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Finding New Tastes at Wat Thai

Wat Thai's Songkran festival last weekend brought out the usual food stalls serving papaya salad, boat noodles, grilled meats and sausages and mangoes with sticky rice.

But there were new tastes too, such as meat jerky like you've never tasted, not the usual chewy stuff you'd pack on a long hike, but thin and crisp as a potato chip, maybe even more crisp.

Blackies Originals pork jerky (above) has only been on the market for about five months. The thin chips of oven-baked lean pork come in two flavors. Both are seasoned with soy sauce and sugar, but one is also spiked with pepper, enough to produce a minor burn after you chew and swallow it.

The jerky is made in Chino. So far you can get it only at a few farmers markets in Orange County. Check Facebook and Twitter for locations. 

If you're looking for Thai plants plants such as kaffir lime trees and Thai basils, you can usually get them at Wat Thai festivals.

The plant booth at Songkran this year was set up by Art't Garden & Supplies in Arleta, not far from the Wat's location in North Hollywood.

The plants were pricey, but try and find a bai toey (pandan) plant at Home Depot (the plants with long slim leaves in the photo above).

Along with kaffir lime trees, the booth sold two types of Thai basil, bai horapha, which is sweet basil, and the less common bai kaprow, or holy basil.

If you missed Songkran, you can still get these and other plants at Art't's garden store, 13235 Bromwich St., Arleta, CA 91334.

Thai Food: Some Like It Crisp

Thai cuisine is famous for its intricate blends of flavor--sweet, salty, sour, bitter, spicy, pungent and so on.

The Thais do a good job with textures too. The one I can't resist is crisp, like in a couple of dishes at Jitlada the other day.

The menu describes koong pear (at top) as deep fried shrimp with a southern curry sauce. No mention of what makes this dish really intriguing--golden fried crispies made from coconut flakes and spices. They ought to bottle those and sell them as cocktail snacks. Crisp fried shallots come with the shrimp too. 

Fried morning glory vine leaves coated with crunchy golden batter go into yam pak boong (above), a sweet, sour, spicy Thai salad. Fried basil leaves add still more crispness.   

This crisp high plunged to a soft finish with Thai coconut custard surrounded by mounds of sweetened sticky rice. It was the same custard that usually comes in a wedge of kabocha squash, minus the kabocha container and covered instead with diced squash.

Jitlada, 5233 1/2 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90027. Tel: (323) 667-9809.

 

A New Look for Thai Food?

Chefs seem bent on creating something new. I guess that's how they get attention.

But why tamper with Thai food, which is perfect as is? What makes a difference in this case is that the innovator is thoroughly Thai, born into the royal family and a celebrity chef. In other words, he knows his stuff from the ground up.

He's Chef McDang (that's a nom de cuisine. His real name is ML Sirichalerm Svasti). And traditional Thai food is what he lectures on when Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs sends him on an annual tour of Le Cordon Bleu culinary schools in the United States.

This year, Chef McDang gave public lectures for the first time. Anyone who really listened to what he said at Thailand Plaza Restaurant in Hollywood should now be able to cook Thai without a recipe. That's how organized and complete his presentation was.

But the dishes he demonstrated showed his new idea, which is to present Thai food in courses--"like French food," he said, not in communal plates and without rice.

This breaks with Thai custom, which is to eat together, sharing dishes that are served all at once. And rice is so fundamental that to find out if someone has eaten, you ask, "have you eaten rice?"

Just as startling was the dash of olive oil he added to one of his "new" dishes, a timbale of curry fish mousse (at right).

In traditional Thai cookery, only flavorless oil is used, never "smelly" oils, he had said. He topped the timbale with coconut cream and flying fish roe and scattered over the plate finely diced red, green and yellow sweet peppers.  

Even more olive oil went over tuna carpaccio with larb dressing (at top), and micro greens joined typical larb additions such as green onions, shallots, sawtooth herb and mint leaves.

The mango sauce that accompanied grilled marinated pork shoulder (at right) was pretty much like any contemporary mango salsa except that it included fish sauce and Thai chiles.

What all this is leading up to is a book, "Modern Thai Cuisine," due out when Chef McDang has time to finish it. 

His prior book, "The Principles of Thai Cookery," is based on his Cordon Bleu lectures. The chef published that book himself, because he's so dedicated to helping people get it right.

CHEF McDANG'S MANGO SALSA

200 grams (about 1/2 pound) ripe mango meat, peeled and diced small
100 grams (about 1/4 pound) tomato, peeled, seeded and diced small
100 grams (about 1/4 pound) onion, peeled and diced small
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
2 teaspoons lime juice
1 1/2 teaspoons Thai fish sauce
1 teaspoon chopped fresh Thai chiles
Granulated or brown sugar to taste

Mix the mango, tomato, onion, cilantro, lime juice, fish sauce and chiles in a bowl. Taste and add sugar so that the salsa is equally balanced between sweet, sour and saltiness.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

 

 

 

Fruit Salad: A Top Thai Dish

Why on earth would anyone order fruit salad in a Thai restaurant?

My lunch companions were not happy when this happened at Lanyamo on Western Avenue.  However, the person who asked for the salad was Thai, and she knew what she was doing.

Her fruit salad turned out to be the best dish we had that day. The other food was OK, but I can hardly remember it thinking about that glorious bowl heaped with fresh fruit, nothing canned. 

The combination included pineapple, mango, apple, cantaloupe, jicama, blueberries and even a few cherry tomatoes, sprinkled with crushed roasted peanuts. 

What made it stand out was the salty-sweet dressing. Thais season fruits with a blend of sugar, fish sauce, lime juice and garlic, and a dash of hot chile. 

Fish sauce with fruit may sound odd, but it works, more effective than salt by itself.

The fruit becomes even more sweet and refreshing, which is a good thing in Thailand's steamy climate, and in hot weather anywhere. 

Lanyamo Thai restaurant, 946 N. Western Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90029. Tel: (323) 466-2958.

Thailand's Tiny Khanom Ping

These thimble-sized nuggets of sweet coconut dough look like cookies for a child's tea party. They're light as meringues, but instead of crumbling as you eat them, they dissolve to a syrupy thick paste.

Called khanom ping, they're a popular Thai snack. I first ran into them at a food shop on a highway outside of Bangkok. Their intriguing texture, simultaneously crisp and soft, and their haunting, delicate taste of coconut elevated them at once to something I wanted to taste more often.

I found them again, at a market in an upscale mall in Bangkok. The price was high for a small container. It wasn't prohibitive, but too much for something that would be crushed in my luggage.

Just recently, I came across the cookies once more, only this time a few miles from home. A Thai Town sweet shop, Bhan Kanom Thai, has them. They're not made there but come from the Thai Traditional Dessert Company in Bangkok.

The tall container holds 300 grams (10.56 ounces), which is much more than it sounds, because the cookies weigh so little. Happily, the price ($3.50), is less than at the upmarket store in Bangkok.

Bhan Kanom Thai, 5271 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90027. Tel: (323) 871-8030.