CSA - Two Malaysian recipes using curry leaves

Note: I've made a bunch more using curry leaves; some Malaysian, some Indian, one Mauritian; since I made this post. Click here to see the lot.

The CSA's first summer a la carte week was today and amongst other things I picked up some fresh curry leaves. Curry leaves are common in Indian cooking and in cuisines it's affected such as Malaysian. I haven't invested in a full Indian pantry, but the other seasonings in Malay cooking come from Chinese and Thai (and some Arab) which I do have so I was able to find some interesting recipes that highlighted the curry leaves, but otherwise used ingredients I already had in the house.

I made Fried Chicken with Curry Leaves and Stir Fry Shrimp with Curry Leaves both of which I found on grouprecipes.com.

I didn't mess with the fried chicken recipe much, but to save you a clickthrough, here it is:

Fried Chicken with Curry Leaves

Ingredients
oil for deep frying
3 chicken thighs, cut into 2" pieces (whenever you're using bite-sized pieces of chicken, thighs are a better choice than breasts or whatever "chicken tenders" actually are. Dark meat both has more flavor and stays moist better)
2 Tablespoons curry leaves, about 2 stems' worth
Marinade:
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 Tablespoon corn starch
Glaze:
1/2 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon sugar
100 ml chicken stock (that's about halfway between 1/3 and 1/2 cup), low sodium preferably

1. Combine chicken with marinade and marinate for 1 hour.
2. Deep fry in oil until golden brown and crispy and drain on paper towels (the recipe author, ponikuta, suggests 5 minutes, but I found mine done in half that time.)
3. Heat 2 Tablespoons oil in wok on high heat, add curry leaves and sauté until fragrant
4. Add chicken and glaze and stir fry until dry
5. Serve immediately with rice

The author suggests adding a dash or two of rice wine to mellow the flavors. Definitely a good idea to cut the saltiness of the concentrated soy and oyster sauces.


The shrimp recipe you'll have notice if you've looked is rather vague. It doesn't mention the size of shrimp to use, the amounts of most of the ingredients and, I think, leaves out an important step with the tamarind. Here's what I did:

Stir Fry Shrimp with Curry Leaves

Ingredients
12 extra large shell-on shrimp
curry leaves stripped from 3 stems
2 teaspoons tamarind paste dissolved in 3 Tablespoons water
2 teaspoons turmeric
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 medium yellow onion, halved and thickly sliced
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar

1. toss shrimp with turmeric.
2. Heat 3 Tablespoons oil in wok on high heat. Add garlic, onions and curry leaves. Stir fry until onions are soft and everything is aromatic, 1 - 2 minutes
3. Add shrimp. Stir fry 1 minute
4. Add tamarind liquid (straining out solid bits), salt and sugar. Stir fry 1 minute
5. Add 1-2 Tablespoons water, turn heat to low, cover and simmer for 2 minutes
6. Serve immediately with rice

Both dishes came out very nicely. The intense oyster/soy glaze on the chicken does over power the curry leaf most of the time, but if you have a piece with a couple of the fried leaves they add an herbal note that rides on top of the sweet and saltiness adding a balancing accent. The shrimp, I think, is the better dish. The tamarind/curry leaf combination is beautifully light and aromatic and a fine compliment for the shrimp. And both dishes were really easy so, if you've got some curry leaves, you could do a lot worse.

Mexican-style hot pickled carrots

It's been a good while since I've done any pickling so I decided to pick up some likely looking vegetables last time I was at Whole Foods. I ended up with some petite carrots, actually thin carrots cut into short lengths. At least they weren't claimed to be baby carrots which I suspect are the same thing just whittled down to round off the ends.

There are a few different ways to pickle carrots--dilled, sweet and hot primarily. The particular variety I'm making is the sort of hot carrot you'll find bowls of in the better sort of Mexican restaurant which means they're probably unheard of in Miami. Ideally, they should have a strong vinegar bite, be eye-wateringly hot but still have carrot as the foremost flavor. I became fond of them when I lived in San Diego I've been meaning to try making them on my own for some time. I'm hoping this will prompt me to actually cook more Mexican food as somehow I never quite get around to doing so.

I found a promising recipe here. Pickling in general is pretty straightforward and this recipe is no exception. Put vinegar and water in a pot along with spices and usually plenty of salt and/or sugar. (There was no salt in this recipe which is quite unusual. I added a couple Tablespoons as the carrots I sampled for texture were tasting a bit blah.) Bring to a boil, with the vegetables in if they, like carrots and cauliflower, need a little cooking or not if they, like cucumbers and tomatoes, don't. Once the texture is at the point you're looking for, dump the vegetables into a jar, cool and let sit in your refrigerator for a month. I was surprised to discover that soaking in a vinegar brine doesn't change vegetables' textures very much. If you don't get them right at the start they aren't going to improve. On the other hand, the flavor slowly and continually changes. I've sometimes found notable differences even from the fourth to the fifth week.

Beyond the salt, my only modifications were to cut down the amounts to fit in one of my pickling jars (actually ceramic coffee containers) and, as I was one jalapeño short, using a chipotle which should add a nice smoky touch to the final result. Remind me in a month to tell you how they turned out.
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Nobody reminded me, but I noticed in my stats that people are finding this page and, more surprisingly, actually reading it so I thought I'd better give you some closure. It's a bit over a month later and basic flavor and texture of the carrots are right on what I was hoping for, including the hint of smoke, but they're not nearly hot enough. It is the right sort of heat, though, so the solution is just to add more jalapeños next time. This batch, because the flavor isn't overwhelming, will make a nice condiment for fajitas or the like. I've got a good easy recipe from Jim Fobel's Big Flavors cookbook; I'll add a link once I've made it and posted about it. Here it is, although I forgot to use the carrots when the time came.

--

It's now three months later and I just found the carrots in their pickle jar in the back of my refrigerator. Surprisingly, not only were they still perfectly fresh, they're finally really hot just the way I wanted them and they taste great. So that's the key: three months aging. Plan ahead!

Strawberry banana sorbet

[Note: I recently made a strawberry banana ice cream that turned out quite well. If you're not dead set on a sorbet, you might take a look at that recipe too.]

Strawberries were on sale this week so I bought them without any immediate idea of what to do with them. Once it became clear that I wasn't going to snack my way through the entire carton I looked around for ways to use them in ice cream. There were a lot of not-terribly-exciting options. I did notice an interesting lack of chocolate/strawberry ice cream recipes, though, which I may follow up on later. I also considered taking another shot at the basalmic strawberry ice cream I made to try to fix the textural problems I encountered. (Probably by using all real sugar instead of Splenda blend and by excluding the vinegar from the strawberry maceration instead just drizzling it in during churning.) But this week, it's strawberry banana sorbet. Given the magical psuedo-custard properties of bananas, I was curious how it would affect a sorbet's texture.

Also, I wanted to try using red bananas. Most people in the US only have access to the standard supermarket Cavendish banana. In Miami we're lucky to be able to get a few other varietals. Red bananas are the second most common banana and I understand that they have a more berry-like flavor than Cavendishes. (Yes, I know bananas are berries and, by the way, strawberries aren't, but you know what I mean.) Unfortunately I'll never find out myself as I've had these red bananas for two weeks now and they're just as rock solid under-ripe as the day I bought them. So I went out and bought some Cavendishes so I can make this before my strawberries start to rot.

Most of the recipes I found on-line for strawberry banana sorbet were actually sherbets (with milk or cream as an ingredient) or extra-thick smoothies so I decided to cobble together a version from a banana sorbet and a strawberry sorbet in Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop recipe book along with some standard sorbet tricks he didn't use.

1 large banana, as ripe as available
2 pints strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water
1 Tablespoon lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 Tablespoons light rum
1 pinch salt

1. Peel banana and place in freezer.

2. Hull and slice strawberries. Toss with sugar and let macerate for 1 hour at room temperature.

3. Add all ingredients to blender (breaking up banana). Blend until smooth.

4. Cool mixture in refrigerator at least four hours until 40 degrees F. Churn and then ripen in the freezer.


That includes a couple refinements I thought of after I made the recipe myself. I neglected to freeze the banana (which breaks down the bananas' cells and gets it goopy. The blender probably does a fair job of this as well, but the freezer is more thorough.) or add the salt (which brings out the sweetness), but it turned out fine anyway. Here it is straight out of the churn. That's rather thicker than I've seen most of my sorbets get, but my new churn provides a full 25 minutes of freeziness and for a change it isn't over 90 degrees in my kitchen today so it could just be the extra cold and not the banana causing it. The real test will be the mouthfeel after ripening. I'll see tomorrow...

It's tomorrow and I'm quite happy with the creamy texture. If you didn't know, you'd swear there was milk in there (but not cream; let's not go nuts here.). And you'd think it was artificially colored with its vibrant strawberry red. Unfortunately, you might also be wrong about it including banana as that flavor is a bit subtle. On the other hand, the strawberry flavor is bright and clear and yummy. Let's just say the banana is there for textural support.

I'd like to try it again with a different berry and a larger riper banana to see how how the extra refinements I didn't put in this time work out.

Frogmore stew a.ka. low country boil

Frogmore stew is a Carolinas specialty and it's something that's been on my to-cook list for a while now. It finally made it onto the menu when I was shopping at Whole Foods earlier this week and saw that they were having a sale on local produce. I thought I'd simulate a CSA box and pick up whatever they had and figure out what to do with it later. This recipe stems from the corn on the cob from Pioneer Growers Coop in Belle Glade, Florida. I was suspicious when I saw corn at a farmers market a while back, but I was wrong. Live and learn.

Along with the corn, frogmore stew also contains redskin potatoes, sausage and shrimp. And that's it. No frogs, sadly. There are an enormous number of recipes for it on the web and, for once, they're not the same three copied and pasted all over the place. And even more oddly, despite them all being keyed in individually they were all exactly the same: potatoes, sausage, corn and shrimp, optionally crab and and optionally a lemon.

There seem to be two key points to getting this dish to turn out right. The first is the timing; Boil the potatoes for 20 minutes, then add the sausage for ten, then the corn for five, then the shrimp for three. The second is in the spices; not many recipes specified exactly what sort to shrimp/crab boil to use, but then not many had anything sensible to say about the timing either. The recipes that were written with care said to use both sweet and spicy boils. That's Zatarains and Old Bay if you're going mass market. My southern style boil is from Spice House. I'm still boiling as I type, but even a suburban boy from Delaware like me gets visions of picnic tables and surf from the smell coming off the pot. I used a couple Tablespoons of each for a gallon of water (for six medium red potatoes, half a pound of sausage, three ears of corn, and a pound of shrimp). That's probably on the high end, but I always bump up the spice a bit.

Most recipes aren't very specific about the sausage--just something smoked and garlicky. I had some andouille on hand as I had intended to make gumbo this week. I hit a few snags with that. First, I had a hard time finding the andouille. Oysters in bulk were tough to come by too. Maybe they're out of season? None of the supermarkets carried them and I didn't get a chance to check the fishmongers before I realize a bigger problem. And that's that there's just no way gumbo is a weeknight recipe, at least not with a chicken involved. With a chicken you have the choice of long or complicated. The long way is to start with a pot of water and boil the chicken for a few hours to make soup which you then add a bunch of other ingredients to to make gumbo. The complicated, and much better way, is to start by frying the chicken, shredding it and adding it at the end after making the gumbo with a pot of pre-made chicken soup. See, that way you get double the chicken flavor. So, I set that aside and I'll find some other use for that chicken.

OK, now that I've had my dinner, those times were spot on, everything was cooked quite nicely. The flavor infused by the boil spices were subtle. I may use even more next time. I served the dish with butter, sour cream and cocktail sauce and, to simulate the picnic style, got a bit sloppy about what went on what. Cocktail sauce on corn is surprisingly good. Sour cream on sausage, less so. All in all, not bad, but I think I must be missing some element that makes it a classic. Maybe it's because I didn't cook it over a bonfire on the beach with friends and family. I'll have to try that some time.

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.

Curry coconut peanut butter ice cream

I discussed the origin of this ice cream a couple weeks ago at the end of this post. (and now that I look at it, I forgot about adding in bits of banana. It may not be too late yet. Nope it's already solidified into concrete.) And this week seemed a good time to give it a try. I started with equal parts peanut butter and coconut milk and then I had to judge how much sweeter it needed to be and what sort and how much curry to add.

Both peanut butter and coconut milk have a bit of natural sweetness but only enough that they hover at the midpoint between sweet and savory and can be pushed either way depending on what other ingredients you add. As I was going to be adding curry powder I decided I needed to add just a bit of sugar to ensure it stayed on the sweet side of things. Next was the curry. There are an infinite variety of curries spice blends from all over southern Asia but all I had on hand were a South Indian blend and a Singapore blend (I thought I had Thai as well, but I was mistaken). Both contain coriander, cumin, turmeric, fenugreek and red pepper, but the Singapore blend adds black pepper, lemon peel and citric acid for a much brighter flavor. I thought the Singapore worked well with the peanuts so I used that. I also added vanilla to mellow out the brightness and to keep it tasting like dessert.

At this point I could have called it pudding and served it, but since I was going to freeze it I had to unbalance the flavors to add both more sweetness and more spice to compensate for the muting of flavors at low temperatures. I also decided that the mix was a bit too thick so I added the sweetness in the form of honey to thin it out a bit.

Not thin enough, though. After a night in the refrigerator the mix had nearly solidified. I decided to giving churning a try anyway (as most mixes that solidify loosen right up with a good stir), but it just wadded itself up on the paddle so I had to take it out and add some milk to make it workable. I only added a half cup but I don't think that was really enough so I suggest a full cup in the ingredient list below. That does make it too much mix for many churns, though. You might want to cut the peanut butter and coconut milk down to a cup apiece instead.

1 1/2 cups natural (but salted) peanut butter
1 1/2 cups coconut milk
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 Tablespoon Singapore curry
1 cup milk

1. Just mix, chill, churn and ripen.

That worked a bit better but not perfectly. I found that my ice cream churn's bucket doesn't really fit snugly on the base so it wobbles around as it spins. It seemed to work out OK last week as I didn't even notice and the pear ice cream came out just fine, but this time nearly a third of the mix ended up stuck to the sides and bottom of the bucket. I wonder if I have a mismatched set. Maybe it was just the unreasonably thick mix that caused it to become a problem; I'll have to make something quite thin next time and see how it works out. I haven't gotten rid of my old churn yet so I can always revert.

I'm not entirely happy with the flavor of the ice cream as it came out of the churn. The peanuts dominate and everything else is relegated to grace notes. The flavors should shift again after ripening, though so I'm withholding full judgment for now.

Well, they didn't shift all that much. The curry is noticeable and give an agreeable complexity to the peanut flavor, but the coconut and the other flavors are too subtle to notice. The curry is a nice compliment to the peanuts--I'll be adding curry to my next batch of peanut butter cookies--but it's still disappointingly straightforward. Nothing that chocolate sauce can't cure, though.

Almost no knead bread (adjusted for the climate)

I mentioned recently that my bread baking hasn't been working out. The doughs have been too moist and haven't been able to hold their rise while they bake. This time I decided to deliberately skimp on the water by an ounce and started with a dough that looked far too dry (but otherwise I kept to the standard almost no knead technique with the exception of substituting in a couple ounces of rye flour. Click on "bread" in the left column to find the post with my usual variation on the recipe.). It seemed to moisten to a reasonable state over time as it sat, but it also tended to dry out around the edges. I ended up spritzing it with water from a spray bottle once in a while.








When it came time for the knead, the texture felt just about right. It formed into a nice springy ball ready for a second rise. I decided to try keeping it in an oiled plastic bucket instead of sitting out on a silpat this time. That way I could suspend a moisten cloth over it without it actually touching the dough and risking sticking. It worked quite well; no sticking problems at all. I may use a smaller bucket next time so it doesn't spread out as much.



Here it is after a two hour second rise just before it went into the oven.






And here it is afterwards. Not too bad. It's a lot lighter than other recent loaves, but it still could be better. I think it kept nearly all of the height from the second rise so maybe I should add a bit more time to that.