Beef Panaeng (Curry)

Recipe taken (and only adapted slightly) from "Fundamentals of Thai Cooking". The panaeng is "perhaps one of the most popular in the Thai repertoire. Salty, sweet and redolent of Thai basil, with the background taste of peanuts, the Curry is enriched with coconut cream..." says the author.

Ingredients:

• 300 g beef skirt steak, cut into short strips (the author recommends beef brisket or cheek, or shank or rib)
• 0.5-0.75 cups coconut cream (see notes on cream below)
• 1.5 cups coconut milk (taken from whole young coconut by piercing a hole and straining)
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce
• vegetables: one Chinese eggplant and ~10 baby carrots chopped into medium pieces
• 3 Kaffir lime leaves, torn
• 3 chilies, cut into strips
• large handful of Thai basil leaves (~30 medium leaves)
• 3 tablespoons good qualities store-bought red curry paste
• 1/4 cup roasted peanuts

Method:
use a mortar and pestle to pound the peanuts into the Curry paste until smooth. "Fry" the Curry paste in the coconut cream for 5-10 minutes. Season with the fish sauce. Stir in the beef and hard vegetables and cook for a couple minutes. Add the coconut milk and bring to a simmer. Add the soft vegetables and simmer until cooked through. Finish with the Kaffir lime leaves, basil leaves, and chilies.

Analysis:

• Forgot to include palm sugar from original recipe; seemed okay without
• cooked the beef in a relatively short amount of time compared to the several hour braising process described in the original recipe. Perhaps this would make the meat less tough than it was in my case.
• I used "young" coconut milk, which is clear instead of milky and has less of a distinctive coconut flavor. The result seemed satisfactory, though.
• There was a slight grainy texture of peanuts in the final product. I should either work the mortar and pestle longer or use creamy peanut butter instead.

Coconut cream:
I tested out the 2 different brands shown below. "Chaokoh" seems to be the biggest seller at the Asian market up in San Mateo. It however, has 4 added chemicals compared to the 1 in the Savoy brand. They both have similar fat content, between 17 and 20%. The Savoy had the problem, paradoxically (since the other one had the emulsifiers), of being totally emulsified/homogenized which makes it impossible to skim the cream off the top for use in the first step of a standard curry-making process.

Green curry paste & chicken curry

I was determined to make my own Curry paste from scratch. When I was at the (one day) cooking school in Thailand, we started making the Curry paste with the traditional mortar and pestle, but the instructor quickly had us switch over to using a blender for convenience. I figured if a blender is good enough for them, a Cuisinart is good enough for me. My recipe ended up being based partly on a "Cook's illustrated" westernized recipe and another more authentic one from "fundamentals of Thai cooking". Roughly, I used:

Green curry paste (see the ingredients in the first picture):
-24 green chilies (used Seranos instead of birds eye)
-large pinch of salt
-16 cloves garlic
-2 tablespoons galangal, chopped
-4 stalks lemongrass, chopped
-2 tablespoons lime zest
-1/4 cup coriander stems, chopped
-6 shallots, chopped
-2 teaspoons shrimp paste
-20 white peppercorns
- 1 teaspoon coriander seed
-1/2 teaspoon cumin seed

The first step is to toast the seeds in a microwave, or elsewhere, and grind them (I used my mortar and pestle for this). Then, throw everything in the food processor and blend to a paste. My paste ended up being very watery and fairly light green in color. My theory is that my choice of green chilies ended up providing too much water/volume in the final paste.

Making the Curry:
-sauté 1/2 of the Curry paste in some coconut cream mixed with a tablespoon of vegetable oil in a pot until nice and aromatic and with most of the harsher flavors gone
-Throw in your chicken pieces (dark meat cut into strips) and cook until nicely coated and browned
-Add about 2 tablespoons of fish sauce and a can of coconut milk (14 ounces) and bring to a simmer
-At this point I added some strips of green pepper as the main vegetable in the dish
-once the vegetables and chicken is cooked, throw in 3 kaffir lime leaves (torn up) and a pile of basil leaves (torn one or 2 times)

Review:
-Curry paste had the texture more of a salsa than a paste (too much water got in, probably through the larger chilies)
-The final Curry was somewhat oily appearance; not sure why exactly
- Like the other recent curries I've made, this one was quite runny; perhaps reduce the amount of coconut milk next time?

Sour orange Curry of Trout and vegetables

Unlike many of the Thai curries you find in the US, this one doesn't have any coconut milk and is quite a bit thinner as a result. The recipe comes from "Thai food" by David Thomson, which I found in the San Carlos library.

Review: acceptable; the curry is so thin that once you pour it over the rice, all of the liquid goes immediately to the bottom of the bowl and it becomes something like rice soup. The recipe is quite easy, though (except for endlessly pounding the curry paste with a mortar and pestle). Also, I used chicken broth, which I think was a little too heavy for the dish; Fish broth would be much better I think.

The orange color basically comes from the curry paste, which is as follows:
-- 5 dried long red chilies, deseeded soaked and drained (I used Arbol chilies, which are around 15,000 to 30,000 on the Scoville scale, which is somewhat tamer compared to the Thai chilies)
-- large pinch of salt
-- 1 tablespoon chopped galangal (Thai Ginger)
-- 3 tablespoons chopped red shallot
-- 2 teaspoons shrimp paste (this stuff is super potent and very salty)

The overall procedure is:
-- bring about 3 cups of stock to a boil
-- add about 50 g of fish fillet (any fresh water will do) to the broth and simmer briefly until cooked; remove the fish and work into the curry paste
-- return the stock to a boil, season with tamarind water, sugar and fish sauce
-- add the curry paste and return to a boil
-- add the vegetables according to the cooking time (options include bamboo shoots, snake beans, Chinese cabbage, a staircase, tomatoes, spinach)
-- add the remainder of the fish (100 g-200 g) and finish cooking

"Green" papaya salad (Thai style)

As you can see, I had some trouble finding a green papaya (supposedly just a standard papaya in the unripe state). The papaya I bought was mostly green on the outside, but ended up being basically right on the inside with light orange flesh. One thing I discovered is that the flesh that is close to the skin is very bitter tasting; thus, you need to slice off a lot as you are removing the outer layer.

One resulting difficulty, was that it was very difficult to "shred" the papaya because it was so soft. I tried to use the Cuisinart, but ended up with very thick strips.

Although untraditional, I served it over a bed of lettuce (dressed lightly with fish sauce!), Which turned out to be a nice touch.

My ingredients:
-- 1.5 cups shredded papaya
-- 1/2 cup green beans
-- 1 medium tomato, chopped coarsely
-- 2 birds eye chilies
-- 3 garlic cloves
-- 1 tablespoon fish sauce
-- 1 or 2 teaspoons of lime juice
-- 1 tablespoon of peanuts
-- 1 or 2 teaspoons of sugar

Tom Kha Kai

Recipe source:
a combination of the following:
-- my little green cookbook from the cookery school in Thailand
-- http://thaifood.about.com/od/thairecipes/r/tomyumkung.htm

Ingredients:
--1 chicken breast, boneless, sliced thin
--Galangal, 5 thin slices
-- coconut milk, 1/4 cup
-- lemongrass, one stem, sliced into rings
-- 4 birds eye chilies
-- lime juice, 1 tablespoon
-- Kaffir lime leaves, 3
-- shiitake mushrooms, 5 thickly sliced
-- fish sauce, 2 tablespoons
-- coriander leaves, approximately 20 chopped coarsely
-- low-salt chicken stock, about 3 cups
-- 1 tablespoon lime juice
-- other vegetables, chopped into medium pieces (eggplant, tomato, etc.)

Procedure:
-- Roughly pound the aromatics (chilies, lemongrass, lime leaves, galangal) with mortar and pestle and add to the stock and simmer for a couple of minutes.
-- Season with the fish sauce and coconut milk
-- add the firm vegetables and simmer until softened
-- add the chicken and the soft vegetables and simmer for just a minute or 2 until cooked
-- remove from heat and add the lime juice and coriander leaves

Outcome:
-- delicious, but not enough lemongrass flavor.
-- very spicy! Perhaps we shouldn't pound chilies so much beforehand
-- perhaps try straining after simmering the aromatics next time to remove all the little chunky bits