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

 

Stir-Fried Clams with Spicy Bean Sauce Recipe

In the early 1990s, I received a fellowship to study at Chinese University in Hong Kong. That year of study helped me polish my language skill but more importantly, I got to eat my way through Hong Kong. My friends and I would go to the Kowloon night market and browse the stalls of overly padded bras and cheap knock-off goods before we settled on a few evening street snacks.

My all time favorite Hong Kong night market dish was clams in bean sauce. The small clams were as big as a quarter and thin shelled so there was a ton of them piled high on a plate. Hot from the wok, each order was unceremoniously plopped down on a flimsy table. My friends and I sat on stools and ate the clams with bamboo skewers, slurping all the sauce we could, scorching our tongues as we worked our way to the bottom of the plate. It cost roughly $2 an order. Seriously.

I’ve been looking for a good recipe for that dish since then. Most U.S. Chinese restaurants offer clams in black bean sauce but frankly, the pungency of fermented black beans overwhelms the delicate clams. I did not realize the error of my ways until I tried Grace Young’s stir-fried clams with spicy bean sauce recipe from Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge.

It’s not fermented black beans that I was looking for, but rather ground bean sauce. Ground bean sauce is sold in jars at Chinese market, and though it is definitely salty, it is not as forceful and earthy as fermented black beans. Ground bean sauce plays well with other ingredients, falling into the background to add savory depth.

Regular whole salted soybeans, also sold at Chinese markets, function in the same way, though they are not as nuanced as ground bean sauce. I used salted soybeans as the jar was what I had in my pantry.

The result was terrific, full of ginger, garlic, a touch of fresh chile heat. The clams stood up well to the flavors and retained their individual characteristics. I was frankly, happy as a clam. The salty, spicy, savory sauce was great on rice too, just like Grace described in the recipe introduction.

Crisp Roasted Pork Belly Recipe (Thit Heo Quay)

Some of my friends have said that they  are “over” pork belly. How could one ever fall out of love with fat? That would could not happen to  me. I recently slow cooked pork belly and now, with that cut of bone-in pork belly that I got from the Chinese market, I was going to try roasting it. I reached out for advice and suggestions on Facebook and this site included

• N. Fong: Yum! Marinate and slow braised, then roasted!
• J. Washburn: I get a chunk of bone-in pig belly nearly every time I go to Austin. It runs about $2.09/lb. there. Several ways to cook 'em. One of my favorites is rub with 5-spice, slow roast, run skin side under broiler to blister when done.
• J. Adams: Char siu!

See the comments section of the post on this unusual cut of pork to get Jarrett’s Thai take on Momofuku’s roast pork belly. Sunflower in the UK provided excellent information on a Chinese version of crisp pork belly.

Gazing at my bookshelves, I remembered seeing a recipe in Vietnamese-Australian Luke Nguyen’s The Songs of Sapa, a Vietnamese cookbook that’s up for an IACP cookbook award this year. I looked it up and his recipe intrigued me for the following reasons:

(1) It came from a Vietnamese vendor in Vietnam and Luke attached a great family story to the recipe.  I'm a sucker for a good story, you know that!
(2) Required scalding the skin, which I just did for homemade Peking duck so I felt like I was on a roll.
(3) Involved these unusual ingredients: annatto oil, cornstarch, and baking soda. What do these ingredients do to the pork belly during roasting?
(4) Was very easy.

I wanted to keep things simple to allow the meat to shine. So I tried Luke's recipe out, and the results were good for my first time out with roasting bone-in pork belly. Pork in Vietnam often times requires scalding and scraping as it can be tough and needs to be cleaned – somewhat like scraping your tongue, which Asians have been doing since ancient times. Seriously.

Crisp Daikon Rice Cakes with Egg and Scallion Recipe (Banh Cu Cai Bot Chien)

If you visited my other site this week, Asian Dumpling Tips, you’ll notice that I went on a daikon rice cake jag. I test drove a recipe for the dim sum favorite from The Dumpling cookbook and then developed a vegetarian version based on ones at Slanted Door restaurant in San Francisco. I have to admit that watching Charles Phan battle Cat Cora on Iron Chef America inspired the vegetarian daikon rice cakes. Plus I’m attending the CIA’s World of Flavors conference this weekend in Napa and the theme is street food and comfort food. All that converged and as I pondered how to repurpose all the daikon rice cake in my fridge.

Bingo -- one way to use up some of the cake was to spiff up a Vietnamese street food favorite called bánh bột chiên (fried cakes, literally), which is made of crisp fried pieces of plain rice dough, with scrambled eggs, scallion and a tangy-sweet-spicy soy dipping sauce. Bot chien is a Chiu Chow (Triều Châu, Chinese people tied to Chaozhou, an area bordering Guangdong and Fujian provinces) invention and quite popular among school children as an after-school snack. Earlier this year, I had the dish at a Dynasty restaurant in San Jose, California, during their dim sum service. I noticed on Yelp that a small number of Vietnamese restaurants offer the dish too.

Thai Sticky Rice with Coconut Cream a la Chez Pim

I live in Santa Cruz, a beach/hippie/arty/university town in Northern California that is very slowly shedding its mantra of “Keep Santa Cruz Weird.” Eleven years ago when my husband and I moved here from Santa Monica (Los Angeles), a long-time local told us that Santa Cruz is a cosmic place. Groovy, man . . . I don’t know if this quirky town offers a harmonic convergence or not, but life has put us here and I’ve met some wonderful, one-of-a-kind people, including Pim Techamuanvivit, the gourmet behind the Chezpim.com blog.

Pim and I get together on occasion for coffee and dinner out, but we have more fun when we cook together. Recently when Pim was over, I had a pot of purple rice prepared from a new rice blend I found at the Whole Foods down the street. I’d never seen the Alter-Eco fair trade rice before but it was an interesting combination of Thai rices: long-grain jasmine combined with short grain black. I made a pot of Alter Eco’s “purple jasmine” (photo below) earlier in the day to test it out, and the brilliant purple-stained result was more like a soft Thai black sticky rice, rather than regular long-grain rice. The flavor was delicately sweet and very much like com nep (Vietnamese sticky rice cooked in a pot like regular rice). A good canvas for Thai sticky rice and coconut milk?

Corn and Coconut Sweet Soup Recipe (Che Bap)

 

Even though corn is native to the Americas, cooks in Asia love to cook with corn. In my Vietnamese kitchen, I celebrate the summer bounty of sweet corn by stir-frying corn with chiles and dried shrimp, frying up batches of corn and coconut fritters and simmering pots of this creamy, risotto like sweet soup. Called chè (“cheh”), sweet soups can be hot, warm, or cold. They are sold as street food, served at restaurants, and made at home. In Vietnamese communities abroad, there are even cafeteria-like chè bars where you can point to various cooked ingredients and the clerk will combine them in a cup for you to eat in or takeaway. Look for chè at Vietnamese banh mi sandwich shops too; they’re typically sold in plastic see-through cups.

Vietnamese sweet soups are beloved snacks that aren’t cloyingly sweet. Last week on Twitter, Leah Crow (@cabeah) asked me to for this sweet soup, which she’d just enjoyed at a Vietnamese restaurant. I tweeted back a 140-character recipe but didn’t feel like the tweet was enough. With leftover ears of corn from Labor weekend, I made a batch of che bap (“cheh bahp”) and jotted down the recipe for Leah and you to use.

Green Papaya Salad with Beef Jerky Recipe (Goi Du Du Bo Kho)

 

Vietnamese green papaya salad comes in two guises and one of them features earthy beef jerky and heady Thai basil (hung que). The other version of green papaya salad is southern Viet and has shrimp, pork and rau ram herb; the recipe is in Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. A northern Viet favorite, green papaya salad made with beef jerky includes slivers of smoked liver and on occasion, lung too. In Hanoi's Old Quarter, I recall a little street full of green papaya salad vendors. I’ve never had the lung in salads in the U.S. Both the jerky and liver are a tad chewy, the liver adding a slight minerally quality to the salad. It’s no great shakes. If you lived in Little Saigon, you’d go to the Vietnamese-Chinese jerky store for the beef and the liver. Or you make beef jerky at home, like I did last week. In my kitchen, I omit the liver and the salad is just fine. 

To dress Vietnamese green papaya salad, you have two options. One is a fish sauce and lime dressing. The other features soy sauce and vinegar. The former yields a salad that is lighter in taste and appearance that the latter. At places like the Asian Garden Mall food court in Orange County’s Little Saigon, it’s common to see the soy dressing. If you watched the movie, Scent of Green Papaya, the dressing is the fish sauce one. Regardless of your dressing, you can serve the salad pre-dressed or with the dressing on the side. Because the soy dressing turns the pale celadon green papaya a sad brown color, I like to let guests dress their own salad. The recipe below employs the soy sauce dressing.