Sukhamvit Soi Five fried chicken

This is a modified version of a recipe I found about a year ago in theatlantic.com's brief-lived food section. It's still in the archive, but it's hard to find and only one other blogger seems to have written it up. The article accompanying the recipe is by Jarrett Wrisley who attributes it to Mr. Pee, a Bancock street vendor whom he met selling chicken outside the Foodland Supermarket on Sukhamvit Soi Five in 2001.

My only change was to use a whole bunch of cilantro instead of 10 cilantro stems and 4 large cilantro roots. I presume that made the marinade greener, but as I've never encountered a cilantro root, I don't know if there's any other differences.

Ingredients:
1 head cilantro including stems, chopped
14 (count'em) cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 Tablespoon black peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 teaspoons salt
2 Tablespoons fish sauce
2/3 cup chicken stock
3/4 cup plus 2 Tablespoons rice flour
1 chicken, butchered into serving pieces

1. Blend the cilantro, garlic, peppercorns, pepper flakes, salt and fish sauce until smooth. Add a little chicken stock to get everything moving around in the food processor. Remove to a large bowl, and stir in the rest of the stock. Add the rice flour gradually until a smooth loose batter forms. Add a little water if it gets too thick.

2. Add the chicken, coat well and refrigerate overnight.

3. Bring chicken up to room temperature. [I laid the chicken out on a tray to speed the process along.] The batter will have thickened up to a paste so make sure it's spread on the chicken evenly. Or, at least try to do a better job of it than I did.

4. Heat oil to 350 and fry around 5 minutes on each side until the center of the meet reaches 160 degrees. It should be more of a copper than a golden brown. [I had trouble cooking the chicken through before the crust burnt with my later batches so watch your oil temperature.]

Let cool a few minutes and serve with sriracha.



The raw batter is spicy and harsh so it's surprising that the cooked crust is more prominently salty. And the spicy notes are more in the Colonel's 11 secret herbs and spices vein than anything notably Bancockian. That's a little disappointing, but it's very tasty for what it is. The meat is flavorful and juicy. The crust is crackly crisp while being well adhered to the meat and inextricably merged with the skin. Gorgeous stuff and very easy. The sriracha isn't necessary, unlike for a lot of mediocre Thai food, but it adds the missing heat and a touch of acid that pops the chicken's flavor nicely so give it or your favorite other hot sauce a try.

Mofongo

My apologies for the extended suspense about how my mofongo turned out. Judging by the breakdowns of first my stove and then my internet connection (and also my glasses. It's been a tough week around here.), there are forces that don't want you to read this post. Unless Blogger goes down, I think they've failed.

So, mofongo. It's a traditional Puerto Rican dish: mashed green plantains--usually deep fried, but baked or steamed if you want a healthy version--mixed with some olive oil, some finely chopped garlic, a pinch of salt, and mashed chicharrones. That's the basic version and I stuck with it for this test batch.

During frying, the goal is to cook the plantains, but not to crisp them. I deliberately overcrowded the pan to discourage browning, but I wasn't entirely successful. I'm really starting to dislike these electric stoves. Give me a gas stove and I'll stop with the over- and under-cooking everything. The browned edges made mashing a bit difficult so I chopped the cooked plantain slices up first to break them up.

Without an internet connection to do my final research I had to rely on memory as to how much of everything else to add. I'm happy with the Tablespoon or so of oil for the one plantain, but I think I went overboard with the garlic. About a 1:2 ratio of pork rind to plantain seems about right, though.

Here's a typical presentation. The mofongo molded to stand up in a shallow pool of a well-flavored homemade chicken broth and topped with shrimp and a little hot sauce. You can also chop up the shrimp (or chicken or whatever) and use them as filling and then float the mofongo in soup like matzo balls, but I'm not going to that sort of trouble.


Huh, I don't get it. I overdid it with the raw garlic so maybe that's throwing me off. The chicharrones lose their crunch when mashed up and mixed into the moist concoction and their flavor diluted with the other ingredients. I don't see what the plantains add to this dish. They're awfully bland and fall apart in the soup to a sort of moist turkey stuffing sort of texture. It's not great.

I've double-checked and, other than the excess garlic, I made this by the book. But people do voluntarily pay for and eat mofongo and they wouldn't for what I just made so I don't know what the deal is. I guess I have to go out and get some so I can properly compare and contrast.

In search of a better quiche crust - part four

In previous installments of this series (I didn't think of giving it a title until now so just click on 'quiche' in the tag list if you want to know more) I first disparaged the idea of a crust on a quiche as it's always soggy on the bottom and dried out on the edges and while my crustless quiche was tasty, something was missing; then I took up Sara Moulton's idea of a savory cracker-crumb crust but didn't care for the aggressive flavor of the crackers or the enormous amounts of butter required; next I lined the bottom of the pan with bread crumbs. They melded into the bottom of the quiche instead of forming a proper crust, but they showed potential.

In considering my next attempt, I gave the standard quiche recipe some thought. Most recipes layer the bottom of the crust with shredded cheese before adding the rest of the fillings. I suppose the idea is to form a fatty layer insulating the pastry crust from soaking up the liquid in the quiche, but I've never seen it actually work. For my crumb crust, what would happen if I mixed the cheese in and then blind baked it?

Only one way to find out. I used generous amounts of bread crumbs--a mixture of panko and homemade-- added just one tablespoon of melted butter and mixed in the 3/4 cup of Emmentaler Swiss cheese I was going to use in the quiche anyway.

After 10 minutes at 350 degrees, the crust looked like this:

Pretty promising, although I should have broken up the long strands of cheese to get more even distribution. But the proof is whether it will retain its integrity after the quiche is cooked.

My recipe this time was four eggs mixed with 1/2 cup cream and 3/4 cup milk along with another quarter cup of liquid from my fillings.

Those fillings are a couple handfuls of large shrimp, quickly blanched to just barely cook through (since they'll be spending another half hour in the oven); a bunch of chives from my garden, a giganto clove of garlic, one large scallion and maybe two cups of baby spinach. All the vegetables got a sauté in olive oil and butter and a bit of a wilt with a splash of sauvignon blanc (he says as if he has more than one bottle of white wine in the house at any particular time).




The fillings go on top of the cooled crust and are topped with a grating of Parmigiano Reggiano,








then the egg mixture, and in to the over for 30 minutes at 375 degrees.






Resulting in this:








After letting it cool off for ten minutes, I cut a piece. Here's the bottom:


Looks pretty good. As for the texture...let's take a bite...well, I wasn't expecting that. Somehow I've managed to turn the breadcrumbs back into bread. It's like the quiche is sitting on a light fluffy slice of white bread. Weird. There are some chewy bits where there was an unusual concentration of cheese, too. I can't say that it's bad, but it's not what I was aiming at.

As for the quiche itself, I went a bit light on the salt, but it has a nice light texture, a tasty blend of herbal flavors and a good balance of flavors with the shrimp. Not too shabby.

I'll have to give the crust some more thought, though.

If you'd like another interesting crust option take a look at Kat's polenta crust here.

CSA - Garlicky tomato curry

I've still got plenty of curry leaves left and since they don't dry terribly well I've got to keep using them up. Today's recipe is a garlicky tomato curry, South Indian style I think, that I found here.

It's pretty straightforward and the author, Amma, calls it a basic recipe you can use to experiment with, adjusting spices and herbs to get different flavors. That makes sense to me, but until I make a trip out to an Indian grocery (probably Indo American on south 84th) I'm can't stray too far. So I'm going to post the original recipe with some annotations for what I did differently.


Garlicky Tomato Curry Recipe

Source: Amma
Prep & Cooking: 25 mts
Serves: 4-5
Cuisine: Andhra (southeast Indian)

Ingredients:

1/2 kg fresh tomatoes, finely chopped
2 large onions, finely chopped (I neglected to restock during my last shopping trip and only had one large onion and some scraps. Still it seemed like plenty.)
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
10-12 fresh curry leaves (plus some extra for the garnish. For those I picked the softer, smaller leaves from the tips of the stems.
10-12 garlic cloves, slightly crushed (you read that right)
pinch of turmeric pwd
1 tsp red chilli pwd (I used extra as my cayenne is old and weak)
1/2 tsp coriander pwd
salt to taste (a couple teaspoons of kosher salt worked well for me)
1 tbsp grated jaggery (jaggery is a big block of unrefined cane sugar. Turbinado is a fine substitution.)
2 tbsp coriander leaves (that's cilantro, of course. I used a bit more to boost the herbal flavors.)
1 tbsp oil

1 Heat oil in a vessel. (A medium pot will hold everything, but the onions will fry up better with the larger surface area of a dutch oven.) Add the mustard seeds and let them pop. Add the crushed garlic and curry leaves and toss them for 8-10 seconds.
2 Add the onions and fry till translucent. Add the chilli pwd, turmeric pwd, coriander pwd and salt. Combine well.
3 Add the chopped tomatoes and cook on medium heat uncovered for 4-5 mts. Reduce heat and cook covered for another 5 mts.
4 Add a glass of water (a cup?), jaggery, adjust salt and cook covered till you get the desired gravy consistency. (I did five minutes covered and then another five minutes uncovered.)
5 Garnish with fresh coriander leaves and serve with hot chapatis, rice, pongal, khichidi or dosas.

Note: Boil eggs, make slits and add to the cooked tomato-onion mixture before adding the water. (This is a great way to overcook some eggs so instead I poached eggs in the sauce for the last five minutes of cooking. That's a little longer than you usually want to poach an egg, but I didn't want a loose yolk running all over the place. I got an equivalent of a mollet boiled egg which is just about right.) You can even add drumsticks for added flavor. (I thought drumsticks were vegetables, but upon researching I've found that they're fruit. There's a good picture and some information here.)


I stopped cooking after the tomatoes fell apart but the onions were still firm. I tried some and while the flavor was great--tomato and warm spices up front followed by a big hit of garlic and herbs--the chunky texture really didn't seem right. I could have kept cooking until the onions collapsed, but you'd think the author would mention if you were supposed to do that. Instead I removed the eggs and tossed it into the blender. The results are a smooth sauce that you'd swear has a cream enrichment and I think it improved the flavors too by distributing the garlic and herbs so it all melds together. I returned the eggs, a good many vegetable bits that stuck to the eggs while they poached and a bit more garnish and I had a pretty presentable, hearty and very tasty dish. Really easy and pretty quick, too.

Triple garlic Spanish-style shrimp

This is an elaboration on a Cook's Illustrated recipe for gambas al ajillo tapas. Traditional gambas al ajillo is made by poaching shrimp in garlic oil, but, as usual, CI tosses out the traditional method as too difficult and unreliable and instead develops convolutions to approximate it.

I kept their three-way garlic technique but I added elements to bolster it into a main dish. I cut their recipe in half so this should double well if you want to serve more than two.

1/4 cup pancetta, diced
7 medium garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 lb large shrimp, peeled and deveined (tails on or off is up to you)
4 Tablespoons flavorful extra virgin olive oil
1 bay leaf
1 dried chile, broken
1 1/4 teaspoon fine-grained salt (adjust for flakes of kosher or sea)
1 teaspoon sweet smoked paprika (optional. You might substitute plain paprika or a broken up dried pepper.)
1 medium tomato, diced (good quality and quite ripe by preference)
2 Tablespoons flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped
1 large scallion, finely sliced
1 teaspoon champagne or sherry vinegar


1. Finely mince or crush one garlic clove. Toss with shrimp, one Tablespoon olive oil, 1/4 teaspoon salt and maybe some red pepper flakes if you'd like a bit more heat. Marinate shrimp at room temperature for 30 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, cook pancetta over medium-high heat in an 8" non-stick pan until browned and crispy. Remove pan from heat and remove pancetta to a bowl. Either leave ~1 Tablespoon rendered fat or discard and replace with a Tablespoon of olive oil. If you're going to do that, feel free to substitute in jamon serano or prosciutto.


3. Smash two garlic cloves. Add to pan with two Tablespoons olive oil. Return pan to medium-low heat. Cook, stirring occasionally until garlic is crisped and a light golden brown, 4-7 minutes. Remove pan from heat and remove garlic to small bowl. Save garlic until you've stopped reeking from all the garlic from this dish. When you need another dose grind up the browned garlic in a mortar with a little salt and olive oil or butter and spread on toast.


4. Thinly slice 4 cloves garlic. Return pan to low heat and add garlic, bay leaf and chile. Cook, stirring occasionally, until garlic is soft and translucent, 4-7 minutes. Turn down heat if it starts to brown; turn it up if it doesn't sizzle. Increase heat to medium-low and add shrimp (with marinade) in a single layer. Cook until top side of shrimp starts to show a little pink, about 2 minutes. Flip shrimp with tongs and cook for another 2 minutes. Remove shrimp to a bowl.

5. Turn heat up to high. Add tomato and smoked paprika. Cook briefly until tomato begins to break down to create a sauce, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in parsley, scallion, pancetta, shrimp and vinegar. Cook until shrimp is cooked through, no more than 30 seconds.

6. Serve immediately with hearty fresh-baked (or at least fresh-toasted) bread.


The dish turned out very nicely. Even with the added ingredients, all the trouble with the garlic was worth it. It infuses both the shrimp and stands up to the tomato and herbs in the sauce.

A citrusy and flinty white wine would be the obvious pairing, but I tried a Belgian-style white beer and was quite happy with the match.