Viet World Kitchen

Thai Chicken Biryani Recipe (Khao Mok Gai)

Trade, travel, and empire have fused together the cuisines of Asia in many delectable ways. This spiced chicken-and-rice dish reflects the Muslim-Indian-Thai culinary marriage.

You may not know of khao mok gai (also spelled kao mok gai) but it is deliciously complex in perfume and flavor. In fact, in the span of a week, I ate it three (3) times while I was in Sydney, one of the greatest places for Thai food outside of Thailand! Go to one of the Chat Thai restaurants for a very good rendition.

Hell bent on replicating it, I found a recipe in David Thompson’s new book, Thai Street Food.  I’ve made it several times, the first following the recipe and it was superb. Then I tweaked it slightly for the resulting khao mok gai recipe below. (Disclosure: I provided an official book jacket endorsement for Thai Street Food. Thompson’s recipe for this dish was one of the reasons why.)

Get ready. Khao mok gai takes time to make. It is not straightforward and quick like last week's Thai grilled chicken (gai yang), though you can mix a little of that lovely sweet chile sauce into the rice, if you want to.

But if you make this Thai version of biryani, you’ll have enough for 8 people, or several rounds of eating. Add a salad and you’ve got a celebratory meal that will be sure to WOW your family and friends.

A few notes:

• Basmati is my substitute for the aged long-grain rice (e.g. jasmine) that would likely be used in Thailand.
• The use of dairy (here it's yogurt) and combining cilantro and mint is unusual for Thai cooking but it works for this hybrid dish.
• The chicken and rice are great on their own but add some tart-spicy-sweet sauce and it enlivens the entire dish, making it bright and spritely. The spicy mint sauce below is akin to an Indian green chutney but the galangal zing skews it toward Thailand. Or, you can use some sweet Thai chile sauce.
• Make the paste and fry the shallots a day in advance to get a head start.
• Use a heavy-bottomed, large, wide pot that you would braise a big stew to ensure that things cook evenly. I used an All Clad 6-quart pan.
• Thai cardamom is available at well-stocked Thai markets but regular green cardamom works great.

Thai cardamom (left), Indian green cardamon (right)

Dive into the khao mok gai recipe below and parse the cultural influences as you cook and eat. For more background information on khao mok gai, read "Biryani, Bangkok Style" by Austin Bush, a photographer and writer in Bangkok.

What is Street Food? -- 2010 Eat Real Festival

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This Friday evening, I'm participating in the Lit Fest at the 2010 Eat Real Festival. There are about a dozen writers invited to talk about street food at the Oakland event that spans 3 days. The Eat Real Festival is kinda like the Woodstock of food. It's free too!

Friday night's theme is Street Food.  I'm in  the 7 to 9pm line-up with some buddies of mine as well as other writers and chefs whose work I admire: Pim of Chez Pim, John Birdsall of SF Weekly, Rachel Saunders of the Blue Chair Fruit, Gustavo Arellano of Ask a Mexican, Anamika Khanna of Kasa Indian, Richie Nakano of Hapa Ramen, Sara Deseran of 7x7 magazine, and David Boyk of California Taco Trucks.

The other themes cover  making, growing, and finding food (Saturday), and food storytelling (Sunday). All the Lit Fest events happen on the second floor of the Harvest Hall of Jack London Square. See more details at the Eat Real Fest site.

Back to the photos. Preparing for my 10-minute talk (it's short but has to be potent!), I reflected on street food that I've enjoyed during my time in Asia and America.

The images above are from my travels spanning 2003 to 2010. Use the "Notes" function to see my descriptions and comments for each photo. There are about 24 photos here and they're helping me ponder issue such as:

• What is street food?
• What is Asian street food? Is it different from others?
• How can we get good street food all over America?

Your thoughts?

Instead of gawking at street food photos, you can always make some. Here are few Asian street food recipes on my two sites:

Viet World Kitchen

• Master Banh Mi Recipe
• Thai Grilled Chicken Recipe (Gai Yang)
• Green papaya salad with beef jerky (Goi Du Du Kho Bo)
• Beef in Wild Betel Leaf (Thit Bo Nuong La Lot)
• Taiwanese Spicy Beef Noodle Soup (Niu Rou Mian)
• Beef Pho Noodle Soup (Pho Bo)
• Chicken Pho Noodle Soup (Pho Ga)
• Hu Tieu Nam Vang (Phnom Penh Noodle Soup)

Asian Dumpling Tips

• Steamed Chicken and Shiitake Mushroom Buns (Bao)
• Japanese Octopus Dumpling Balls (Takoyaki)
• Portuguese Egg Tart (Poh Taht, Pasteis de Belem)
• Japanese Braised Pork Belly Buns

 

Peking Duck Meal at Home -- LA Times Article

 

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Remember my experiments with Sichuan and Peking duck earlier this year? After those initial forays, I wanted to make a whole 3-course Peking duck meal with the Mandarin pancakes, stir-fry and final soup. Editor Russ Parsons of the Los Angeles Times "Food" section let me go at it and the article was published today.

I cooked a lot of ducks to perfect the recipes, and the photos above give you the highlights. The roasted duck. Its crisp flesh in a homemade pancake (it's like a flour tortilla but better), the stir-fry with the roast duck meat, and the final soup made from ducky broth and cabbage.

Don't be daunted. It surprisingly doesn't take much to produce this wonderful Chinese meal in your home kitchen.  My husband and I ate it multiple times during recipe development. We never tired of it and didn't even develop duck tummies. Seriously.

Check out my journey toward Peking duck-dom, recipes, and techniques:

Dine-in Duck  (Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2010)

Start practicing on your family and friends. Let me know your thoughts!

Related Chinese duck recipes:

Chinese Fragrant and Crispy Duck - Version 1 (Xiang Su Quan Ya)
Chinese Fragrant and Very Crispy Duck - Version 2 (Xiang Su Quan Ya)
Homemade Peking Duck

• Step 1: How to blow up a duck
• Step 2: How to scald and give the duck a tan
• Step 3: How to roast the duck

Taiwanese Spicy Beef Noodle Soup Recipe (Niu Rou Mian)

Tomorrow my husband and I will be celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary. (I was a child bride. Ha! -- NOT.) We were discussing what we should do, where we could go out, what we had eaten on past anniversaries. We didn’t make any concrete plans but I started thinking about the meals we shared when we first started dating in 1989. Yes, we’re an old couple.

One of our favorite places was the Mandarin Deli in Chinatown, Los Angeles. It was a hole in the wall that my sisters introduced me to when they were attending USC down the way. I loved the Mandarin Deli’s giant pot stickers that burned my mouth with their hot juices (they’re mentioned in Asian Dumplings).

An order of dumplings was always paired with hot bowls of beef noodle soup (牛肉麵, niu rou mian). Its inky spicy broth, plump wheat noodles, and chunks of red-cooked beef were perfect with the dumplings. It was good in the cooler months as well as the hotter months. I ate it year round.

Since then, I’ve made various versions of the soup from recipes found in Irene Kuo’s classic, The Key to Chinese Cooking, and Fuschia Dunlop’s enlightening work on Sichuan cuisine, Land of Plenty.  I’ve also ordered plenty of beef noodle soup from Taiwanese joints, such as A&J Restaurant, which has outposts in Southern and Northern California.

Overall, I like the Taiwanese version of niu rou mian (literally beef meat noodles) better than other versions of the Chinese soup. The Taiwanese take usually has more complexity in the broth but I didn't know why until this past weekend.

BaoHaus NYC: Asian American Bao Burgers

Last week I was in New York en route to Asia. A couple of Manhattan friends, novelist Monique Truong and restaurateur/chef Pichet Ong, suggested that I check out BaoHaus, a new Lower East Side snack joint serving up Taiwanese stuffed buns called gua bao. BaoHaus’s buns are not round, filled buns like the ones you get dim sum or the ones I made using refrigerated biscuit dough. Rather, they are mini sandwiches called gua bao.

The leavened bao dough is shaped into clamshells and steamed. Open up the resulting plain steamed rolls and slide a little morsel inside, such as red cooked pork belly or deep fried duck. (Cantonese roast duck is often served with steamed buns for you to make your own mini concoction.

Some describe gua bao as a hamburger, but I’m not sure. I suppose you could say that bao are Chinese buns so these are Chinese hamburgers. Any thoughts on whether gua bao are hamburgers or not?

The version at BaoHaus is Taiwanese, stuffed with a satisfying amount of pork belly, braised beef, or deep-fried tofu. Pichet and I like the pork belly best, though we also ate up the other two versions too!

Don’t expect a David Chang/Momofuku-esque pork belly bun here. Owner and chef Eddie Huang was born in the U.S. and raised by food savvy Taiwanese parents. His father ran a steakhouse and made Eddie work every job, though he never intended for his son to go into the restaurant business.

Guide to Vietnamese Restaurant Menus

Have problems navigating a Vietnamese restaurant menu? You’re not alone. They are their own animals but are generally organized the same. There are more or less the same menu items – think of a Chinese restaurant menu. Instead of a "Pasta" section, there's a "Noodles" section. "Banh" are usually savory dumplings, crepes, and little morsels made with flours and starches.

Nevertheless, Vietnamese restaurant menus can confuse with English translations. As a Vietnamese speaker, I sometimes ask for clarification too!

Last year the folks over at Pho411.ca approached me to collaborate to help Vietnamese food lovers and Vietnamese restaurant owners. Sometimes there are typos and miscommunication that get in the way of good food. Pho411.ca and I put the following content together for those who may be unfamiliar with Vietnamese food terms. (Your Vietnamese language skills may be rusty!)

Also, for Vietnamese chefs and restaurant owners may benefit from having some kind of common vocabulary to use when describing Vietnamese dishes. The content in the pages below is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather a starting point. I hope the information broadens your understanding of Vietnamese food and allows you to explore it more deeply.

• Sections of a Menu: How a Vietnamese restaurant menu is organizes. What types of food do you usually see? What are they?
  
• Common Vietnamese Restaurant Dishes: English - Vietnamese names of common foods you'd find on a menu. Restaurants, delis, bakeries and pho shops offer mostly the same things. Use this as a guide.
• Cooking Methods, Seasonings, and Ingredients: If you don't recognize a dish, this page will  help you translate the menu descriptions.  How is something cooked? What kinds of seasonings or dipping sauce is served with it? What are the featured vegetables and fruits? From there you can imagine the flavors. Or, ask informed questions!

Have content to add or corrections? Add them here or better yet, go to Pho411.ca and use their convenient feedback form (scroll to bottom of page).

Can REAL Asian Food be Mainstreamed?

Acclaimed cookbook author and New York Times columnist Mark Bittman recently invited me to contribute to his new site, MarkBittman.com. It's intended to be a "slog", e.g. a salon and food blog. The content is being crafted by Bittman and a team of ardent food people. There's home cooking, ingredient discussions, and information on food politics and trends. The site is not for dogma but rather for conversation, much like what we do here. And, there's some good cooking too!

I'll be posting content to the site on a regular basis -- broad topics or cooking stuff I find here and there - supplemental to what I have on Viet World Kitchen. My first post focuses on whether or not authentic Asian flavors can be produced on a mass level for mainstream America. What does it take?

We've discussed the meanings of authentic Asian food and modern and pan-Asian cooking. I recently went to a new restaurant this spring in Los Angeles that made me consider the opportunities for getting solidly tasty, honest Asian fare outside of ethnic enclaves.

What restaurant was it? RockSugar. For details, read the post on MarkBittman.com:

• Can Real Asian Food be Mainstreamed?

Gifts in the Mail: Handmade Knife from Vietnam

It is one thing to open up an Amazon package of something I ordered for myself, but it’s another to get surprise mail like the envelope above. Historian and novelist Dana Sachs sent it to me, prefacing on Facebook that she had a gift to add to my kitchen. I had no clue what to expect. Then the  manila envelope arrived.

It looked plain and unassuming. Being flat, it couldn’t contain artisanal palm sugar or homegrown chiles, a couple of past food gifts that I’ve received in the mail.

But it must have had something to do with Vietnam because that is Dana’s area of specialty. (Her new book, The Lives We Were Given, details the fall of Saigon through the journey of thousands of babies airlifted from Vietnam in April 1975.) On the back of the envelope, Dana cautiously warned me to open it carefully, lest I cut myself. Did she send me one of the 'killer' dao bao shredder/peeler knives?

Turns out that she sent me a handmade knife from Hanoi. She carefully wrapped the blade in paper and affixed this post-it note:

These are my favorite knives in the world. Don’t put it in the dishwasher. Also, they rust, so just wash it off. But they never get dull.

I slipped off the newspaper sleeve and found a hand-forged blade. My gawd. I’d never seen such a rustic knife. But I could not use it – yet.