Thai Noodle Dish Lanna?

[maryeats]

Help!

Tonight I had a Thai noodle dish listed on the menu as "Lanna." The dish consisted of wide rice noodles in a thick light brown gravy with vegetables.

I asked the server what the sauce was made from, but he didn't know. There were some bean like things in the sauce, which I thought might have been, fermented soybeans, but the server told me they were peanuts.

After looking around the Internet for Thai recipes Lanna, and coming up with no answers I'm wondering just what I ate and what the sauce was made from. Could it have been raat nna? If so are fermented soybeans often used in Thai cooking?

[snowangel]

This dish is sounding a lot like Kway Teo (sp?). Austin, what do you think?

[Austin]

maryeats: what you had was almost certainly laad naa. And you were right and the server was wrong (!) those were in fact tao jiaow, fermented soybeans, a Chinese ingredient that is used in many Thai-Chinese dishes.

Unfortunately I don't really like this dish (don't care for the gelatinous brown sauce) so I'm not really sure how it's made. It' s popular dish so there must be resources somewhere out there on the web!

(Incidentally, if you Google "Lanna" you'll almost certainly get information about a former northern Thai kingdom!)

Austin

[ecr]

Most decent Thai cookbooks have a recipe for guaytiaow laad na -- Thompson's does, and there's a tasty version in Hot Sour Salty Sweet. If you don't have access to a cookbook I'll post an adapted version of one or the other.

I love laad na, esp. with plenty of vinegar-chili sauce and dried red peppers from the traditional Thai noodle shop condiment trolly!

[MelissaH]

In various restaurants and cookbooks, I've also seen the dish's name spelled as lard na, lad na, rad na, and other variations. I'm guessing it's a transliteration thing, like going from Yiddish to English.

Around here, it's always got lots and lots of broccoli to go with the wide rice noodles and brown "gravy." Your choice of beef, chicken, pork, tofu, shrimp....

MelissaH

[HKDave]

I've heard 'Lanna' used to describe a style of Thai cooking, but the dish described does sound like Lard Na. Here's a recipe:

Lard Na Moo

(Fried Noodles Topped with Pork Sauce - this is the classic combo, but you can sub any other protein for the pork, and any other green veg for the kale)

Ingredients

150 g wide fresh rice noodles.

1/2 T dark soy sauce.

2 T vegetable oil.

1/2 T garlic, finely chopped.

Preparation: Separate the rice noodles and mix well with the dark soy sauce. Heat oil in a frying pan or wok over a moderate heat until it starts to vaporize. Stir-fry the garlic until golden. Add the noodles; stir-fry for 2 to 3 minutes. Plate and set aside.

Ingredients for Topping

100 g pork fillet, thinly sliced into bite-sized pieces.

100 g Chinese kale, cut into 4 cm pieces.

1/2-1 cups stock.

1T tapioca flour, dissolved in 1/4c water.

2-3T vegetable oil

1T garlic, finely chopped

1T fermented soybeans

1/2T oyster sauce.

1/2T light soy sauce

fish sauce, sugar, ground white pepper to taste

Preparation: Marinate the pork in the light soy and oyster sauce for 20 minutes.

Stir-fry the garlic in hot oil until golden. Add the pork and fry until just cooked. Add fermented soybeans, stock and Chinese kale. Season to taste with fish sauce, sugar.

Add the dissolved tapioca flour, stirring until the mixture thickens. Remove from heat.

Arrange the noodles on each serving plate. Pour over the topping and sprinkle with white pepper. Serve at once with condiments on the side: chiles in vinegar, ground dried chiles, fish sauce and sugar.

Does that sound like it?