Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 16 - Thailand

Intro

The next country in our around the world trip is Thailand, home of a cuisine that was largely unknown in the West, then became ubiquitous over the course of about fifteen minutes. That’s not a bad thing and not a coincidence - in order to boost the profile of Thailand the Thai government in 2002 initiated the Global Thai programme, aiming to boost the number of Thai restaurants abroad. This included provision of prefabricated restaurant plans and generous loans for food-related businesses abroad.

Broadly recent Thai history seems to be a cycle of democracy, military coup d’état, junta and restoration, despite that this policy was very successful and seems to have stuck through different modes of government, which is actually quite remarkable.

Naturally Thailand has a long and storied history outside of this recent instability, with the current Thai people likely originating from Guangxi in China, migrating out from the 8th century, and the Kingdom of Siam maintaining its independence in the imperial era (at the cost of outlying territory) as a buffer state between Britain and France. But, frankly, even if far less important than any of that, the Global Thai thing is just perfect for an introduction for a food blog. What a cool nugget of history.

The book

Today’s book is The Blue Elephant Cookbook: Royal Thai Cuisine - a cookbook that, unusually, does not specify the author on its cover.

Within the book itself we learn that the author is, in fact, one John Hellon, someone I was unable to find anything much about, who goes otherwise unmentioned in the book itself. His other cookbooks are unrelated to Thailand - a book of recipes from his favourite restaurants back in the early ‘90s and a book about French influence on regional Indian cooking. I honestly have no idea how he ended up writing this.

In any case the book is licensed from the Blue Elephant chain of restaurants, which began in Brussels, expanded into London and from there spread to Copenhagen, Paris, New Delhi, Dubai, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Malta, Lyon, Bangkok and Phuket. Looking at their website only the Copenhagen, Malta and Thailand restaurants seem to still be around so, regardless of the food, perhaps this business plan was too optimistic and rapid.

The brains behind the operation is Belgian art dealer Karl Steppe if you believe the book, his wife Nooror Somany Steppe if you believe the website and, currently, their son Kim Steppe if you believe recent write-ups on the chain. There’s what I think is a fairly obvious implication in all this, that Karl and now Kim run the business side and Nooror the culinary side, but quite why there are multiple different stories about these restaurants with different protagonists baffles me - surely just indicating their respective roles in the business would suffice?

To sum up the book is associated with a chain of Thai restaurants, which I assume is reasonably authentic and good if it can sustain itself in Thailand, and the story behind the restaurant and this book is extremely muddied for no apparent reason.

Finally, as you may well know, Thailand has a rich tapestry of regional cuisines. This book focuses on Royal Thai cuisine, from Bangkok, which they portray as essentially integrating different regional recipes and refining them, essentially a rough equivalent of French haute cuisine but with more of a royal link.

To state the obvious this is, to some extent, a pitch for the reader to try the restaurants as well, but the term is well-established - albeit with some controversy about whether this is truly a distinct cuisine or simply Central Thai food with better quality ingredients and more elaborate presentation.

So although dishes from other regions of Thailand are in this book (including imports such as satay) this is intended to be a high-class Thai cookbook and not an overview of all the regional styles in the country.

What I cooked (and adjustments)

Having talked about the elaborate presentation of this style of food I attempted none of that. Early on in this blog I contrasted my approach to that of Instagram-friendly cooking in that I believe the aesthetics of food are not the most important part of it and that delicious food can be actively ugly. Indeed I think that in most circumstances sight is the second least important sense for food.

This is all a roundabout way of saying I didn’t attempt any carrot sculptures. I’m sorry to let you all down. (It’s worth mentioning there actually are instructions for making carrot flowers in the book!)

Another thing I didn’t attempt was Thai curry. No grand philosophies at play here though, I’ve just already done the ones I wanted to try from this book. Now for what I actually did cook:

As starter-type food I made sweetcorn cake (thod man kao phod) as well as an obscure food I doubt anyone west of Myanmar have heard of - satay. This is all very technical and complicated but I used lamb this time.

For the main course I made Bangkok fish (pla rad phrik) and meekrob, but with turkey instead of chicken (as the recipe called for chicken mince, something I couldn’t find and didn’t want to prep myself).

Also, naturally, I made rice. I can’t remember whether I made it to the recipe in the book or not, I took no pictures, but it was fine. Also, despite not actually cooking any curries from this book on this occasion I did actually need red curry paste - as pre-bought pastes usually contain garlic I make these myself to the recipe in this book.

Cooking

First things first - pastes. Soaked dried red chillies, coriander seed, lemongrass, asfoetida (subbing in for garlic), shallot, galangal, shrimp paste, salt, white pepper and lime zest (should be kaffir specifically in an ideal world - it is not an ideal world). It looks like I opted for fresh galangal, an expensive choice that is marginally better than the dried stuff.

I chopped shallots (and lemongrass), toasted the seeds and blended. If you don’t have a blender and you hate yourself consider doing this in a pestle and mortar.

And, paste. Look, it was never going to be visual perfection, was it?

This paste was for, unintuitively, the sweetcorn cakes. I also needed light soy sauce, sugar, flour, kaffir leaves, some beans (I think I had frozen yard long beans in the bigger tupperware in shot), breadcrumbs and, of course, sweetcorn. I expect it would have been better with fresh sweetcorn but I had enough on my plate!

I’ll spare you, dear reader, pictures of slicing and dicing and instead subject you to a picture of some of the ingredients in bowls. The whole process of making these into cakes is essentially making a dough with water and flour, combining and shaping. Kind of difficult to elaborate on that much without outright copying the recipe!

For now onto the meekrob, probably the most involved dish in this batch. Prawns of two sizes, minced chicken (turkey), thin vermicelli noodles, breadcrumbs, egg, orange zest, orange juice, lemon juice, chilli sauce, tomato ketchup and a truly alarming amount of sugar. Bit of a wild ride in terms of the ingredients - truth be told I probably shouldn’t have attempted something quite so laden with sugar.

I juiced the oranges and lemons (and added orange zest), beat the eggs, deveined all the prawns (fiddly but not too bad), chopped the smaller prawns and combined most of the alarming ingredients into a bowl.

I also shaped the sweetcorn cakes and, at some point off-screen (probably a fair while after the steps pictured), deep fried the vermicelli noodles. Meekrob is meant to be crispy after all!

At this stage I thought it best to move onto prepping the fish, I think I used cod. I chopped the chillies and garlic, crushed the pineapple, chopped spring onion and pepper, floured my fish and combined the fish sauce, sugar and tamarind juice. The other ingredients pictured are ginger paste (combined with the onion) and asfoetida (as usual subbing in for garlic).

Once the prep work was done I moved onto … yet more prep work. This time for satay.

The meat is lamb strips threaded onto soaked bamboo skewers (though I skewer them much later), not very complicated, and the real work lies in the marinade and, especially, in the sauces.

First the marinade. I crushed coriander root, chopped lemongrass and asfoetida together in a mortar - coriander root is a bit difficult to source and unreasonably expensive for what it is so I’d suggest just using the stems of leaves.

This mix was then simply combined with the other marinade ingredients - coconut milk, sugar, salt, oil, white pepper, turmeric, curry powder (I roughly approximated a mix), toey/pandan leaf and Maggi liquid seasoning. These last two ingredients deserve a bit of focus - the leaves aren’t too easy to source but make a big difference vs using extract, so I’d recommend tracking them down if you have a recipe using them.

Maggi is owned by Nestlé, a company I try to avoid, but the alternative would involve making another sauce with more difficult to find ingredients - such as yellow bean paste, palm sugar and unsweetened black soya sauce (which I assume is different from the normal stuff!). It would also involve cooking two kilos of veggies and, as I only needed two tablespoons of sauce. This all seemed a bit excessive so I bit the bullet.

The final step is the most complex in this entire post. Put the meat in the marinade and leave it. Mind blown.

Incidentally I really liked having coconut milk in a carton rather than a can. That should be the usual way of buying it rather than an oddity!

One sauce recommended for the satay is cucumber sauce. This involves making a base sauce of water, sugar, salt, toey/pandan leaf, crushed galangal and white vinegar (rice vinegar used this time). Broadly just boiling these ingredients together for about ten minutes, then adding the vinegar.

Making the cucumber sauce from this base is, fortunately, incredibly simple. Add cucumber, shallot and carrot. I kept my sauce in a mug because I was running out of vessels.

The more familiar peanut sauce is a bit more involved. Coriander root and asfoetida were combined into a paste and peanuts were roasted and ground. Sesame seeds were also roasted.

Making the sauce involved frying the asfoetida/coriander paste with some red curry paste and then adding coconut milk.

Once this mixture was boiling I added fish sauce, sugar, tamarind juice, the sesame seeds and the peanuts. As can be seen I had a bit of a problem with it boiling over.

But, after this and a quick (botched) attempt at breading prawns for the meekrob, the prep work was done. What followed was a deep-frying montage of sweetcorn cakes, cod and prawns. (Presumably I also fried my noodles around this time too.)

Incidentally, if the deep fat fryer hasn’t cropped up in these posts before, I heartily recommend them. They, like steamers, are far better options than attempting these cooking methods with pots and pans.

Most of the rest of the cooking was a clean run of simple things but I still had to finish the various bits and pieces that meekrob requires.

Firstly, egg. The recipe says to deep-fry half through a sieve and to scramble the other half. Truth be told I have no picture of the former process (not that I’d have time) and can’t recall if I attempted it. Nevertheless, I’m sure you’ve never seen an egg scrambling so here you go. Aren’t you lucky?

Yes, after all that deep frying the hob was getting messy even by my standards. I then added the turkey and prawn and stir-fried.

This is where it goes wrong. All the juice and all the horrifying ingredients went in here and I was meant to simmer for a few minutes until the mix became syrupy. It took far, far longer and I think this kind of ruined everything.

Nevertheless eventually everything panned out (I hestitate to say “okay”) and I mixed the noodles in and served. It looked okay at least. If you ignore its setting.

As the pictures of fish in the background indicated I told a slight fib in the ordering of this post and actually finished off the Bankok fish in parallel. Forgive me.

Firstly the chilli and asfoetida were fried (very briefly) before the pineapple, ginger and onion were added (less briefly).

Then I added the tamarind juice, fish sauce and sugar, simmering for a while.

Finally in go the veggies and they all get a quick stir fry.

Finally it’s all just dumped on top of the fried fish. For maximum aesthetic effect I took a top down shot on top of the hob with all the loose vermicelli on it.

With the fish done I now had the satay to attend to. I used an ancient technique called chucking it under the grill and putting sauce on it while it cooked.

Even with the odd lighting most of the food ended up looking mostly alright in the lounge somehow (peanut sauce excepted) so here are a few pictures of the finished products. I was very happy with the fish and satay, okay with the cakes and rather disappointed in the meekrob.

I also apparently ate some in the bedroom later on the dog tray. So you get to see that and also my messy desk. And in my defence the light-up keyboard came free with my PC.

What I’d do differently

Firstly I think there’s some finesse required on the frying that I lacked at the time (and presumably now). The sweetcorn cakes were too dark, the fish and prawns were not golden enough, though the prawns also suffered from the breaded coating not really sticking well enough.

I expect this is an issue of timing for the sweetcorn cakes and of attempting too large a batch for the others.

The sweetcorn cakes were also a bit too packed with corn so perhaps I’d try and increase the volume of batter to compensate. I’d also use fresh corn as well as using French beans instead of yard long beans (which are worse for almost any application in my view, save for looking cooler and costing a lot more).

Finally. the cucumber sauce meant for the sweetcorn cakes didn’t really add anything. It was good with the satay though so no regrets on making it.

On the topic of satay I did actually repeat that and … they turned out far worse. I suspect the recipe may suit lamb more than chicken (which I did on the repeat attempt) but, moreover, I couldn’t find pandan leaf the second time around and I think that may, genuinely, make a big difference.

Finally - the meekrob. Well, the meekrob was a mess. It was sickly and odd and the noodles weren’t really crispy.

Reducing the volume of juice (and therefore cooking time) would go a long way to fixing it but there’s a whole nest of problems to untangle for that dish that I can’t fully list after just one attempt. And, given the worrying amount of sugar in the dish, I’m not too minded to attempt it again. Truth be told I’m less minded to ever order it again unless this recipe is very unusual!

My view on the book

My views are mixed.

Broadly almost everything should be good on paper. The introduction is mostly excellent, there is a section on the restaurants, which seems a bit of a marketing puff-piece, but the remainder of the introduction are two interesting pages on Thailand and ten pages on useful topics from wine to decorations to specialist ingredients.

As we’re currently in Asia the specialist ingredients section of the book is particularly important and, overall, I found it compact and useful. However I do think it downplayed the difficulties in getting some ingredients, such as coriander root, and it does contain a strange reference to “hispanic stores” (miscapitalisation retained).

Perhaps this book was originally translated for the American market and this reference may have slipped past the net in localisation. It doesn’t surprise me there would be specific stores for Hispanic people there given there’s heavy cultural (and racial) connotations to the word there (that’re totally absent here). Regardless, it’s odd.

Despite the meekrob being a bit of a wash I find the recipes in this book generally work well, I’ve tried a fair few outside this post, though I suppose there may be some possibility of the deep fat frying instructions being a bit iffy. I think that may be my lack of expertise more than the book though.

I also like the photography in this book, the photos do sometimes take up too much space but they are also very useful for knowing how the recipes should look at the end. And the problem isn’t even consistent or too noticeable save for the double-page spreads preceding different sections of the book.

Still, there are some odd changes in recipe density throughout the book - the soup section has more recipes than pages, whereas the poultry section only fits in a recipe every 1.5 pages or so.

The one, consistent and very annoying feature of these recipes though are the serving sizes. Most recipes are scaled so that one serving is produced rather than scaled so that the ingredients can be bought in convenient sizes. This often results in ridiculous units - a recipe I never attempted, banana flower salad, lists 30g of chicken and prawns, as well as single tablespoons of coconut milk. This is a completely random example and, though extreme, this problem permeates the entire book.

Nevertheless I still can’t put my finger on why my feelings are quite so mixed on this book. It’s good, I’m happy with the results but something seems off and the range seems a bit thin. I doubt I’d get rid of this book but I’m not sure I’d actively recommend it either, and I’m intending to eventually supplement it with a more comprehensive book on Thai food. Ideally one that actually tells me a bit more about the regional cuisines.