EatingAsia

Where Am I?

That's what I think to myself as I drink in this gorgeous view: a winding river backed by low mountains, trees showing their limbs while others sport various shades of brown, all of it lit by a weak sun, and not a coconut palm in sight. I could be taking in a summer day in northern California (where, by the way, summer occurs when much of the rest of the US is sliding towards winter).

That was our favorite time of the year when we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, so it's a sweet bit of fortune to find it here in on a February day in northern Thailand. Yesterday we drove from Lampang to Mae Chaem, a scruffy village on a diversionary road off the Mae Hong Son Loop. It's a relatively short journey - just 2 1/2 hours - but the last leg cuts through Doi Inthanon National Park, home to Thailand's highest peak, and for the final ninety minutes or so the road is all twisty turns.

We drove with our windows open (something we never do at home in Kuala Lumpur) and, at the road's highest point, gulped in wonderfully crisp air as the sun began to fall behind the mountain. As the elevation dropped the air heated and the scents of dry brush, dead leaves, and deliberately-set fires filled the car. When we arrived in Mae Chaem, which is nestled in a parched (at this time of the year) valley, the temperature was on that delicious cusp between daylight sauna heat and moist, nighttime coolness. After finding a room for the night we walked to the wet market (what little of it was still up and running at half past seven) and celebrated our arrival, seated roadside at a rickety table, with Sang Som and soda poured by a boiled peanut vendor.

 

There's not much to Mae Chaem and we'd rather be at higher elevations anyway, so this is just a pitstop - but we want to make the most of it so we're up early, to take in what little there is to take in before the valley heats up. At seven the market is surprisingly quiet, just a few vegetable and kanom vendors and others selling pork, beef, and chicken in a glassed-in 'meat room'. There's no real coffee either, so we down our Nescafe with our noses scrunched as if it were medicine (and in a way, it is) and then walk for a bit along the river before turning into village's 'suburbs', a neat grid of residential streets.

Sleepy doesn't begin to describe the dozey feel of this place, but the residents are friendly and the roads are lined with some lovely old wooden houses.

 

When we return to the market an hour later it's bordering on kind-of lively, with more vendors of prepared foods and a woman at the back cooking up laab khua to order.

 

She flavors her laab not with spice paste but with ground chili, a powdered spice mixture heavy on the prickly ash, and fish sauce; her laab is chunkier - the meat and 'parts' cut into larger pieces - than most, and it's studded with plenty of generously sized pieces of crackling.

 

We pad our breakfast with a spicy chicken, vegetable, and mung bean vermicelli gaeng purchased from a nearby vendor, and grilled, banana leaf-wrapped fish sourced from another.

 

The former is wonderful but the latter I can't abide. The tiny fish are too bony and the paste they've been mixed with before grilling contains an ingredient that puts me off somehow. This is frustrating and very unusual  - I can't recall the last time I tried something that I couldn't bring myself to continue eating. But Dave is happy to finish it off by himself.

At the far end of our table a woman chops pork fat into big chunks and tosses them into a huge wok. As we eat we admire the patience of one Mae Cham resident for whom hope springs eternal.

Please Dress Politely

   

Guys (and gals), leave your tank tops back at the guest house; its shirtsleeves only if you want to eat at Chiang Mai's Thanawm Pochanaa Restaurant (and, if you're in Chiang Mai, you really should eat there). I know it's hot out, but hey, the three sisters who run this tight ship have eased their requirements substantially: they previously banned shorts and flip-flops as well.

We were directed to Pochanaa by our friend W, immunologist by day and architectural preservationist/oral cultural historian/animal rights activist nights and weekends. This Chiang Mai native, whom you might mistake for a prim aunty should you meet her on the street, also finds time for serious chowhounding. She and her husband roadtrip just to eat. We're pretty sure our meeting her a few years ago was the result of an act of divine intervention.

 

'You must try Pochanaa before you leave Chiang Mai,' W urged over a lunch of Yunnanese food, right after she'd regaled us with descriptions of a two-table operation on the edge of town well worth the trek (we didn't make it there).

The restaurant has been around for years, and it really is run by three middle-aged sisters. And it's remarkably eat-off-the-floor squeaky-spotless. Pochanaa is probably the cleanest eatery I've ever been in in Southeast Asia - and that includes Singapore. We usually don't pay much notice to these sorts of things, but when you walk into Pochanaa you're practically blinded by the gleam of the windows, tables, chairs, the prep area. By the looks of things Pochanaa is the territory of some ferociously attention-to-detail cook-owners, an observation that's confirmed when the food arrives to table.

The dishes served here are central and Chinese Thai. Following W's recommendation we ordered gaeng kiaow waan gai ('sweet' green chicken curry), a dish that usually elicits nothing more than an 'eh' from me. Pochanaa's is simply exquisite. The chicken, though boneless and mostly white-meat, is tender and incredibly moist. Though coconut-y, the curry manages to be not too heavy, and the natural sweetness of the coconut milk is well balanced by a wee bit of heat and the bitterness released when one of its many pea eggplants pops between the teeth. Lots of Thai basil here, and lemongrass, galangal, and wild lime leaves as well, but also other (to me) unidentifiable, seasonings that really places this version high above most others I've eaten.

Nam prik gapi - slightly sweet, fairly spicy, and certainly fish-flavored (no doubt about it, you've really got like shrimp paste to appreciate the merits of nam prik gapi) - is served with long beans, chunks of cucumber, fresh bamboo shoots (wonderfully crunchy), and fried horse mackerel, which is the small fish you find beautifully displayed in baskets in the salted goods section of Thai wet markets. I'm a relatively late convert to these specimens, having only become enamored of fresh mackerel a few years ago while we were living in Saigon. Now I can't get enough of them. They're bony, but the meat slides away from the bones with the merest prod of a fork. The flavor of the fish's meaty flesh is not at all harsh, and the crispy tails make fine eating as well, bones and all.

We're glad that W insisted we order the muu op, or roast pork, which arrives as a mound of paper-thin slices of tenderloin doused with a soy-based, anise-scented sauce that begs for a plate of rice (I also fantasized about piling layers of the meat on a Vietnamese baguette).

A plate of pak beung (water spinach) perfectly stir-fried with minimal garlic (the sisters won't cook your pak beung with fermented soy sauce and chilies for that Thai green veg staple pak beung fai daeng, so don't even ask) rounded out the main meal, which is where we planned to stop ... until we noticed every other patron was finishing with Thai cendol.

And quite a good version it was too, boasting toothsome rice flour noodles (all too often those green pasta 'worms' are mushy) and very fresh coconut milk. No palm sugar here - that's the Malaysian version - and the fact that us palm sugar addicts didn't miss it says something about the deliciousness of this sweet.

Pochanaa has an English-language menu, but we recommend you walk up to the display case and ask the sisters what's on offer that day (or just point, if you don't speak any Thai - believe us, no matter what you order you're unlikely to be disappointed). We understand that you'll always find muu op, gaeng kiaow waan, and red curry with catfish, but other items come and go. You can also have any of the curries over rice or kanom jeen as a one-dish meal. The only beverage available is mineral water but - here again is the attention to detail - it's served ice-cold.

Thanawm Pochanaa, across from the walled city's Tha Phae gate, Chiang Mai. There's no sign in English, so look for the blue and white awning and a 'No Shirt No Service' marker on the door. And go for lunch - the restaurant is only open till 5 or so. Closed Sundays.

Northern Meat Recipe

This is the dish that got innards into my kitchen - laab khua, or northern Thai-style cooked laab (pictured upper left and opening our previous post).

Dave and I were introduced to laab khua a couple years back, while in northern Thailand researching an article for the Chicago Tribune. On previous trips to the area we'd eaten well but hadn't really taken to sticky rice and northern flavors, which seemed almost too intense (many northerners have described their cuisine to us as kem-kon, which might be translated as 'concentrated and intense'), unlightened as they are by the lime juice that appears in so many Isaan and central Thai dishes.

Well, something clicked for us on that Chicago Tribune foray. After just a couple of days in Chiang Mai we found ourselves waking with an urge for sticky rice and strong-flavored nam prik with fresh and blanched veggies and rich, meaty dishes like gaeng om and laab. In Nan we learned to make pork laab at the home of a local we'd become friends with on a previous trip. Her cousin, a real estate developer by day and reknowned cook (within Nan town, that is) during off hours, comandeered the kitchen and whipped up a feast that included jaw pakkat (pork and greens soup lightly soured with tamarind), 'red eye' nam prik, and both fresh and cooked laab. It was a spectacular meal.

When we got back to Kuala Lumpur I had to test recipes for the article - usually my very least favorite food writing-related task. But making (and eating) those northern Thai dishes was most enjoyable; we never tired of the flavors.

I submitted the laab khua recipe below with my article. My editor at CT, deeming it a bit too adventurous for her readers, elected not to run it, staying instead with 'safer' options like dtam makhya (smoky pounded eggplant dip) and gaeng khae gai (coconut milk-free chicken and vegetable curry). I don't blame her - the dish probably does include a few too many challenging bits for the average American cook and eater.

But it's soooo tasty! This is the dish that propelled me to the wet market in search of a pork seller who could provide the freshest pig liver, heart, stomach, and skin. Yes - this is the dish that got me, finally, after many years cooking pretty adventurously, to tackle offal. I don't make it often (it's extremely rich, after all), but whenever I do I'm thankful for that trip to northern Thailand that banished my squeamishness. I'd urge anyone who thinks they could never eat beef or pig liver (or other bits) to give this a try. At the very least, toss in some chicken livers. The strong spices need that balance.

Laab Khua Muu (Northern Style Pork Laab)

(Serves 6-8 with a couple other dishes; recipe can be halved)

This is a pork laab, but you could easily substitute beef and beef parts (or even chicken, but use a lighter hand with the spices). I haven't included blood - if you choose to, figure on about a quarter cup or so, and stir it in with the meat - or pig skin, both of which our hostess in Nan added to the mix.

This laab incorporates a moist spice paste, and the end result is relatively dry. Some laab cooks make a much simpler version by simply stirring ground (and, presumably, roasted) spices and chilies into chopped meat and then cooking that with blood. Some cooks add water so that the laab sits in a little pool of 'soup'. Laab khua seems to me a very personal thing; make it how you want it - if you like it hot, use more chilies. If you want less spice flavor and more emphasis on the meatiness, halve the amounts.

And if you just can't countenance innards, make it without (but you should probably reduce the amount of spices because you won't have the innard richness to balance them). Sticky rice is the authentic accompaniment (but steamed rice will do), along with a generous mound of fresh vegetables.

And don't be put off by the recipe's length - you could always toast and grind chilies and spices ahead of time, or even make the spice paste a day in advance and pop it in the fridge.

250 grams of pork skin and organ meats, such as stomach, heart, liver, kidney (it’s preferable to include at least some liver)

500 grams pork, roughly chopped

10 plump cloves garlic, unpeeled

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

5 red-skinned shallots, unpeeled

 

1 handful dried red chilies

 

3 slices galangal root

1 Tbsp coriander seeds

5 long peppers

1 cardamom pod (preferably white)

½ whole nutmeg

½-inch piece cinnamon stick

2 ribs mace or 1/8 tsp ground mace

10 black peppercorns

1 tbsp Sichuan peppercorns

 

½ Tbsp shrimp paste

4 green onions (white and green parts)

½ bunch each cilantro and mint

1 bunch sawtooth herb (if not available, substitute with additional cilantro and mint)

 

Salt

Fresh vegetables and herbs for serving, for instance: sliced cucumbers, green cabbage, napa cabbage, long beans, wing beans, water spinach, mint, sawtooth herb, coriander, Thai basil, pennywort.

1. Place pig innards and skin, if using, in a medium saucepan and cover with cold water by 1 inch. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer till cooked, about 15 mins. Drain, reserving the cooking liquid. Set innards aside to cool and then chop to same fineness as chopped meat.
2. Pound with mortar and pestle, or very roughly chop, 5 of the skin-on garlic cloves. Heat a wok or frying pan over medium heat and add the veg oil. Add garlic and fry over medium heat, stirring, until golden brown. Remove garlic with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towel. Leave oil in pan and set aside
3. Over a grill or an on unoiled griddle or saute pan, char the remaining garlic cloves and shallots over medium-high heat until soft, about 6-8 mins. (Or, place garlic and shallots in a microwaveable bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and microwave on high till soft, about 2-3 mins.) Set aside to cool.
4. Toast galangal and spices in an unoiled saute pan or wok over medium heat, stirring constantly, until galangal is touched with brown and spices are fragrant, about 2 mins. Take care not to burn spices. Remove from pan and set aside to cool, separating galangal from dry spices.
5. In the same pan, dry fry the chili peppers over medium heat till they're dark but not black. Allow to cool, remove stems (and seeds, if you don't want too much heat), and add to spices.
6. In the same pan, toast the gapi slowly over low heat, pressing and flattening it to a patty with a spatula to expose the maximum amount of surface to the heat. Cook until the gapi is lightly browned and no longer smells raw, 1 min. or so per side. (Or, flatten the shrimp paste with the back of a spoon, place on a piece of foil, and toast under a hot broiler till brown.) Set aside to cool.
7. Place dry spices and chilies in mortar or blender (or spice grinder) and grind to a rough powder. Remove and set aside.
8. Peel garlic and shallots and place in mortar or blender. Add galangal and shrimp paste and pound or chop to a rough puree. Add dry spices and process or pound briefly just to blend.
9. Over medium heat, reheat the garlic oil from Step 2. Add garlic-dry spice-shrimp paste mixture and cook, stirring constantly, for two minutes. Add 1/2 cup cooking water from the innards and continue to fry and stir until the liquid is mostly absorbed, about 2 mins. Remove the pan from the heat and leave aside to cool.
10. While the paste is cooling, roughly chop together the green onions, cilantro, mint, and sawtooth herb (if using).
11. Rehat the spice paste over medium-high heat. Add chopped pork and cook, breaking it up with a fork, until the pink color is almost gone. Add the innards, stir to combine, and taste adjust for salt. Add all but a heaping tablespoon of the chopped green onions and herbs, stir once or twice more to mix, and remove to a plate or bowl.
    
12. Sprinkle with the browned garlic and reserved fresh herbs and serve warm or at room temperature with fresh vegetables and rice.

Northern Meat

As I've written before, northern Thais love their meat.

Oh, they enjoy their plants too. Fresh and blanched vegetables are eaten at almost every meal - stirred into soups, pounded into a dtam or mixed into a saa (the northern version of yam), combined with other ingredients to make a nam prik or 'dip' (into which more veggies and sticky rice will be dunked), or left fresh to nibble alongside  laab or toss into kanom jeen. Visit a northern Thai wet market and be amazed by the sheer number of varieties of cultivated and wild vegetables on offer.

But meat dishes, often very hearty meat dishes, are also ubiquitous in northern Thailand, and on every visit we invariably end up eating much more of the red stuff than we do at home. We don't mind. We go with the flow.

 

The northern Thai love of beef is exemplified by gaeng om, a specialty we became acquainted with two years ago at a morning market in Lampang, a pleasant town boasting of lovely old wooden buildings and a laid-back vibe. On that morning we followed our noses to a makeshift wood stove supporting a clay pot in which burbled something deep, dark, and undoubtedly (we figured) delicious. When I leaned in for a good sniff (and Dave for a photo) the pot's owner led me to a plastic chair and motioned for me to sit.

'Gaeng om!' she said, handing me a bowl brimming with coffee-hued broth, bite-sized chunks of beef, and various beefy bits and bobs. Wow. It was - incredibly deep, beefier than the beefiest beef stew, beefier than a slab of grilled steak, but also complex, with full-on heat from dried chilies, subtle spice from Sichuan peppercorns, black pepper, and jakan (a peppery, woody stem that also flavors Lao dishes), and a hint of citrus from wild lime leaves and lemongrass. Though certainly rich, it wasn't all that heavy.

We devoted a good bit of time during the rest of that northern Thailand sojourn looking for a gaeng om as wonderful as the one that vendor fed us on that Lampang morning. We failed. And we never forgot that gaeng om.

So, here we are after nine days in Chiang Mai, ready for a break, eager to hit the road. We want clean air, green landscapes, and room to breathe. We're itching to get out into the countryside, but our first stop must be Lampang, for the gaeng om we've been thinking about for thirty months. We're up with the sun and ready for a bowl - no,this time  we're going to make it three bowls (hey - they don't make gaeng om in Kuala Lumpur, you know). We hightail it to the market, primed for beefy goodness.

And the vendor's not there. No sign of her, no empty stall indicating she's merely taken a day off. She's just gone and left and taken her heavenly gaeng om recipe (which I'd planned to extract) with her. 'Dejected' doesn't describe it. But marketing always makes us feel better, so instead of wallowing we wander. We buy spices, stop for a couple glasses of good, strong coffee, and snack on excellent miang kham made by a vendor we remember from two years ago. 

And then without even looking, we find gaeng om. Not the gaeng om, but a pretty close contender.

It's part of a two-act show that also features northern-style beef laab, made with blood and eaten fresh or cooked (in the latter case it's called laab khua). The couple pictured below has been serving their respective beef specialties (he does the laab, she does the gaeng) in a shadowy, smoky (from coal cooking fires) annex to Lampang's Wisonin market for years.

Time has honed their skills. The gaeng om is everything we'd hoped for - rich, intense, almost too meaty to believe, the perfect thing to warm the soul and wake the belly on a February morning. IT's got a few more chewy odds and ends than I'd like, but the flavor is superb. A side order of khao niaow (sticky rice) is essential, for sopping up the dish's broth and tempering its heat.

When a laab order is placed the vendor pulls out his knives and sets to work, rhythmically hacking a piece of beef into uneven bits (no machine-ground meat here), mixing in a little coagulated blood during the process. While our fellow diners - male laborers, mostly - take their laab fresh, we go for the cooked version.

The blood undoubtedly adds to the dish's hard-core meatiness (there's blood in the gaeng om too), which is complemented by a host of ground dried spices. There's no Isaan laab-style tartness from lime, and we don't miss it. This dish isn't about sweet, sour, salty, hot - it's about savoriness, pure and simple. Fresh cilantro on top and a plate of mint, cabbage, and water spinach on the side cleanse the palate and ease lurking guilt about excessive red meat consumption (this wasn't our first laab of the trip).

Having sated our gaeng om cravings we push on. And a good thing we stopped, too; though our journey will entail more laab khua encounters, that bowl of gaeng om proves to be the last of the trip.

Thanks Times Online

... for including EatingAsia in your list of Top 50 Food Blogs. Word has it that in coming weeks TO will be following with interviews of food bloggers included in the list, so stay tuned.

Chiang Mai's Tasty Friday Morning Market

 

We are in Bangkok, physically, but still up north in our heads. We love Bangkok. We lived here, quite happily, for a little under a year. When we left it wasn't at all willingly, but with heavy hearts and great regrets about everything we didn't have a chance to experience. We've always thought we'd come back here to live, eventually. But after the North Bangkok seems hot and crowded, if still very delicious.

At any rate, we're still thinking about Chiang Mai and environs, about the people and the food and the vibe and the vistas. Let's start in the 'big city', at a place we feel most at home: a market.

If you've no Thai language skills but can manage a bit of Mandarin you'll do quite all right at Chiang Mai's Ciin Haw market (actually, you'll do fine there with only English, too), held every Friday morning in a parking lot across the street from a mosque near the night bazaar. Ciin Haw are descendents of Chinese Muslims who migrated south from Yunnan in waves centuries ago. Chiang Mai's most well-known dish - khao soi - is usually attributed, in some way or another, to their presence in the region.

 

Even if you don't speak or understand Mandarin, certain visuals might tip you off to the presence of Chinese or Chinese speakers - such as the row of jars above, condiments produced by Guizhou's Lau Gan Ma Company. We're quite partial to the chili paste on the left, an oily emulsion of black beans, garlic, and crushed dried and roasted chilies peppers that, combined with Chinese black vinegar, sugar, and soy sauce, makes a mean dip for shui jiao (boiled dumplings).

Our love for Lau Gan Ma (which we call 'old lady hot sauce'), blossomed in Shanghai, when our ayi's flight attendant daughter gifted us a jar after a run to Guizhou. (Our continuing affection for the stuff might also have something to do with the fact that the stern-faced, severely-coiffed woman pictured on the label is a dead-ringer for our stern-faced and severlely-coiffed, but soft-hearted, ayi.) When we returned to the San Fran Bay Area from Shanghai in 1998 we hand-carried 6 jars with us. Now you can buy Lau Gan Ma just about anywhere, but beware - the rumor is that copycats abound.

In addition to jars of Lau Gan Ma you might see, at Chiang Mai's Ciin Haw market, faces that look, to us, as Chinese as they do Thai,

 

containers of homemade fermented (and spiced) bean curd, otherwise known as 'Chinese cheese',

 

and dishes that sing with the lip-numbing tingle of hua jiao, or Sichuan peppercorn.

But now we're mixing our ethnicities, because the huajiao-spiced dishes we ate at this market are actually of Shan, or Tai Yai origin. The one pictured below is an utterly delicious and comforting combination of thin rice vermicelli (laying unseen, at the bottom of the bowl), doused with a paste made from soy flour (according to the vendor, who described herself as a Shan from Yunnan - but gram flour, according to this wiki entry) and seasoned with crushed toasted soy beans, sesame oil, la jiao (sandy chili paste of dried chilies, salt, and oil), huajiao you (Sichuan peppercorns steeped in hot oil), and lots of fresh coriander. It's bizarrely viscous and gloppy but in a good, warming way - just the thing to fill the stomach and spread heat through the body on cool Chiang Mai winter mornings.

Next to the vendor dishing up this bowl of goodness is a pickle seller, and if you're so inclined you can nab an empty bowl and ask her to fill it with the pickle of your choice, to eat with your noodle 'porridge'.

And there's another Shan specialty worth keeping an eye out for here: donuts.

The sweets, made with ground glutinous black rice, give Malaysian kueh keria a serious run for the their money.

After frying, the donuts are dipped in molasses, which they absorb like sponges through their porous  skins.

Despite their soaking the donuts remain crispy outside, but within they're soft and creamy, almost custardy. The molasses cools them down quickly, so you don't have to wait too long after they're done to take a bite - and when you do, molasses spurts into your mouth. Sounds sweet, but all that sugar is  tamed by molasses' bitter edge, and the rustic flavor of the black rice dough shines through.

We're thinking that these might just be the world's most perfect (sweet) breakfast food. We went through two bags of five each in the blink of an eye, and I spent a good portion of the rest of our time up North searching for more (in vain, unfortunately).

Other eats at the market include mohynga, which is not Ciin Haw or Shan but Burmese, a thickish fish soup-stew with rice vermicelli. This version was made with thick slices of pickled banana tree trunk, which lent a slightly funky (but tasty) fermented edge, and topped with crunchy daal fritters.

The vendor of this Burmese dish told us that his father was a Ciin Haw who migrated from southern Yunnan to Shan state, in Burma, before finally settling down in Chiang Mai. So although this market is known as Chiang Mai's Ciin Haw market, many of its specialties have some relationship to the Shan, who've long been a point of contact between Burma, Thailand, and southern China.

After many, many donuts, several bowls of noodles, and a lot of vegetable ogling (fresh fava beans! how we wished we had a kitchen) it was time to head off and ponder .... lunch.

Surfacing

 

After attempting to blog the same post several times - and failing, thanks to a combination of wonky internet connections and Typepad's completely unfriendly, easy-to-freeze 'new compose editor' - we give up, and offer instead the above photo and reassurances that we haven't completely dropped off the map. It's been a fantastic two weeks (has it only been two weeks?) and we have lots to share ... but that will have to wait till later in the week, when we can post from Bangkok or from home in KL.

Extra points to anyone who knows where this one was taken (hint: it's an easy-to-overlook tourist site in an oft-overlooked stop on the infamous Mae Hong Son Loop).