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A Class at the Blue Elephant

Cooking schools are a dime a dozen in Thailand, but there's a really good one at the Blue Elephant in Bangkok, judging by the one lesson I had.

How could you find a better teacher than Nooror Somany Steppe, founder, director and creative chef of the Blue Elephant restaurant group, which has grown to 12 branches extending from Europe through the Middle East to Asia?

Visiting the Bangkok location is like stepping into Asia's colonial past. The building has the same tropical, exotic feeling that permeates the Raffles in Singapore.

More than a century old, it opened as the Bombay Department Store, became the Japanese army command center during World War II and has now been totally restored.

Classes take place there daily. Students go to the market to learn about ingredients, watch how the dishes are prepared, then cook the day's menu themselves and sit down to eat it.

My class was a special one-dish demo for the group of Thai restaurant owners and chefs (at right) with whom I was traveling. 

We started with blue mai tais from the Blue Bar (above). Yes, there's lots of blue at the Blue Elephant. It's the royal Thai color.

Then we watched Steppe make tom som pla salmon, a sweet, sour, slightly spicy salmon soup. It looked easy, and I had no trouble reproducing it at home.

Dinner after class showed off the Blue Elephant's royal Thai cuisine. The food was exquisite, because that is what makes it royal--beautiful presentation combined with beautiful taste.

Some dishes were classic Thai. Others were updated, like Steppe's  creamy tom yum goong (hot and sour shrimp soup), which she modeled on a French bisque and served in a shot glass. 

Beside it, another shot glass held a single betel leaf wrapped around a mixture of white and pink pomelo, dry shrimp, green mango and pickled lettuce, topped with coconut sauce.

Then on to starters such as steamed flower-shaped dumplings and golden taro dumplings stuffed with shrimp and chicken. Then came  chicken-coconut soup served in a young coconut.

Main dishes included prawns in sweet tamarind sauce and Northeastern style grilled beef with a sauce of dried chiles, accompanied by sticky rice. The rice had been formed into slender rolls and fried. Golden brown, chewy and crisp, they were irresistible.

A snow fish souffle was lightly seasoned with basil and kaffir lime leaves. Rather than a western style souffle in a little casserole, the delicate Thai souffle had been spooned into a length of bamboo and topped with coconut cream and red chile strands.

There was much more, ending with a trio of desserts that included pandan-flavored coconut ice cream, a steamed mung bean cake and foi thong, or golden egg threads cooked in syrup. 

Thai wines aren't yet up to western standards, but those we drank at the Blue Elephant were quite good. They are made for the restaurant at Siam Winery in the Chao Phraya delta, near the Gulf of Siam.

The red is made from a varietal called Pokdum, which is a cross between Muscat Bailey and Golden Queen. The white is a Malaga Blanc, and the rose blends Malaga Blanc and Pokdum.

I wish I had had one of those wines to drink with the tom som pla salmon (photo at right) that I made at home. 

The Blue Elephant Cooking School and Restaurant, 233 S. Sathorn Road, Yannawa, Bangkok, Thailand 10120. Tel: (66-2) 673-9353.  

TOM SOM PLA SALMON
From the Blue Elephant, Bangkok

1 cup salmon in 2/3-inch chunks
1/4 teaspoon Thai shrimp paste (kapi)
1 teaspoon cilantro stems, including any roots that may be attached
4 small shallots
1/4 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 1/2 cups fish or chicken stock
1 tablespoon finely slivered gingerroot
2 tablespoons fish sauce
5 teaspoons tamarind liquid (tamarind paste diluted with water)
2 teaspoons Thai palm sugar (or light brown sugar)
1 green onion, cut into 1-inch lengths, including some of the green top
1/4 cup cilantro leaves

Prepare the salmon and set it aside. 

Wrap the shrimp paste in a small piece of foil, place in a small skillet and roast over high heat just until fragrant (this will reduce the strong aroma). If you cannot obtain shrimp paste, leave it out, but it does add an interesting nuance.  

Place the cilantro stems in a heavy mortar and pound until crushed. Add 2 small shallots and pound until pulverized. Add the peppercorns and shrimp paste and pound to a paste. Scrape out of the mortar and set aside. There will be about 1 tablespoon paste.

Place the stock in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Crush the remaining 2 shallots and add to the stock along with the pounded paste, gingerroot, fish sauce, tamarind liquid and palm sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer 1 minute. 

Add the salmon and bring to a boil. Do not stir after the salmon is added. Simmer 1 minute, until fully cooked. Add the green onion and remove from heat.

Pour the soup into a heated bowl and garnish with cilantro leaves.

Makes 1 large serving or 2 first-course servings. 

 

Crispy Pork Beats Out Noodles

Pa-Ord Noodle on Sunset Boulevard obviously specializes in noodles. And they are very good, because Pa-Ord is the new incarnation of Ord Noodle on Hollywood Boulevard, which became one of the top draws in Thai Town.

Lawan Bhanduram, who founded Ord Noodle, sold it and moved on. Now she has opened Pa-Ord, serving the same dishes. Read what I wrote about this on Squid Ink.

What I like apart from the noodles is No. 24 on Pa-Ord's menu: rice with Chinese broccoli and sliced crispy pork (khao kanah mu grob). I don't think I could go there without ordering this dish.

The small, crunchy pork chunks are irresistible. The meat is fried, then roasted and stays crisp until you finish. Soft rice and bright, fresh Chinese broccoli set it off perfectly. But watch out, devilishly hot bits of Thai chile lurk in the mix. 

If you want to eat Thai style, you'll order a fried egg on top of the rice. Watching a cooking demonstration of red curry in Bangkok, I was surprised to see an omelet served on the side and to learn that this is a typical pairing.

The Thai egg and meat affinity hasn't yet arrived in Los Angeles.  Order red curry in a local Thai restaurant and you may get rice, but not an omelet. And so Pa-Ord's crispy pork is eggless unless you specify otherwise.

Pa-Ord Noodle, 5301 Sunset Blvd., #8, Los Angeles, CA 90027. Tel: (323) 461-3945.

A House of Mystery in Bangkok

Fairfax Avenue, a street in Los Angeles lined with Jewish delis, bakeries and restaurants, would seem to have little in common with Thailand. 

Yet a book that I found in a thrift shop there led me to an extraordinary place in Bangkok.

The book was a silk-bound copy of "The House on the Klong" by William Warren, an American who resettled in Bangkok.

Warren has written any number of books about Thai culture. This one was privately printed in Tokyo in 1968. My copy is the 11th edition, published 10 years later.

The house on the klong was the home of James H.W. Thompson, who developed the Thai silk industry. Assembled from old teak houses brought from various villages, it was furnished in Thai style and housed Thompson's Asian art collection. 

In 1967 Thompson disappeared while walking in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia. No trace was ever found.

The house is now a museum, administered by the James H.W. Thompson Foundation.

Bill Warren, whom I met years ago when he came to a Thai food festival in northern California, told me that he designed the gardens at the Thompson house.

And so, during my recent stay in Bangkok, I went to see it. Tours are offered daily. You can wander freely through the beautiful gardens and ground floor structures, which house fine pieces acquired by Thompson.

Inside, you must be escorted by a guide and are not allowed to take photos. This was frustrating, because I would love to have photographed the dining room, where I could almost feel the presence of Thompson and his guests as they ate from antique blue and white china and admired 19th century paintings that depict the life of the Buddha.

The sideboard in this room is an old Chinese worship table. The dining table has the insignia of King Chulalongkorn, or so I read in another book about the house in my collection, "6 Soi Kasemsan II." That book was signed by Thompson himself.

The title is the address of the Thompson compound, which has been expanded to include a shop that sells contemporary silk items with the Thompson label and, happily, a restaurant.

Although I would never be able to eat in the house, I could dine on a veranda that faced it. What a beautiful spot for lunch, looking out on a fish pond and the gardens beyond.

The silk-covered menu has a section titled "Absolutely Thai Thompson Style."  Did Thompson eat such food? Possibly, because the rice with stir-fried shrimp and Thai basil that I ordered is very common.

It was a fine dish, tender shrimp and mushrooms alongside a mound of jasmine rice topped with a fried egg. My drink: lemongrass juice, accompanied by a pot of syrup so that I could sweeten it to taste.

It had been raining, and that added a mysterious, spectral feel to a place that will always be shadowed by the strange disappearance of Jim Thompson. 

Jim Thompson House & Museum, 6 Soi Kasemsan 2, Rama 1 Road, Bangkok, Thailand 10330. Tel: (662) 216-7368. Opens daily at 9 a.m. The last tour is at 5 p.m.

Sydney's Star Chef Visits L.A.

Australia's celebrity chef Neil Perry was in town last week, for a couple of reasons.

One was to check a site for a restaurant in Beverly Hills, but that's a long way off.

The other was to cook for a lunch promoting Qantas Airways' new, lower fare from Los Angeles to Sydney and tourism in New South Wales. Perry had two reasons to do that. First, he's in charge of the food served on Qantas. Secondly, three of his four restaurants, including the flagship Rockpool, are in Sydney, so bringing more travelers there is good for business.

Lunch, at the home of the Australian consul general, went from appetizers (goat cheese tortellini) to three courses paired with Australian wines and bread provided by one of Perry's chef chums, Thomas Keller. 

The first course was a zucchini and Parmesan tart, a  round of rich pastry topped with thin circles of zucchini. An arrangement of "summer vegetables" on the plate made sense because it's summer in Australia now. There was also black olive oil, which Perry makes by blending salty black olives with olive oil. The wine was 2008 Brokenwood Semillon.

New Zealand John Dory may have come from the wrong country, but in Australian hands, it came off very well. Perry poached it in water from tomatoes hung to drain. Scattered around it were cut-up fingerling potatoes and tomato confit and on top was a cluster of chervil, tarragon and micro parsley.

The two wines were 2007 Robert Oatley Chardonnay from Mudgee, New South Wales, and Oatley's 2008 Sangiovese Rose.

Perry's food is driven by multiculturalism and heavily influenced by Asia. (The best Thai restaurants outside of Thailand are in Australia, he told lunch guests.) His Sydney restaurant Spice Temple is devoted to Chinese regional cuisines, and his cookbook "Rockpool" (New Holland Publishers, Australia) has a large section of Asian-inflected recipes.

But this lunch was Mediterranean. It ended with  strawberry mascarpone cake, a creamy strawberry mixture between two layers of dacquoise, and a luscious dessert wine, the 2006 De Bortoli Noble One, a botrytis Semillon from Riverina, New South Wales.

The Sydney Morning Herald's "Good Food Guide 2010" describes Perry as "the king of modern Sydney dining." Here are the addresses of his three restaurants in that city. 

Rockpool, 107-109 George St., The Rocks, Sydney, Australia. Tel: 9252 1888.
Rockpool Bar and Grill, 66 Hunter St., Sydney, Australia. Tel: 8078-1900.
Spice Temple, 10 Bligh St., Sydney, Australia. Tel: 8078-1888.

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What Tavern Will Feed the Stars

Check out my Squid Ink post on what Tavern in Brentwood will put onto plates at the SAG awards this Saturday.