Fine food on Ko Sichang: Recipes from Pan & David

Crispy-fried Tuna Steak with Green Peppercorns
Cooking time 10 minutes; Serves 2

Before we had a real restaurant, when we were running Sripitsanu Bungalows, we used to cook for our guests when there weren't too many people around. On a cool night, with hundreds of squid boats bobbing like little villages of light on the black sea below, one of the dishes that tempted many into the habit of eating spicy food was this crispy fish with its rich, aromatic sauce and exotic garnish. We call plaa insii tuna because it has the same very firm, tasty meat, although with less fat. The usual translation of "horse mackerel" brings to mind something dark, flaky and oily--which might be a wonderful fish, but doesn't describe plaa insii. If you can't find plaa insii, fresh tuna or swordfish will do nicely.

about 500 g good vegetable oil

300 g plaa insii steak, about 2 cm thick
150 g coconut cream
30 - 50 g green curry paste
20 g or about 20 kaffir lime leaves
20 g krachaai (finger ginger) roots cut into match-stick thin julienne
20 g fresh green peppercorns, on the stems (frozen green peppercorns will do, but dried ones won't)
15 - 20 g or 4-5 red and orange phrik chii faa chilis about 8 cm long, seeded and cut into fourths lengthwise
10 g white soy sauce (si iew khaao; the type with shiitake extract gives a very nice flavor)

Heat the oil in a capacious wok until it is almost smoking. Fry all but 4 - 5 of the kaffir lime leaves briefly until they are crisp but still a handsome dark green. Drain on absorbent paper. Turn the flame up as high as it goes† and put the fish into your wok. The oil should spit furiously. Cook about two minutes; you want the outside a deep golden color, and the inside still moist and tender.

Pour off all but about 50 g of oil, and reduce the heat to medium-high. Add the curry paste to the wok, and stir it quickly into the oil until well aborbed. Add the coconut cream, stirring constantly. The mixture should boil within a minute or two; let it simmer another minute. You should now have a sauce a bit thicker than heavy cream. Add the 4 - 5 reserved kaffir lime leaves, finger galangal, chilis and peppercorns. Swirl twice around the wok and remove from heat. Place the fish on its serving dish, artistically cover all but one end with the sauce, and garnish with the crisp-fried kaffir lime leaves.

With the proportions of chili, curry paste and peppercorns given above this dish may be too spicy for diners who aren't used to Thai food. You can reduce those ingredients by about half without spoiling the dish (much), but there's no point in trying to adapt it to the taste of those who cannot abide chilis. One can eat everything but the unfried kaffir lime leaves, but you should invite your guests to proceed cautiously when it comes to the chilis and peppercorns.

† One reason a lot of Asian cooking is so hard to duplicate at home is that no domestic stove has nearly enough heat output; a big domestic burner might get up to 25,000 BTU / hr, against perhaps 200,000 BTU / hr from a high-pressure restaurant burner. A tuna steak is about the biggest thing you can fry properly at home.

Kaeng Liang Kung Sod (Peppery shrimp soup with vegetables)
Chili paste preparation: 30 minutes; cooking time 10 minutes. Serves 4

This soup--almost thick enough to call a stew--is an old-time favorite that has become strangely hard to find these days. The scent of shrimp, black pepper, basil and shrimp paste will have any real Thai food aficionado salivating and rubbing here hands the moment you uncover the pot. Unlike the tuna steak recipe, this is one you can make very mildly spiced and still enjoy. The secret is to have enough black pepper to be very noticeable, but not so much that the flavor of the shrimp and vegetables is overwhelmed.

Kaeng Liang chili paste

10 g kapi shrimp paste
20 g krachaai finger galangal
20 g dried shrimp
10 g coriander root
20 g shallots, peeled and coarsely chopped
5 g black peppercorns, coarsely pounded
5 g dried phrik khii nuu "bird" chillies

Pound all of these ingredients into a reasonably smooth paste in a stone mortar. The quality of your final product can be no better than that of the shrimp paste and dried shrimp--both should have a distinctly appetizing smell. When guests ask "How come it's never this good at home?" we just smile, but the answer would be "because you're not spending enough on the shrimp paste and dried shrimp, or you're keeping them too long." If you want to tone down the black pepper, do it at this stage instead of using less chili paste to make the soup. The quantities given above are enough for one pot of soup; since the paste keeps well in the fridge, you may want to double or quadruple the recipe to save time on future occasions, or share with friends.

500 ml water
100 g kaeng liang chili paste
200 g large shrimp (about 30 g each)†
100 g buab liam angular long gourd in slices about 3 cm thick
80 g pumpkin meat cut in 2-cm cubes
80 g fresh baby corn, half-husked (as sold in Thai markets, with about 1 cm of the husk left on the stalk end)
60 g straw mushrooms, halved
20 g maenglak hoary basil leaves, a small handful§
10 g white soy sauce (see remark under tuna steak recipe above)

Bring the water to a boil, preferably in a terra-cotta pot‡. Add the chili paste; you should have a broth noticeably thicker than milk. When the chili paste is well dissolved, add the pumpkin and baby corn, keeping the soup at a bouncy simmer. Let them cook a minute or two, and add the long gourd. When the gourd starts to soften, add the shrimp, stir for ten seconds, and remove from heat. Add the basil. Cover and let sit a minute or two for the shrimp to cook before serving. Apart from starting with good chili paste, the secret of making this astonishingly delicious instead of merely tasty is to have absolutely fresh shrimp cooked exactly enough and no more. They should be just cooked until opaque right through, and not one second longer.

If you can't find all the indicated vegetables, others will do: what is wanted is a variety of textures, and rich (pumpkin) and bland (gourd) flavors, none of them too assertive.

† Tail-peeled and deveined, but with heads on, if possible. Many Thais consider the heads a great delicacy, especially if they have some coral ( red-orange fat); even if you don't eat them, heads add greatly to the flavor of the broth. And the heads are the part of the shrimp that gives away too-long storage: if the head has turned dark, the shrimp won't taste sweet. This may be why shrimp with heads on are so hard to find in Western supermarkets.

§ If you can't get your hands on maenglak, rdinary basil will do; holy basil (kaphrao) won't.

‡ Of course you can use something else, but an earthenware pot lets you serve in your cooking pot, keeps in enough heat to finish the cooking off the stove, and adds a little touch of the traditional Thai farmer's home to your table. If you don't serve in the cooking pot, heat your tureen or whatever by keeping it full of piping hot water until you're ready to put the soup in.

Filet Steak with Three-pepper Sauce
Cooking time: 15 minutes. Serves 1

After a long enough time in Thailand, a Westerner cook will want spicy Western food, or run into a Thai who wants Western food that has some serious kick to it. This dish has been filling the bill nicely for many years now. The sauce is both Western in its wine, vinegar and cream flavors, and Thai in being thick, rich, spicy and crammed with vegetables. As long as they are not total strangers to chilis, you don't need to worry very much about the palates of your diners, because the beef does not absorb the flavor of the sauce.

180 g best beef filet, tied with string to hold a good shape
5 g salt
10 g butter
10 g olive oil
80 g beef or chicken stock
10 ml red wine vinegar
20 ml sherry†
70 g heavy cream
20 g green peppercorns
80 g yellow or green bell (sweet) pepper in slices 3 mm thick
15 g or 2 - 3 red phrik chii faa chilis about 8 cm long, seeded and cut in strips about 8 mm wide

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan, melt the butter, add a little salt, and cook the steak over reasonably high heat. Remove the steak and keep it covered on its serving dish. Put the frying pan back on the fire and deglaze it by adding the stock and vinegar, scraping to dissolve all the steak juice. When the liquid is reduced by half, add the sherry. Reduce a bit more and add the cream, lowering the heat to avoid curdling it. Add the peppercorns, pepper and chilis, stir briskly for 20 seconds or just enough to start wilting the pepper and chilis, and dress the steak with this sauce. You can add a little brown roux if you like a thicker sauce: take equal portions of all-purpose flour and butter and cook them over a very slow flame until the mixture is golden-brown. It keeps for ages in the refrigerator. French fries are the ideal thing to soak up the excess sauce.

The secret to making this dish well lies in buying really good beef. The rich sauce needs a very lean and tender cut of meat. We have had much better results with Villa Market's or the Thai-French Butchery's locally raised filet than with frozen imported beef. If you can't get really good beef filet, the dish is better with a good lean medallion of pork filet than with a less luxurious cut of beef.

† "Majestic" Thai Sherry, which costs about B110 a bottle, is not only perfectly adequate for cooking, but a very decent drink for anyone who likes a moderately sweet (amontillado) sherry.

Maple-Pecan Ice Cream
Cooking time: 30 minutes; cooling time 4 - 8 hours; freezing time 25 minutes; setting time 3 hours. Serves 8

This is about our favorite of all ice creams; rich, subtle and totally satisfying. Guests who have never tasted maple syrup or pecans keep falling in love with this. When we say "Serves 8" we're assuming you find some way to deny people a second serving...

50 g pecan halves
50 g best unsalted butter

100 g white cane sugar
200 g good coconut or toddy sugar
70 g Grade A dark amber maple syrup
250 g whole milk
450 g heavy cream
1 medium hen's egg
10 g pure vanilla essence

Put the pecan halves and butter in a small baking dish and bake in a 150 C oven for 20 - 30 minutes. You want the pecans to be crisp and very lightly browned. If you let them brown, they lose a lot of their delicious flavor.

Heat the milk over a low flame (the Larousse Gastronmique and all the other Auncient Authorities will tell you to use a double boiler, and if you're not eagle-eyed and ferret-fast, you might do well to heed them, because a touch too much heat can burn or curdle this stuff). Dissolve both kinds of sugar in the milk, stirring constantly from now until you turn the stove off. The coconut or palm sugar will dissolve faster if you break it up into small pieces. When the sugar is well dissolved, add half the cream. Remove pot from stove. Beat the egg lightly in a large bowl, then slowly pour the hot milk-sugar-cream mixture into the egg, whisking all the while. Return the mixture to the stove and add the remainder of the cream. Keep cooking and stirring until the custard (that's what it is now) is thicker than heavy cream. When the pecans are ready, pour their butter into the custard, continuing to stir. If too much cooking or too high a flame curdles your custard you can add it slowly to a second beaten egg off the fire and thus repair things fairly well, but the best approach is just to watch like a hawk. Set the pot in a basin of cold water the moment your custard is thick enough; it is possible for retained heat to curdle it off the stove.

While the custard cools, chop the pecans into the sort of pieces you like. We slice them crosswise to about 3 mm thick because we think regular-sized pieces look nicer. Add the vanilla extract to the custard once it has cooled a bit, then chill it thoroughly as soon as it's close to room temperature. If you have the old-fashioned sort of freezer that uses salt and ice you can freeze your ice cream at once; if you're using one of the Cuisinart, Krups or similar devices that relies on your freezer's cooling power, it's best to chill the custard somewhere else before you put it into the ice cream freezer, like in a basin of ice and salt. Again, if you're using a new-fangled ice cream maker, you'll want to let your finished ice cream set in the freezer a few hours before serving. (Don't put the ice cream freezer's bowls into the freezer with the ice cream; they'll use up a lot of cold that the ice cream wants.)

This is one of those irritating recipes where you can't replace anything and get the same effect. Well, you could probably use artificial vanilla essence without anyone's noticing (we make our own from brandy and vanilla beans), but you certainly can't replace coconut or palm sugar with something easier to find, much less the pecans, and least of all the maple syrup. Artificial vanilla extract smells a lot like the real thing, but artificial maple syrup does NOT.