Get your meez on

Thai dinner from the almighty wok

I wanted to cook outside because of the heat, so I was looking at either the grill or the wok. I felt like Thai food and had summer squash, shrimp, and rice noodles laying around. Since I couldn't do the noodles on the grill, I went with doing everything in the wok.

The noodles. I used a pad thai style sauce: FLS and tamarind. The noodles had been soaking overnight in cold water in the frig, so I simply drained them , threw them into the hot oiled wok, let them caramelize a little, and then poured in the sauce, which bubbled, reduced, and was absorbed as the noodles cooked through. I finished them with cilantro and scallion.

The squash. Lately I don't make curries as curries, preferring instead to reduce them into a thicker and more intense sauce. I find I like the vegetables grilled or stir-fried with a curry sauce instead of a full-blown curry, so that both retain their separate flavors. And, I don't have to make as much. I finally used the last of that curry paste from a while back to make the sauce. (Once it turns cold I'll probably go the other way and make all my curries into soups.) I served the rest of the sauce separately, and it was nice on the shrimp, too.

The shrimp. These were easy: just sear them in a hot wok and then turn the heat way down and season with a little FLS. The searing gives them a nice flavor and the lower heat helps them warm through without becoming tough.

The plate. I plated these things with pickled carrots and cucumbers. The carrots were done with OJ, ginger, and cider vinegar; the cucumbers were in a plain brine. I also garnished with little purple basil buds, fried shallots, and (of course!) shredded chile.

Fish over a wood fire

Summer sometimes feels like a race to enjoy all of the great produce while it's here. We're lucky to have a farmer's market close to us, and we have cherry tomatoes and green beans growing in our little side-yard plot. A lot of meals lately have been very simple: lots of grilled zucchini, green beans, steamed red potatoes, and as much corn on the cob as possible, along with something like chicken or pork chops slapped on the grill without too much thought. Our little cherry tomatoes (about a dozen a day) never even make it off the counter.

Whole grilled fish. Cooking with wood is fun, and cooking whole fish is fun, and together you get sort of a grilling speedball.  I got some little red snappers from the Asian market because I have been thinking a lot about little grilled fish lately, particularly sardines and anchovies. Since we don't get those here, I had to settle for the snapper.

Started with the usual wood fire:

Laid the fish right on the hot grill after oiling both the grill and the fish:

When they were good and seared on the first side, I moved them away from the fire and closed the lid to finish them up. Since I'd oiled both the grill and the fish they lost a little skin but really didn't stick, and they held together pretty well:

 

The wood still smokes a fair amount, so while they cook they also take on a nice smoky flavor:

The sauce.  I made another summer salsa, this one Thai-inspired with diced hearts of lemongrass, radish, and a little chile, seasoned with FLS:

This dinner was definitely hands-on: we ate the fish with our hands, since I don't know how to get the little bones out any other way, and had plenty of corn on the cob to go with it.

I served the fish au naturel with basil, cilantro, and fried shallots. This  way to eat fish is definitely not for everyone, but the 5 year old thought that eating the head was the bomb, and my wife grew up on little fish that her brother and cousins had caught from local lakes, so this was old hat. And it is pretty fun to eat the meat off the little fish heads.

Thai-flavored ribs

During the summer we have more informal, quick, and sporadic meals, usually in the form of a frig full potato salad, cole slaw, pickles, and sloppy joe meat, or as they call it where my wife is from, "Tavern" (or, less appetizingly and less fortunately, "loose meats"). So dinners are quick and light, with usually some kind of light supper later on, often more of the same. I had a small rack of ribs left from the weekend that I had intended to smoke, so I made some Thai-flavored ribs.

I braised them in about equal amounts of fish sauce, sherry, and palm sugar (maybe 1/4C each), and then added enough water to come up the ribs halfway. I covered the glass baking pan with foil, and braised them for about an hour and a half at 250, or whatever the real oven temp is. I then removed the foil and let the liquid reduce. After it was syrupy, I put them under the broiler and basted them with the bubbly glaze every few minutes.

Dayum.

My wife liked them, without knowing that fish sauce was one of the primary seasonings. Served with a side garnish of mint and chile, with crunchy fried almonds on top for textural contrast, and a lime to counteract the sweetness and saltiness. As usual, mint completely elevates it. There is just something about the combination of fish sauce with mint, or with Thai basil, or both: something Righteous and Good. And Right.

Chicken legs in Thai underpants

Here is my trusty Weber grill that I bought for $10 at a yard sale in 1998. I've grown tired of it lately, and so I leave it out in the elements, but it refuses to die. I have a mix of contempt and sneaking admiration for this thing.

One of my favorite things in summer is grill-roasted chicken. I love the bacon-like crisp skin. The meat is nice too, but it is really about the skin. I rarely do a whole chicken, because no one here likes white meat. I like legs about once or twice a month and whole birds about once or twice a season.

To set up for grill-roasting, I fill a chimney starter with charcoal, let them burn down, and then put them on each side of the grill. I have the Weber charcoal holders, but they are not absolutely necessary. You can also add wood chunks for smoke flavor. I don't bother soaking the wood, and I'm not sure why people do that; the water does not penetrate the wood, and burns off quickly anyway, leaving you with...dry wood. I leave all the vents open, partially because the bottom vent covers have all fallen off.

Another great use for all that curry paste we put away: stuff it under the skin of chicken leg quarters, along with salt and whole mint leaves. After trying the infamous Zuni roast chicken, I am a real believer in tucking flavorful things under the skin and letting them perfume the meat for up to three days in the frig. It really does add a lot of flavor, and the salt seasons the meat throughout. In this case, the paste is mostly aromatic vegetables (garlic, shallot, lemongrass, ginger), all of which work beautifully with chicken. But then again, what doesn't work beautifully with chicken?

I put the legs down the center of the grill and cover for about an hour to an hour and twenty minutes. The internal temp is usually around 400 degrees. An hour and twenty minutes is usually about right for very crispy brown skin, but they usually come up to temperature within an hour or less. Dark meat can take being overcooked, and the flavorings and the skin make up for the lack of totally juicy and succulent meat, although I should say that this meat is still really good so the tradeoff is more than fair.

Scallops

I have the good fortune of being the only one in my house who likes scallops. I've had a Welcome Spring  idea rolling around in my head for awhile now involving scallops, asparagus, and morels. It hadn't quite materialized until I ran into some fresh morels and decided to make a go of it. These were nice dry sea scallops that I grilled briefly over a very hot fire. The dish came together very easily.

• Browned some corn in a hot dry skillet.
• Sauteed the morels in butter with a little splash of sherry and some salt and pepper.
• Made the sauce by frying the same curry paste I made a while back, and then adding coconut milk and simmering for a a while to get the flavor of the paste. I strained the sauce so that it would be smooth, reduced it a little, and seasoned with FLS.
• Quick steamed the asparagus and then shocked it in ice water.

That's about it. I heated the morels briefly in the butter and gave the asparagus a quick dip in simmering water before plating, then finished by garnishing with mint and chile.

As with the steak from the other night, the idea is to let the scallops take center stage, with things to help highlight aspects of its flavor, like the sweetness with the corn and coconut, the freshness with the asparagus and garnishes, and the earthiness with the morels.

The picture is kind of a heartbreaker, but the dish was most excellent.

Steak night in Thailand

 

Steak sauce. I wanted to make a steak sauce with big Thai flavors. I was looking for a big savory/umami hit, just like the one I had previously gotten from fish sauce in a Thai beef salad. The fish sauce really brought out the beefiness. Shrimp paste has a deeper, darker, and, well, fishier flavor than the fish sauce I use, and when you fry it it becomes even more so. But as always, the fish taste is way in the background once everything is put together, and what you get is a dark savory complexity. If this sounds silly, check out the ingredients on a bottle of Lea & Perrins.

To start, I fried some garlic and then added some sugar to caramelize. I then fried some shrimp paste (left), stopped the frying with some sherry and fish sauce, and added some hoisin for more sweetness (right).

Then some peanut butter (left). Once all the ingredients were incorporated I pureed the liquid, strained it (right)

 

and reduced it (right) a little until thick.

 

Here is what I ended up with:

At this point I have something approaching the soft ball stage that is too concentrated and too sweet to use as it is. I have the earthy, funky, dark, sweet flavors  that I wanted to build, and so I can set it aside and correct the seasoning when I'm ready to use it, when I'll add a fair amount of lime juice to brighten it up and counteract the sweetness. I'll also add some juices from the resting meat to get it to the consistency I want.

The steak. Since I was building some big Thai flavors in a sauce, I needed a big beefy steak to stand up to it. Skirt steak fits the bill. It is similar to flank steak, and I think it has an even bigger beef taste than flank. Because they are quite thin, in order to get a good sear without overcooking them you need a serious amount of heat. For small cuts like this I'll typically use the chimney starter as the cooker, which works great and is a lot of fun. I had salted the steak 24 hours in advance, which meant that it was nicely seasoned. Contrary to what we've always heard, salting in advance is a great idea: it seasons the meat throughout and causes it to retain more water (just like brining), which makes it more forgiving and makes it seem juicier. It also pulls some proteins to the surface that help with browning.

Plating. After letting the meat rest about 10 minutes under foil, I sliced it against the grain and plated it with fried almonds and shallots, a lime wedge, chile and mint, and some of the sauce (notice the change in color and texture from the last sauce picture):

 

The plating is OK, but I'm not sure it quite captures the dish. Nonetheless, everything tasted great together. The idea is to let the beef speak the loudest, and add in little hits of this and that to accentuate and complement certain aspects of it, like with the earthiness of the almonds,  the sweetness of the shallots, and the freshness of the mint, chile, and lime.

Crispy sweet pork belly starter

I can't imagine a better way to use the pork belly from yesterday than to make the crispy sweet stuff. To get it to a glazed and crispy stage, I cooked it in a mixture similar to the one I’d braised it in, namely

• Fish sauce
• Hoisin
• Oyster sauce
• Sherry

To start the sauce I sauteed some garlic until golden:

Added some sugar to caramelize:

And caramelized the garlic with the sugar:

Then I added the sauce ingredients, reduced it a little, and put in some deep-fried pork belly. It took on a nice glaze, a lot like barbecued ribs but crisper, sweeter, darker, more complex, and porkier. Again, a little goes a long way.

I put it with a little salad of fresh grapefruit and pickled cucumber, marinated briefly with a little fish sauce and a little sugar, to tame it slightly and give it that whiff of something more going on:

I think of this as a starter: a little more than a salad, but not a whole meal by itself. The grapefruit and cucumber have enough acid to stand up to the very rich pork, and the grapefruit pairs with the sauce in a wonderful way. Think duck a l'orange but simultaneously richer and more powerfully citrusy.

This is where those little things we put away really step up. I sprinkled the pork with fried shallots to add earthiness and shrimp powder for its salt and note of shrimp bacon. Pork and shrimp are great pals, and here they're both dressed to the nines and ready to hit the town on a three-day bender. The salad side I sprinkled with fried ginger, whose floral crispiness  enhances the grapefruit.

And the mint just

Blows.

It.

UP!

Pork belly

One of the great neglected cuts of meat in America is pork belly, although it is becoming more popular. Although it is less common for people to cook it at home, it is the same piece of meat that becomes bacon when it is cured and smoked, so its nice striation of fat and meat is immediately recognizable.

In Thai cuisine. Pork belly shows up in Thai food often as snack food sold by street vendors. As with many other Asian cuisines, there are many recipes for crispy/sweet pork belly, involving first steaming it to render some of the fat and soften it, and then cooking it in soy sauce and sugar until the sauce reduces to a sweet glaze and the pork gets crispy.

This one. For this piece I braised it sweetened soy sauce and water to impart some flavor. It came out of the oven very succulent, although with all that fat it is hard to imagine it coming out any other way. This is a good thing to put away in the freezer, in large part because the richness and size of the piece make it difficult to do much with unless you are feeding a bunch of people. I like tocut quarter to half inch slices and put them in ziploc bags. It’s a nice addition to stir fries, particularly for vegetables, and you can always pull out a piece and make the sweet crispy pork.

It is not something you eat much of by itself, unless you are doing lots of hard physical labor in sub-freezing conditions. But, nothing beats a little fried belly for a mainline hit of porcine essence.

Braised pork belly, deep-fried:

Your meez on steroids

Or, for the less gentle crowd, kitchen crack. Flavorful, addictive little things that put your food over the top. Each culture has its stock of these kind of ingredients that are used as flavorful garnishes. But they're more than garnishes; more like flourishes. In fact, if you are really going to learn another cuisine, a useful first step is to take a little time and make some of these kinds of basic preparations, and more importantly, have them around ready to use, which is the important part.

The meez. I don't think of the meez as just a convenient arrangement of things while I'm cooking, but rather as something that extends to the whole kitchen, and includes all those things that I have on hand, things I can produce and use quickly. That is, things I can put right into the meez with very little effort on my part and get a big return.

Such as:

Fried Thai things. In particular with SE Asian cuisine, fried things like shallots, ginger, and nuts come up over and over again. If you have to make these things every time you need them, a simple Thai relish or curry becomes a protracted but infrequent affair. But if you invest less than an hour and make enough to store, then you're much closer to a the Thai swoon at any given time.

Shallots frying:

Shallots. The hardest thing I had to do was peel the shallots. To peel them quickly, I slice off both ends, slice them in half lengthwise (i.e. end to end) , and peel off the whole outer layer. You sometimes sacrifice a little of the flesh, but it goes much easier. Once they were cleaned I just pushed them through the thin slicing disk on the food processor and put them into hot oil, which I heated until it was shimmering and swirling a little bit.

Shallots done:

Ginger. Next up was ginger. If you have a nice sharp paring knife, then the ginger peel comes right off. You need to hold the pieces in some water with a little lemon or lime juice to keep it from turning blue. Once the pieces were peeled, I used the fine shredding disk on the food processor and then into the oil they went.

Fried ginger:

Almonds. I finished with fried almonds. Nuts can just as easily be roasted in a 300 degree oven or even in a dry pan, but I find that the heat transfer is much more consistent in hot oil, and they take on a light gingery shallot flavor from the oil. No prep work needed; I just put in as many almonds as would fit on the surface of the oil. Once they darken a little, I fish one out and break it open. I'm looking for a light amber color all the way through. I chopped half and kept half whole. These things are rich, but they go a long way because their flavor is deeper and more concentrated.

Fried almonds, whole and chopped:

Portable. And, these things translate to other cuisines very readily. What food (besides desert)  couldn't be improved by the crispy dark sweetness of fried shallots? Or the bright piquant filaments of that ginger? For example, used the almonds in an Sichuan-style orange beef stir-fry:

All of these things are great in salads, but there's one more thing I need before I put together a salad...

Thai tempura

I think there is a fine middle ground in cuisine where techniques typically associated with one culture can be profitably combined with ingredient and flavor profiles from another culture, and still make sense.  In this case, it is not exactly a stretch, as frying is certainly known in Thai cuisine, and elevated to a Platonic ideal in Japanese cuisine.

Tempura 101. Tempura is a very light, delicate, crispy batter-fried thing. The batter is typically equal parts powders and liquid, with the powders being mostly flour and sometimes cornstarch, baking powder, salt, or sugar. The liquid is typically cold water, but may include club soda or beer, and an egg may be mixed in. The egg may be whole or just the white or the yolk, and whipped until light or not. The liquids are mixed well together and the solids are mixed well together, but the liquids and solids together are expected to be lumpy and undermixed. The idea is to not overwork it, and to not create a batter that is going to form a strong barrier. Usually with tempura, the food being fried is still very much visible, unlike, say, fried chicken.

The magic of frying. Any frying done correctly does not impart much oil to the food, but rather draws out a lot of moisture via steam, which leaves the food very flavorful. The steam exiting from the food keeps the oil out. Some oil will collect on the surface, and a little will be absorbed by the batter.

Pickles. I made some quick pickles the night before to have at the table for noshing before and between tempura waves. Pickles nicely complement fried foods. The carrots were steamed slightly and pickled in OJ and cider vinegar with ginger. I’ve had the red cabbage around for awhile now. It is in a plain vinegar-sugar-salt solution with a hint of clove and allspice The cucumbers were salted and put in ice water overnight. I dressed them right before serving with a little soy and sesame oil. They were light and crisp with a slight nutty flavor from the sesame oil. The bok choy was the heavyweight: Chinese black vinegar and chile garlic paste. By far my favorite, and despised by everyone else.

Condiments. I put sort of a Thai twist on this by serving it with an FLS sauce with chiles. I also put out a soy dipping sauce too as well as some sea salt for an extra blast.

The stuff. This was the first round. In keeping with the Thai theme, I included some mint leaves, red chiles, scallion, and thinly-sliced ginger. The ginger and mint take on a lighter flavor with frying, but are still explosive. Also, some shrimp and sweet potato, both of which are fairly standard. The fun part is making little combinations as you eat it; shrimp, ginger, mint, and chile was my favorite.