Viet World Kitchen

Thai Grilled Chicken Recipe (Gai Yang)

The sun decided to make an appearance this past week in Santa Cruz for longer than just a couple of hours a day! I was unfortunately stuck in my office reviewing edits on a writing project. After finishing on Friday, it time for a real weekend. 

To start things off, Rory opened up a liter bottle of a dry Riesling and I made Thai grilled chicken (gai yang).  Mymenu choice was inspired by two things: (1) the jar of Thai sweet chile sauce I recently made and (2) memories of a fabulous rendition of gai yang at Sailors Thai, a renowned restaurant in Sydney, Australia.

I had basically given up on ordering cloyingly sweet grilled chicken at Thai restaurants, but my dining buddy that evening, Bangkok-based journalist Jarrett Wrisley, convinced me to order the signature Thai dish. He was prescient in saying, “If this is a good Thai restaurant, they should at least do this well.”

We were startled by how good the gai yang was at Sailors Thai. Jarrett and I politely fought each other over every last bit of flesh and tangy-spicy sauce.

Sailors Thai was started by David Thompson, the chef/owner of Michelin starred nahm at the Halkin hotel in London and the soon-to-open outpost at the Metropolitan in Bangkok. David is one of the foremost authorities on Thai cuisine. He is feisty in nature and uncompromising in his cooking. Over the years, he has elevated Thai food to a high level of craftsmanship and respect that it deserves.

Thompson’s cookbooks, Thai Food and Thai Street Food are phenomenal works. Thai Food is one of my reference books and I used it to work up this gai yang recipe, which is frankly super easy.

Hardline traditionalists would use a small chicken (think game hen size) but I opted for chicken-leg and-thigh quarters. They are juicy, cost less, and taste great.

Brush the sweet chile sauce on at the end or serve it on the side. Do both, if you like. You can’t lose.

Peking Duck Meal at Home -- LA Times Article

 

• 
• 
• 
• 

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

Stir-Fried Beef with Lemongrass and Chiles -- Mark Bittman.com

Remember how I went on the press trip last month? I went to New York, Nanjing, China, and then Hanoi, Vietnam, in the span of about 10 days.  In total, I flew 9 flights in 13 days. I tasted new foods, experienced Asian history, met relatives I didn't know I had, and battled jet lag!

Among the things that I took away from the trip was the stir-fry above. It's not quite Vietnamese thit bo xao xa ot but a hybrid Chinese-Vietnamese preparation that I had on Dragon Air (part of Cathay Pacific Airlines, which co-sponsored the trip).

The simple stir-fry comforted at the end of the journey, and I liked it lots. So much so that I went home and replicated it. It's hard to believe but airline food can inspire!

For the recipe, see this 7/8/10 post on MarkBittman.com:

• Decent Food at 30,000 Feet, Seriously

Related posts:

• Advice for Fighting Jet Lag and Surviving Red-Eyes
• Hanoi Food and Travel Tips: Where to go, what to eat
  
• Hanoi Food and Travel 2010 (initial impressions)

Garlicky Pan-fried Pork Steaks Recipe (Thit Cot-let Chien)

My mom reads this blog and loves to come up with ideas for cool content. This weekend when I visited my parents, she showed me her new twist on one of my childhood favorites: pan-fried pork steaks full of garlicky goodness. It’s a dead simple recipe that reflects Vietnamese-French cooking. Just note the Vietnamese name: thit (meat) cot-let (cutlet/pork chop) chien (fried).

The difference between what I grew up eating and what my mom served the other night is that instead of using dry thin pork chops, my mom now prefers end-pieces of pork loin. She buys them in bulk from Smart & Final for a good deal. They are a pork processing byproduct. She loves it and stands by her pork choice. Would you mess with this woman?

That cut of pork has a moderate amount of fat and lots of flavor. It’s tastier than the pork chops of my youth. All my mom did was defrost the pork (remember, she loves to freeze things) and then used the spine of a cleaver to lightly pound and tenderize the meat, which she cut up into pieces about the size of the palm of her hand. Then she generously seasoned it with minced garlic, salt and pepper.

My parents had a packed social schedule that day and didn’t get home till 5:30pm. Given that, mom prepped the pork the night before and refrigerated it. (You can marinate the meat for an hour at room temperature, if you like.) She let the meat sit at room temperature for about 45 minutes to take some of the chill off.

Then she coated each one in plain breadcrumbs (nothing fancy like panko) and pan-fried the pork steaks in a skillet on her outdoor stove. She loves her patio set up and does most of her cooking there where there’s an ocean breeze and she can ‘communicate’ with the ingredients. It’s a bit like being in Vietnam.

Mom used medium-hot heat and made sure there was enough oil to cover the bottom of the large skillet at all times. Each piece took about 5 minutes to cook, and got flipped over midway. She had to add oil as she fried because she cooked about 5 pounds of meat. Occasionally she would scoop some of the overly fried bits out of the skillet to clean it out.

The result was heavenly. The outside was slightly crisp and the meat inside was succulent and savory. I would have eaten a lot more had there not been so much other food on the table.

When making this simple pork, you don’t have to shop at Smart & Final for the meat. Boneless pork shoulder steaks would be fine. Or, cut pieces from the more marbly end of a pork loin.

We eat these pork chops with fork and knife. It’s one of the few Vietnamese dishes where each guest gets his/her personal slab of meat. Nevertheless, I noticed that everyone at the table – my mom, dad, husband and me – sliced up their entire pieces of pork before any was eaten. Feel free to dip the pork in a bit of chile garlic sauce for some heat. 

Grilled Whole Fish in Banana Leaf Recipe (Ikan Panggang)

Banana leaf is not merely nature’s placemat. Asian cooks use it like plastic wrap, foil, and parchment paper. The beauty of using banana leaf is that it imparts a wonderful tea-leaf like scent to food during the cooking process. It’s kinda like the Southeast Asian version of French cooking en papillote (in paper)!

In the Vietnamese kitchen, banana leaf perfumes silky sausages and headcheese and many dumplings. But we seldom wrap large whole fish in banana leaf and grill it like our Southeast Asian brothers and sisters tend to do. Fresh lotus leaves, which are huge and easy to wrap with, is more typically used. Or, you use mud to encase the whole fish, usually freshwater snakehead fish (ca loc in Vietnamese). Or, you just grill the fish in a wire frame basket.

But who has fresh lotus leaves and mud at their disposal? Or the right size wire basket? Not me.

The other night, I thought of a wonderful lunch of grilled whole fish that I enjoyed with Robyn Eckhardt and David Hagerman in Kuala Lumpur in 2008. It was served with a briny-spicy-sweet dipping sauce made of funky shrimp paste, sweet kecap manis soy sauce, and chiles. A terrific harmony of Malaysian ingredients.

Wanting to recapture those flavors, I found a similar recipe in Christopher Tan’s Singaporean cookbook, Shiok! Chris is among the leading experts on Southeast Asian foodways and I trust him immensely. His ikan panggang recipe was modestly called “Barbecued Fish” in English. The flavors were fabulously big. I’ve adapted Chris’s recipe here for you.

Fragrant and Crispy Duck Recipe (Xiang Su Quan Ya)

“There’s nothing I can do to stop you,” Rory said when I laid out my plan to make Peking duck, which entailed borrowing a neighbor’s air compressor to detach the skin and fat. When I brought my duck home from the Chinese market, I realized that I couldn’t figure out where I should stick the pump. The recipe instructions in Eileen Yin-Fei Low’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking did not give me enough guidance. The duck was casting a gentle gaze at me in the fridge, and I had to figure out what to do with the dear bird.

I perused my Chinese cookbooks to discover a Sichuan preparation of crispy duck, which Fuchsia Dunlop says is the duck that most Chinese restaurants abroad actually serve. What I've enjoyed hasn't been roasted, but deep fried! Maybe that's why they get the duck to the table relatively quickly.My friend Carl Chu, a Chinese food expert and author of the Chinese Food Finder series , verified Fuchsia’s claim by saying that Peking duck at most Chinese restaurants are mostly made in advance and then deep-fried to refresh and serve. So I gave up on using the air compressor pump (Rory was relieved) and embarked on a weekend of Sichuan duck.

Honey Baked Ham with Red Wine and Orange Rind Recipe

I’ve been nibbling away on my mom’s leftover holiday ham for over a week now. We had slices of the savory sweet ham on Christmas Eve, then she packed  it up for each of us kids to take home with us. There was so much leftover – Mom baked 20 pounds of ham – that she carefully used her scale to portion the ham out and then froze lots too. I’m sure we’ll be eating her ham futures during 2010. (The photo above is of her finished products, before slicing.)

But that’s okay because I love ham -- pork is the go-to meat in the Vietnamese kitchen. If it’s not grilled like the Vietnamese restaurant-style lemongrass pork steaks I mentioned last week, then it’s simmered in caramel sauce, or made into cold cuts for stuffing into banh mi. But then there’s the ham – which is nothing but a fore or hind leg of a pig. My family has had a love affair with with American-style baked ham ever since we were first gifted our first Honey Baked ham for Christmas.

Secret to injecting flavor into honey baked ham

That went on for a few Christmases and then one day, my mom decided to make her own. She wanted to figure out how to imbue the ham with flavor. My father, ever the tinkerer, suggested that we inject the ham with honey as that’s what Honey Baked Ham must do.

Easy Grilled Pizza with Trader Joe’s Dough

 

This summer, I’ve reviewed, dissed, and re-purposed Asian-inspired prepared food products from frozen dumplings and Chinese barbecued pork to rice paper rolls. Last weekend, I decided to take a non-Asian Trader Joe’s product to make a Vietnamese-style dish. Trader Joe’s excels at western flavors and products, and I’ve been using the Trader Joe’s pizza dough for several years whenever I want a quick pie. It’s not the best pizza dough you can make but it’s darn good for a convenience food. And for less than $1, you get a pound of great dough. Plus, you can keep it refrigerated for a couple days.

I typically cook pizza in a hot oven, stretching it into super thin crust pizzas and baking it on a stone preheated for 30 minutes to 450F. But it was warm last weekend and I didn’t want to heat up the house. Rory wanted pizza and he suggested that we try grilling it as prescribed in the August issue of Sunset magazine. I checked out the article and noticed that Sunset’s grilled pizza technique came from Jamie Purviance, a seasoned cookbook writer and author of the excellent Weber’s Way to Grill. We followed Jamie’s technique, and working together, in less than 45 minutes, we make 4 amazing grilled pizzas, topped with goodies from our garden and leftovers in the fridge. That’s as fast as going to a pizza joint or calling out for a pizza.