Notes:

1. Basically, I searched Google, Twitter and Facebook for people worldwide associated with Lao food, including Lao cooks, chefs, restaurant owners and writers. I emailed about 30 people and asked them to list their top 10 essential Lao cooking ingredients. Out of the 30 people I contacted, 10 people replied and their answers are tallied in the table below. In the email that I sent to the participants, I asked them to list the ingredients in order of importance with #1 being most important, #2 second most important, etc. When I tallied the answers, I gave the #1 ingredient a value of 10 votes, #2 ingredient a value of 9 votes, etc. The votes in the above table is the total of all of the participants’ answers. Thus, the more votes the ingredients have, the more important the ingredient is regarded by the participants in the survey. Please don’t be offended if I did not contact you to participate in the survey. The reason is simply because I could not find you or a way of contacting you in my search. If you’re a Lao cook or chef and would like to participate and contribute to this survey, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment below with your specific top 10 essential Lao cooking ingredients, and I’ll add it to the table. Korp jai der! ↩
2. I encountered several issues in this survey. Initially, I thought the openness of the question, ‘What do you consider to be the top 10 essential Lao cooking ingredients?’ would allow the participants to interpret and answer the question freely. Unfortunately, the term ‘ingredients’ is too broad and can range from herbs/spices to meat/protein. Hence, to list just 10 ingredients is both restricting and challenging. Consequently, some of the participants listed more than one ingredient as “one ingredient”, for example, ‘lemon & lime’, ‘dried/ground & fresh chili’, ‘spring onion & shallot’, ‘leafy greens’, ‘ginger & galangal roots’, ‘fresh herbs’ and ‘fish & meat’. This made it difficult for me to tally their answers and I just left these answers as they are in the table. To simplify the survey and for the record, I combined ‘brown sugar’ with ‘sugar’ to create one ingredient, and I separated the answer ‘ginger & galangal roots’ (4 votes) into 2 votes each and added them individually to the table. ↩
3. I would like to say thank you to all the participants involved in this survey. I really appreciate you taking the time to reply back to my email. As much as I appreciate the time and effort of all the participants involved in this survey, I would like to stress that the results in this survey is based on the opinions of only 10 participants, hence it should not be taken as definitive. If more participants were involved, the results will be different and there will most likely be other ingredients listed in the table as well. I think that the results in this survey are useful and can provide the basis for a more in-depth/controlled survey in the future, for example, participants are asked to choose (a number of ingredients) from a list of determined ingredients what they consider to be the most essential Lao cooking ingredients. ↩