is our first place. It's called Ban Trung Gai, Nan Hong Kong. Apparently, this place takes inspiration from Hong Kong, but maybe not the food that I'm interested in. Here they have a special egg sausage dish, which I know doesn't sound that exciting, but if you grew up white trash like me, those are essential cooking ingredients, and they found a way to remix them here like I've never seen before. It starts with a sausage that's wrapped in an egg. From there, she puts on ketchup, then shrimpies, then mayonnaise, and finally pork floss. Come take a look. When I flip it around back, you can see the egg, how it's wrapped around the sausage. You can't even see the sausage at this point, but I'm telling you, it is there. Let's try it out. Mmm. Wow. So much happening. My mind is full of confusion. The sausage is super soft, almost like a pate, and then the sauce, it's sweet, it's savory. You get a little bit of texture from the shrimp in there. I'm going to try taking a little bit of a smaller bite this time. Mmm-hmm. Sausage, egg. You get the texture from both. You get the flavor from both. The strength of Vietnamese street food is in the creativity and the innovation, always coming up with new stuff, because you don't need a ton of money to create really interesting, delicious street foods. I love it. This is our first food. We are just getting started. Let's keep going. Boom. On to our second food right here. This is one of my favorite foods in Vietnam, and a food that I never actually even tried until moving to this country. I'm talking about the snail. This is no ordinary snail. Come take a close look. You can see that the snail has something poking out of it. That is not the actual snail body. That is pork. So they've actually removed the snail, they add pork in, and I think they put the snail back into the snail, and they tie it all in there with a piece of lemongrass. I think I'll get six of these, and then they have another kind of snail over here. Nothing extra stuffed inside, it's just a snail. I'm gonna try them both, sit down, and give it a ride. It's right here. Two types of snails. I'm very excited, because I haven't had snails for a long time. Right here we have a fresh water snail. This is from the Mekong Delta. She put a bunch of different stuff in there. We've got ginger, chilies, some different herbs. Before she even gives it to you, she boils it in coconut water, which is a very Mekong Delta thing to do. Oh, this is what we want right here. See, that's the meat right here, and that is the little poop sack on the bottom, and you can eat all of that. Oh yeah, delicious. It's interesting, because some parts of the snail are kind of gooey, and almost oyster-like, and then some parts are really crunchy. Not crunchy like a potato chip, but like crunchy how sometimes meat can get a little bit crunchy. Even with no fish sauce, quite delicious, and you can actually taste the coconut water that she boiled it in. Next up, right here, this is the pork snail. When you pick it up, oh, these are stuffed together. In order to take it out, they've tied some lemongrass here. So you get the lemongrass, you hold it on both sides, and you pull. Buried inside all that meat is the actual snail itself. Very cool, very creative. I'm going to try it out without any sauce. Let's go for it. You taste the lemongrass, and this beautiful pairing of just juicy, savory pork, and inside of that is that crunchy, delicious snail. Two things you wouldn't think would go together well. You don't exactly picture a pig and a snail holding hands, walking down the beach together. They don't seem like they'd be star-crossed lovers. But in this instance, those two ingredients go together incredibly well. I'm going to dip the rest of this in this fish sauce. Oh, it's glistening. Firework. That is incredible. Next food. Let's go. We've just stumbled upon our next food right here. Oh my gosh. The pan is hot. She is frying some of this batter right now. So this is a rice batter that she's putting into this tin. This is a dish called Banh Cat. It's very famous in the city called Vung Tau, but here she's kind of remixed and made her own version of it. So right now she's putting in these little quail eggs into each one, and then you get to pick other toppings that you want inside your little fried cup. So she's putting in some artificial crab legs, some shrimp. Right now she's adding in some pork to some of the cups, then scallion oil, so scallion on top of everything. From their crispy fried onions. It looks like we may have had a slight miscommunication, because I have four plates of food in front of me right here. But the total comes up to $160,000, which means we're getting even closer to our goal. This one right here, you can see some of the crunchy scallions on top, you can see that green onion. Even the outside, it is like rippling crispiness. I just want to see how it tastes on its own. Let's go for it. It's almost like a little creamy inside, on the outside, ultra-crunchy, crispy. You can taste a little bit of the meat, you can taste the egg in there, but I gotta say, there's almost no flavor here. The flavor is really gonna come from any of the herbs you put on it, or this hotin fish sauce right here. And that has, I believe, some pickled radish. So the next move is to grab one and really completely submerge it in this sauce. That is a delicious sauce. And I'm telling you, if you went so... Uh-oh. It's raining. We're in Vietnam, the humidity is like 98%. I'm actually not even sad that it's raining right now, because it is so hot, I look like I just ran a 5K. Wow, it's getting crazy out here. While everyone is out there, panicking, I'm in my little zone of happiness right here. It cannot be interrupted, I cannot be stopped. Check this one out. We've got mock crab, more scallions, more fried shallots. I'm gonna put that in the sauce. I'm gonna put some of these on there too. Let's try another bite. I love it. When you come to Southeast Asia, any time you see somebody with one of those pins that has these little divots just big enough for these to be made inside of, you have to try it out. It's gonna be fried, crunchy, and absolutely delicious. This is a big win. Plus, we spent almost $6 here, so we're really racking up the money. It's still raining. Oh, this is not good. I'm trying to get as close to the counter as I can. My ass is getting poured on right now. Right here, they have a big selection of meats, a nice big variety. I've just ordered one of these. So take a look at this. This is a seafood selection. Huge tentacles here, or you can get a whole octopus like this. I've ordered a whole octopus. It's on the grill right now next to some kebabs. In addition to the octopus, I'm gonna get some of these. This is bo nuong, beef that's been grilled, and they squeeze it on some lemongrass like that. So it's already cooked. They're just gonna reheat it. And then I think we'll try this too, because it's not something you see every day in Vietnam. This is called bo la lot. This is beef, and it is wrapped up in a la lot leaf. Right here, this is what the bo la lot looks like before it is grilled. He's putting some oil on there and then transferring it to the grill, and that is gonna cook up beautifully. All right, let's go. I am soaked. So here's a bunch of different food. We're gonna build up to this octopus, but I wanna introduce you to this first. It is a ground beef that they've mixed with delicious spices. They've formed it around here. It's almost like a Vietnamese kebab. So I'm gonna try it just how it is. Let's go for it. Oh yeah. You can tell there's fish sauce in the meat, because it's so sweet. It's got this umami kind of savoriness to it. You can see how it's just wrapped around the lemongrass so wonderfully, and it picks up a little bit of flavor from the lemongrass too. This is so good. I don't think it needs any sauce added to it. Happiness. Over here, bo la lot. So they've got four of them together on a stick. Each stick is about a dollar, which is a great deal too. It's sweet, it's juicy. The leaf is hard to describe. I mean, I could just say the exact name, but if you've never tried it, it wouldn't mean anything to you. It's just very fragrant and aromatic, and it adds its own flavor to the meat itself. It's like a little meat cigar. Time to light up, baby. Over here. The octopus. I'm going to rip off one of these big tentacles. You can see these little suckers, tiny on the bottom, getting bigger as they move up the tentacle. I'm going to put it in this green chili sauce, sop some of that up, and take it down. I know a lot of Americans know calamari, and unfortunately they just know that one version of squid, which is kind of cut up and fried, but grilled octopus is so incredible. This chili sauce, it is so fresh, so spicy, and that's combining with the sauce they put on there already. Incredible. Fresh seafood right here in this market. We've gone from eggs wrapped in hot dogs to this so far in just a little bit of time. I think we're doing great. Let's keep this train moving. Right here, we have our next food. This is something I did not expect to see in this market. It is sea urchin, but let me show you how they make it. The first thing he does, he puts it on the grill, and then he cracks a quail egg into it. Then he lights up his torch, and he torches it from the bottom, getting the whole thing to kind of start boiling up, cooking the egg inside. Next step, he's putting in the cheese. We've ordered two with cheese and two with peanuts. So that is some kind of a liquid cheese, like I've never seen before. Torches that up. Then we've got these green scallions going in with some scallion oil and some nice peanuts on top. Oh yes. He's going to throw these on the platter, bring that to the table. We've got ourselves a nice little treat. And now we're back. Sea urchin is not my favorite food. To me, it tastes kind of metallic, but here, he's prepared it in a different way. So we have the sea urchin, we have some of the egg, and then some of the cheese on there too. Some of the most random ingredients I've ever seen together. Moment of truth. Let's try it out. Oh, I like that. I cannot guarantee you that there's sea urchin in here. Mostly it just tastes like cheesy, almost mayonnaise-y eggs. I literally have scraped everything out of the bottom, so there has to be sea urchin in here. Let's try one more bite. I think there's a hint of sea urchin in there. It's not a strong flavor. Mostly you're getting some of that really processed cheese, which is actually pretty tasty. And then the quail egg. So for one of these, it's 50,000 dong. That's about two and a half dollars. So you're paying about one dollar per bite here. That is pretty pricey. Let's try this one. So this one here is scallion, peanut, and sea urchin. Definitely there's some sea urchin meat in there. That's very nice too. Wow. I'm very pleasantly surprised by this. It's not a big quantity of food, but it's quite delicious. I love the scallion oil flavor. It's one of my favorite flavors or ingredients that they use in Vietnam, so it obviously has that really strong scallion taste. Plus the crunchiness of those nuts and just a little bit of meatiness from that sea creature. That is awesome. And when you're trying to get it to a hundred dollars, that is the way to do it, because that's roughly ten dollars right here for ten bites and all. I'm getting slightly full, but we still have a couple more foods to go. Let's keep it going. Boom, and we're on to food number nine or so. It is almost 9 p.m. We've been here for a few hours now, rocking this street food. I found another one that I like, and I'm going to try it out, and then I'm going to show you. It's kind of complicated, the recipe though, so let me take you through it step by step. It all starts with an orange rice paper that she has to spritz like a houseplant. From there, it gets one layer of chili salt. She spreads out some beautiful herbs on top. A quail egg gets cut into several pieces. Next, some scallion oil, then crushed peanuts, fried onions, some satay sauce, and then it's time for the rolling. This is the most important step. It's actually not. They're all important. For the texture, you want it to be rolled nice and tight. I mean, this is rolled tighter than one of Snoop Dogg's joints. Then she's going to take them all, cut them with the scissors. Now she's putting on some mayonnaise. So that is complete, and we're ready to bring it to the table. Another vendor, another food. This is banh chanh cuon. So banh chanh means rice paper. This orange stuff right here is the rice paper cuon, means the roll. Chewy rice paper on the outside, and tons of different interesting fillings on the inside. A little bit of mayonnaise on the top. Let's try it out. I love this one, and it's hard to explain why. This is a dish very unique to Vietnam, served all over the place, but each place, they stuff it with slightly different ingredients or put different toppings on top. But always, what I keep coming back for is that texture. It's so chewy. All right, I'm breaking off another piece here. Flavor-wise, it's spicy. It's salty. Then you taste some of the fresh herbs. Then you taste creamy quail eggs. Then the crunchy onion. Creamy mayonnaise on top. It is just a mind-bending experience with all these flavors and textures together. It is street food innovation at its best. I love it. All right, folks. This is our last food for the evening. It is coming up on 10 p.m., and I simply cannot stuff any more food inside of me. Here, this is something famous in Vietnam, and something you won't find in a lot of places outside of here, because they look at sweets and desserts a little bit differently. First of all, avocado. It's blended up into a puree on top of that. Coconut three ways. Coconut ice cream, a sweet shredded coconut, and then a super crispy coconut on top, mixed with some crunchy, salty peanuts. It's awesome. It's refreshing. And it's 30,000 đồng, less than a dollar and a half. Some ice cream, some of the shredded coconut. It's going to take some work to even get to the avocado, but that is looking nice. Oh, it's so refreshing. So coconut-y. From three different coconut attacks, I feel like I could bring to the surface some of that avocado. Yeah, look at that. Green avocado mixed with ice cream and everything else in there. Let's give it a try. This is a stunning cup. The avocado, aside from the taste, you know, it has a lot of natural fats, and it's just so creamy. When you mix it with some sugar, some ice cream, and some crunchy bits like this, oh my gosh, it is priceless and delicious. At the end of a day of long eating, if you're feeling stuffed, go with something like this. Stomachs always have room for dessert somehow. So that is 10 foods. I've reached my limit. I'm going to tally up the total and meet you for a nice little conclusion. Let's see if we broke $100 today. Boom, guys, that is the end of the video. I mean, I didn't even say anything. Today I've eaten over 10 foods, but does that amount of money equal over $100? We're tabulating now. There's tabulating sound effects. The final amount is not enough. I just don't need to think this is some kind of gimmick, the $100 thing. I am so convinced in my next three videos where I attempt the $100 challenge, I swear I'm going to make it happen. This street right here in particular that we've been on all night is good, clean, fun, lots of food, affordable prices. This is one of my most favorite places to go at night in Vietnam, if you don't mind being wet the whole time. I didn't even pee my pants, that's literally all rainwater and sweat water. Guys, that is it for this one. Thank you so much for watching. I will see you next time. Peace. All right. That is it. I've got to find an umbrella or dry clothes.