SEAsianOutpost

Okay, I went back to my 15-year-old Lonely Planet guide book and found the place that we went to. It is called Khao Soi Lam Duang, and it is/was on Charoen Rat Road. An earlier recollection of mine was incorrect; they are wheat noodles, but not buckwheat noodles. This place, humble as it was, was litteraly Khao Soi purveyor to the King. - Roger

Well, the roasted-in-foil technique reduces the stink, but there's still no doubt about what you've been up to in your kitchen. Roasting like that seems to result in a different flavor, and has the problem (imo) of leaving the paste in a very hard cake that's difficult to distribute throughout a dish. If you going to do a lot of further grinding, whirring, etc. to it anyway then it doesn't much matter, but for some dishes it is hard enough to get the shrimp paste distributed evenly even when you fry it, I find. - Roger

Oh, go ahead. As long as it is clear and brown you're good. I mean, how bad can something made from the liquid that runs off from a huge vat of anchovies rotting for months in the tropical heat be? Seriously, just adjust the fish sauce/lime juice/sugar amounts to taste and you'll be fine. For kids definitely go lighter on the fish sauce -- it's, shall we say, an acquired taste. Speaking of acquired SEAsian tastes, in the last couple of years I've started using shrimp paste (a.k.a. ka pi, blachan, trasi) more liberarly in my cooking and it really kicks up the authenticity. It smells so nasty raw that it is easy to be afraid of it, but once fried it adds a great depth of flavor to all kinds of things. It is the key to my industrial-Kuala-Lampur-street-vendor Malaysian fried rice. - Roger

Umm ... Dynasty, eh? Er... Uh... General rule-of-thumb: Thai ingredients sold in non-Asian stores are grossly overpriced, markedly inferior, and often both. Case in point: Taste of Thai "Light Coconut Milk", which is nothing but regular coconut milk cut with water, typically retails for nearly $2 a can. Real, regular coconut milk cost $.69 in big city Asian groceries and $.99 here in the sticks. Of course, you have to supply the water. Beware that some fish sauces contain sugar (even some of the good ones, actually), so there's just no substitute for adjusting the dressing proportions to taste. - Roger

No, you two aren't the only ones with passions for Kao Soi. I remember that the noodles were curly, which gives them a little more oomph. If you can find a pasta shop offering fresh curly noodles (good luck!) that's be a good start. The last time I made kao soi (been years now, sadly) I used thick Japanese udon noodles. They were a little too soft, but not too far off. I don't think any prepared curry will do the trick, since they're all Thai and this dish is really more Burmese. I made the curry from a kao soi recipe in one of my cookbooks (can't recall now which one, but I'll check and get back to you -- I think it may have been Thailand the Beautiful). Yes, yes, you need the crispy fried onions. And the lime garnish goes without saying -- this is Thai food, after all! Has anyone ever seen kao soi in an American Thai (or otherwise) restaurant? It is so hard to find anything except central-plains/Bangkok style food in restaurants. Years ago there used to be a Southern Thai restaurant in San Francisco that had some good weird stuff, including those smelly beans that Southern Thais love so. But Chao Koh closed a long time ago... So, in a battle of kao soi vs. lakhsa, which would you choose? - Roger

Chad, don't cook anything but the meat. You want the thinly sliced shallots to be crisp and to have that mild raw shallot tang. Squid Brand fish sauce is a classic, too. As Tommy mentioned, fresh mint is a great addition. And you gotta have cilantro. I think either chopped fresh chile or chile flakes is better than powder. You want little bits of intense heat, not a uniform heat throughout everything. - Roger

Oh, man, Thai temple food festivals. When we lived in the (SF) Bay Area we'd go to the ones in Berkeley or Union City and get awesome food that was often radically different than anything available in restaurants. Strangely, I don't remember seeing laap but I do remember mind-blowing pounded salads, including one that used whole little pickled crabs. The best stuff was usually made by old ladies that spoke virtually no English and had clearly learned their skills back in the village. D**n, now you've gone and reminded me of another thing I miss from those days - Roger

The French eat all kinds of things dipped in egg batter and fried. They obviously don't call the basic bread version "French" toast. And they eat Pommes Frit (sp?) all the time. It isn't "German" chocolate cake, it is "Germann's", or just "Germann", chocolate cake. A guy in America named Germann came up with the kind of chocolate that was originally used in it, and the cake was named after him. Good luck finding "Canadian bacon" in Canada, though you'll find "back bacon" everywhere there. Any non-US types out there want to share the names used in other countries for common US foods? - Roger

In the severly SE Asian food-deprived town where I live there is one Vietnamese restaurant. As luck would have it, the chef appears to have done some time in Singapore, since there are both Singapore noodles and lakhsa (with chicken or seafood) on the menu. I guess the Lakhsa would be "curry" style as described here -- it has a wonderful coconut milk gravy. The best part is the big dollop of really dark, intense rempah stirred in to the top of it -- that just says Malay food to me. Lakhsa seems to be one of those things that really varies a lot from restaurant to restaurant. I've had it at a couple of Singapore/Malaysian places in the SF Bay Area -- that I generally love -- and just wasn't that thrilled with theirs. I was surprised to find that I liked the Midwestern Vietnamese restaurant-style version from here better. A few years ago we went to a really hard-core Malaysian place in the San Gabriel valley near Los Angeles and had great lakhsa -- probably among the best. - Roger

Has anyone else found that different cookbooks, particularly ones produced in different countries, have very different notions of how big "a shallot" is? I once made a recipe from a Malaysan cookbook that called for 15 shallots, and the result was a mass of shallot pulp with a little other flavor mixed in. Clearly their notion of "a shallot" was much smaller than the shallots typically found in American grocery stores. This pertains to laap (Tommy! ) because it could really mess up that crucial balance if you're working from a tiny shallots cookbook but cooking with honkin' American mega-shallots. I think the same holds true for garlic. In Thailand the garlic cloves are smaller, and possibly less pungent, so the "amount" (count) of garlic called for in recipes can be too much if you're using American-sized (and strength) garlic. Also, I think the papery skin on Thai garlic is much more delicate, so some recipes might call for leaving it on -- which would be an ugly mistake with our heavily-clad garlic. Btw, anyone interested in starting up a thread to talk about Kow Soi noodles? Lakhsa? - Roger

I tried to post my laap story weeks ago, but technical difficulties prevented it until now. I've made laab or larb-like things a few times over the years, but reading this thread inspired me as it appears to have many others. There have been a couple of key pieces of advice in this thread that I followed that I'll mention along the way. I started with boneless pork tenderloin and minced it by hand with a cleaver (I think food processors tend to mush up the meat too much, unless you a) use nearly frozen meat and b) are very careful not to over do it). Somewhat to my surprise, both recipes that I checked in my Thai cookbooks called for galangal, so I used frozen fresh galangal (the dried stuff is only suitable for use in soup (Tom Kha Gai)) minced and then pounded to paste with a morter. I simmered the pork and the galangal in a little chicken stock [KEY TIP FROM THIS THREAD] (I would not recommend cooking it with any lime juice - imo, lime juice tastes nasty when cooked) and left it to sit to soak up the liquid [KEY TIP] while working on other parts. Finely sliced shallots, shredded fresh mint leaves, and plenty of really fresh cillantro. Normally I don't like tons of cilantro on my Thai food (putting me at odds with most Thais, who put huge amounts on compared to American Thai food preparations), but when this dish is done right it can support a lot of cilantro and be really good. Minced dried red chiles (one recipe I saw called for dried chiles, but showed a picture clearly using fresh chiles, so go figure). Toasted jasmine rice in a pan and then ground not-too-finely with a morter [KEY TIP]. IMO, the pre-fab roasted rice powder you can buy in Asian markets is useful only for sanding -- it tastes nasty. Using sweet rice may be better, but the freshly roasted jasmine rice was really good. Dressing of lime juice, fish sauce, and evaporated cane sugar (*not* that fake "natural" sugar stuff -- it's gotta be cane [or palm] sugar). Since the tartness of lime juice and both the strength and the saltiness of fish sauce vary, you can't give exact quantities for the dressing -- you just have to taste it and adjust it to your liking. Like people say over and over here, in Thai food balance (between strong flavors) is everything. The result? Sublime. So good that I had to make another Thai salad just a couple of days later. So I made what is probably my all-time favorite Thai salad (well, second only to the bbq'd duck salad we had at the Kloister Beer Garden in Bangkok many years ago, which is the standard against which all other salads will forever be judged), Som Tom. When I've had this in restaurants it is usually made with green papaya, but I don't know if that's mandatory. In the past I've usually gone that way, too, but this time I made it more laab-like, mainly just pork, ginger, shallots, peanuts, and dressing. Wicked good in this form, too. On the subject of what is and isn't "appropriate", "correct", "authentic", etc., in laap (or any Thai food, for that matter), I think people need to get familar with the Thai concept of "sanuk". It doesn't translate very easily to English, but "cool", "all right", and "fun" touch on it. If putting olives in your laap makes you happy, then do it (just keep it away from me ). They key thing is not to stress out because you don't have some authentic ingredient (though now and then there are dishes that are best simply avoided if you don't have key ingredients: you can't make Tom Kha Gai without galangal, period, and you can't make Indonesian rendang without kaffir lime leaves). Btw, dried or powdered lemon grass is a crime against nature. The only reason to use lemon grass at all is for the aromatic elements, and those are gone when it is dried, leaving nothing but saw dust. Buy it fresh, clean it and cut it up, then freeze it. The result is 90+% as good as fresh. Same for galangal, except finding fresh galangal is still really, really difficult, where as Melissa's does (way overpriced) lemon grass these days. - Roger