Thanks Kenny H, will def try the eggplant. JayHack - I went to our local mega-pan-ethnicity grocery store (Buford Highway Farmers Market), which carries just about every imaginable latin american and asian produce. It is not supposed to be ripe at all - basically zero sweetness, it’s probably closest to a large, firm cucumber in taste and texture.
On a trip to Portland a few years back my good friend and I had a really nice dinner at Pak Pak. Tried lots of stuff and everything was great. The wings were great. Went home and wanted to make the wings. IIRC F&W had named those wings one of their dishes of the year or something so the recipe was available. While mine were good they weren’t up to the restaurant version. This is in contrast to my regular hot wings which I prefer to most any restaurant. Regardless they were good. I have tried them with crushed peanuts instead of the garlic and with lots of siracha and that works best.
Jay: I love green papaya salad and buy it at a local vietnamese market. Funniest thing, Kansas City has a real dearth of vietnamese restaurants, not a visibly large asian population for the most part, though with a decent amount of chinese students around, but has two very large, well-stocked vietnamese markets and a very large chinese market. I frequent my preferred vietnamese market for many staples. They always have green papaya. I recommend finding such a market in your town if you haven’t already. There are so many things that I can only get there. Items like fish sauce or different soys are cheaper and larger there (and better options) while items like green papaya, proper bahn mi bread, and countless other items can only be found there.
Great work, Kenny! I just bought the book and have tried only the fiery beef salad, but it was terrific. You cannot have too many Thai cookbooks, and this seems to be a good one. I cook the cuisines of many different countries, but I am not sure that any I cook carries the same satisfaction as Thai. The ingredients can be a bitch to assemble some places, but can usually be grown and/or mail-ordered. However, the techniques are straightforward and easy to master, and there are many first-rate cookbooks available. The gap between homemade Thai and most restaurant Thai is as small as for any cuisine that I can think of. And if one decides to live in Italy and wants to eat anything Asian other than bad Chinese and barely passable sushi, you need to be able to cook it yourself…
Last night was another adventure in Pok Pok, and yet another challenge to manufacture sundries. The recipe du jour was Het Paa Naam Tok (Isaan-style Forest Mushroom Salad). The main hurdle was a toasted sticky rice powder. This requires hours of soaking, an hour of low heat toasting, constant agitation, and finally a very fine grind. The result is a condiment that produces a popcorn like note that marries into the dressing of the salad. The next challenge was producing a smoked chili powder. This is straightforward chili toasting and I would recommend using Guajillo chiles, it produces the correct heat for the recipe portion. I did elect to forego the grill and hit a very hot wok with large chunks of cremini and shitake, at one point deglazing slightly with mirin. This produced great mushrooms with good color and even some slightly burnt edges making up for the lack of grilling. The dressing calls for thin soy sauce in the dressing as a concession to vegetarians, we stuck with the fish sauce original. I also roasted some thick slices of eggplant to put on the side, along with some purple sticky rice.
This was not a salad, it was a meal. And once again, just incredible. Who in their right mind would serve a bunch of mint leaves on top of cooked mushrooms? A perfectly balanced composition, and surprisingly, or not really, that rice powder and chili powder really play a big part. Another face melting, drop your fork and savor, totally new flavor extravaganza. If you look closely at the photo you can see the purple colored powder around the edges of the plate, that is the toasted rice powder and it is a great and critical addition to this dish. Most is sprinkled in as tossed, but you also finish with a drizzled couple pinches.
Wow. That looks awesome. But seems like a ton of work, too.
It’s the little things in these recipes, and you make them in bulk so you can build a cabinet of sundries. Once that is up and going it is actually a very fast assembly. Investing so to speak.
I fixed your post Bill. Other than that single error, your comments were spot on.
LOL! But I promise you, walk a mile in my muddy shoes, and you will discover a newfound joy in your mediocre Asian food in Boise…
Prompted by Mr. Fu’s advice, I picked up a Lodge wok today. $60. I look forward to trying it and if it does not make wok cooking more effective, I will convert it into a nose cone/blast shield for a home made missile or perhaps a bizarre rendition of a NYC bumper pad for my Nissan Versa.
I am tempted by the Pok Pok book but having actually eaten at the PDX restaurant and not having been all that thrilled with the product, the similar book written by the chef behind The Slanted Door seems like a better bet.
I bought a used copy of this book today after eating at the POrtland restaurant. Some of the flavors reminded me of my vacation in Thailand years ago.
Interested in your feedback. I had the beef curry at the Brooklyn location and it was pretty insane. Have not made it.
Will give an update when the book arrives… ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
how’d it go?