BANGLADESHI FOOD - Fung Bros Food

Hashtag Bengali boys, hashtag Bangladesh What's going on guys welcome to a very special episode of Fumbro's food We are in Jackson Heights Queens right now with my friend Nak. What's up guys, I'm Nak Zammal. And today we are gonna be covering a culture, food, and country that very few of you guys know about. We're talking about Bangladesh. Yo, Nak, why is Jackson Heights Queens special? This is the heart of the South Asian community in New York City, the highest concentration of Bangladeshis in the entire city. A lot of people have been asking us to cover Bangladeshi food and culture for a while now So I'm super excited to do it today. Let's go. In Bengali we say kaitajai. Kaitajai. We're going to a hot bazaar right now. This is like a real authentic hole-in-the-wall spot. Everything tastes like it was made by a grandma. Let's go check it out. Alright, so we are checking out Bengali food right now. Bangladesh, if you guys don't know, it's a desi country. What does desi mean? People talk about desi countries, they mostly talk about India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. But Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan are also part of it, and it just means South Asian. It's another word for South Asian. We have a similar background, similar culture. We got a couple of my homies right here. My name is Manfuzel. We started an organization called Jhal NYC. We do Bengali street food, very traditional stuff, and we employ stay-at-home mothers and new immigrants from Bangladesh. I'm Alvi, and I'm also part of Jhal NYC. Hi, my name is Sumaya. I'm from Queens, and I'm really excited to show you Bangladeshi culture. Shingara. Alright, so this is a shingara. Shingara is generally vegetables, but this has liver in it. That's like something that probably is going to shock some people, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm excited to get into this. What is this sauce? It's a tamarind sauce. Tamarind sauce. It's called tettul in Bengali. Tettul and shingara. I like it. It sounds tight. It's more flakier than I expected. Bigger, too. I don't know. It looks huge right now. Like, to be honest, I barely taste the liver. The liver is just like smoothing everything out for me right now. Almost like a potato would. Yeah. Okay, you guys, we got the Bangladeshi entrees. Now, there is an order to things. What do we start eating with first? Always gotta start with the bortas. Begun borta, eggplant, dal, lentils, fish borta, aloo borta, potato, shima borta, bean, pumpkin. Borta is like a more iron-y type of potato. We got tomato borta, and I think we got a shrimp borta there. So the borta you try with the parboiled rice, and you would also have that with the dal. Dal is just like a lentil stew. It's just super runny and delicious. You want to just take a lot of the dal and then just pour it on the rice. You got to take the lime and squeeze it all over. Okay. And just mix that in. Okay, all right. No, that was really good. With the lemon, too. I've never had that flavor before. I'm gonna start with the dal borta, which is the lentil borta. I mean, we're gonna do it with our hands. Put a little bit over here and just mix it in. And I just knead it in. I got this cut on my finger, so I'm thinking about if I put the bortas in this cut. Can't do it with my right hand because I got the cut. Can't do it with my left hand because... Because this is a cultural taboo. So I'm gonna use a fork. You take like a little bit of everything and you try each dish and you eat it all together. And sometimes it tastes better when you mix them together, too. I'm trying the fish borta. That reminds me of a fish larb. You know, it's like Thai food. It's definitely like larb. Loti is basically like a vine. This right here, bunamangchu, it's made with beef. This is beef? Yeah. Yo, I've never had beef like this before. What they do at home is like if there's leftover beef, they keep cooking it over and over again, right? And it just turns into this later on where it kind of dries out and just gets really crispy and very concentrated in flavor. That reminds me of a rendang. Yeah. Like a beef rendang. So the loti is kind of like okra. It has that like gooeyness inside when you bite into it. Oh yeah, I can taste it. It tastes almost like a squash. Yeah. All right, let's get into the fishes, guys. This is the main part of the meal. This is what makes a Bengali a Bengali, being able to eat these fishes. This is the ilish mas, which is the Hilsa fish, and it's actually the Bangladesh national fish. Also, it looks like there's an egg inside here. Oh, perfect. That's a good thing. Oh, they put an egg inside the fish? No, it's a fish egg. It's the fish egg. Naturally, when they cut it, it was like that. They had a fish. It was pregnant. It was a pregnant fish. All right, man. All right, you guys, I'm gonna mash that into my rice. All right, so I'm looking for bones when I eat this, right? Yeah, you got to be careful. Yeah, there's a lot of bones. That's why people eat with their hands. Bengalis, they eat with their hands, and they kind of just look at the bone, and it's just chew it really well. Would you say that that's the mark of how Americanized a Bengali is? If they don't eat with their hands, people are like, oh, you're kind of Americanized, bro. I don't really eat with my hands. Yeah, honestly, none of us eat with our hands anymore. I used to do it until like high school, and people started asking me, like, why my nails are yellow all the time, and that's when I stopped. I stopped a long time ago, but God do it for the culture, you know? This is the luimas, the carp. The Pokemon. The magic carp. Very similar. You can see the jhol, you know, the sauce that it came with, and there's some cauliflower right here. Oh, yeah, right there. It's more meatier, and the fish is like more like chunks. Am I wrong to say that the food definitely seems less westernized than Indian food? Definitely. Yo, I was feeling the Ilias. And that's why it's the national fish. I feel like the way the meat was too, it was able to absorb more of the flavors than this was, but this was totally the way to go if you're not trying to, you know, be super careful with like every bite. This is definitely like the common foods with India and stuff like that, and it's definitely what you eat when you go to events, weddings, birthdays, that kind of stuff. Right here, we got, this is just a phulao. Yeah, the rice pilaf in Bengali, we call it phulao, clarified butter. They put a little food coloring in there. You gotta swag out the rice. This rice is gonna have flavor on it, despite it kind of looking like white rice. That right there, that's the chicken roast. It has a sweet flavor to it. It's sweet because the onions, caramelized onions. The roast is good, man. The roast is super good. Murgi means... So this is haleem. You want to eat that by itself. Yeah, you do by yourself. It's kind of a stew. Before that, you want to just squeeze that lime. It's all about the lime. All about the lime, guys. It's a stew, it's beef, right? It's beef, there's lentils, there's barley. At first sight, I thought it was going to be a lighter flavor. It's completely different, and it's a flavor that I just never had before. This might be the best haleem in New York City. Yeah, honestly. I don't want to say it on camera, but I think I might beat my moms out. So I think that's it for the meal, and we're going to move on to another very important part of Bengali cuisine, the sweets. All right, so you guys, we are in premium sweets right now in Jackson Heights. My favorite sweet that I usually have when I'm in Bangladesh is the laddu. All right, so these are Bengali sweets. You know, it's a very important part of our culture. These are all sweets that are very authentic to the Bengal region. I like it, man. I'm going to start off with these little Vienna sausage-looking joints. Taste that. That cream and sugar is very heavy in Bengali cuisine. That's pretty good, though. But this is cheese. Yeah. What? Yo, I thought that was bread. We got the khalo jam right here. No, you can see how red that is on the inside. Oh, snap. It's like some carnival food right there. Yeah. Roast is the juice that's just like dripping in. Khalo jam with the roast, that has my co-sign of what that's good. The last ones are gura shundesh. Gura is date sugar. It's like a brown sugar. The concha is like a caramel. Instead of breaking bread, you can break gura shundesh with other people. Like, hey, my brother has some gura shundesh. This is called bapapita, and it's steamed rice flour cake with brown sugar and coconut on the inside. Coconut, brown sugar, and steamed rice? Yeah, rice flour. Oh, okay, like a bao. Yeah, I like that. This is deli pizza. It's another pastry. It's deep fried. They use brown sugar also. Don't worry about the horns, man. It's lit. This is New York, man. Like Perkz said, New York don't know how to be quiet, man. Right. We're cooking tamuri. It's puffed rice with a lot of different things inside. There's some mustard oil, lemon juice, and black salt. And the way he's going to mix it up right now is just getting all the flavors incorporated with the puffed rice. Have you been out to tamuri? Smoky. I like it. It's that lemon flavor, that cilantro. How would you describe this flavor to people? I'd say trail mix is the best way to put it. Like a spicy, savory trail mix. All right, you guys, so we just came from Jackson Heights, and now we're in Elmhurst, Queens. And we are at Tangra Masala, which is a Chinese-style Indian cuisine. This is a huge staple in our community. Everyone's eating here. If you're Bengali specifically, you come here for graduations, birthday parties. The whole Indo-Chinese, Bengali-Chinese food is massive for us. But I actually got my homie who's ethnically Chinese, but grew up in India. Wing, right there. What's up, guys? What's up, man? What's up, Wing? So I'm Chinese ethnically. I was born in Calcutta, which is in West Bengal, right next to Bangladesh. And that's why I was born. All right, cool, man. Well, let's go check it out. So these are chicken lollipops. This is a staple with all Indo-Chinese food. You'll find it at every Indo-Chinese restaurant. Super popular. The sauce is so good. If they sold it separately, I would so buy it. Chicken. Oh, good. So these are momos, steamed momos. If you're Nepali, if you're Tibetan, if you're Himalayan, you're very familiar with this. Most, you know, Indo-Chinese restaurants in America, you'll find this. Gotta get it with the hand. Gotta dip it in the sauce. Just gotta get a little in the corner. There you go. I feel like it's a real fusion, the flavors. You definitely taste those spices that they added that you probably wouldn't find in a Tibetan place, you know what I mean? And then this is Manchurian chicken, and it's another like a Hakka Chinese and India specialty. You know, you won't, again, you won't find this, you know, within Hakka cuisine in China. This is chili chicken, which is another one of those staples. It's a Hakka staple of the Chinese. Definitely one of the most popular Indo-Chinese dishes. This is salt and pepper hydra prawns. Yeah, prawns are also like, because we talked about earlier how seafood is a huge part of Bengali culture and cuisine and everything like that. This is, you know, a tribute to that. Like prawns are like a big deal just as much as fishes. And then this is a chow mein. It's like a mixed chow mein. It's kind of like how, you know, American chow mein is down to. It's like, you know, the same as traditional chow mein. This is another, you know. I can tell the Bengali-Indian influence though, because look at that color. What's it like being kind of like, being a Chinese person who grew up in a Bengali part of India? So, I mean, honestly, it was awesome. Like, I got to experience a lot of different kinds of food, a lot of different kind of culture, and it just kind of opens your eyes up. You see a lot of different things, you know what I'm saying? It's not just like one thing. You see everything. It's a little wider spectrum, so you have more perspective, I'd say. All right, you guys, thank you so much for watching that episode of Fungo's Food and Culture. We were in Queens, New York today, and until next time, we're out. Peace. I really appreciate you guys watching this. I hope you learned something. I'm Alvi. You can follow me on Instagram at alvitode, A-L-V-I-T-O-D-H-E, and this is my cousin. We're talnyc. You can follow us on Instagram at J-H-A-L-N-Y-C. I hope you enjoyed this episode. You can follow me at S-U-M-A-I-A-A-A with an underscore. Thank you. My name is Wayne. Thanks for watching the episode. Just one message is just spread positivity. Peace out, guys.