Kaeng Som (Thai Sour Curry - แกงส้ม)

This is the ultimate grande dame of Thai curries.

On the one hand, it's so simple to make that it's made almost weekly in Thai households. On the other hand, simply because of that everyone, their mother, their grandmother, their dead great-grandmother and her long-dead ancestors have an opinion about it!

(Read the post about food and identity to understand this phenomenon.)

That having been said, the dish is easy to make casually but extarordinarily hard to make expertly.

It's hard for the same reason that chefs routinely test novices with making an omelette, or that you end up skating naked making certain Italian dishes.

You're using a minimal set of ingredients, and there's no place to hide. Either you nail it or you don't, and if you don't, there's no way to fix it.

It's the ultimate test of technique. It's doubly hard for those of us who didn't grow up with a Thai grandmother beating us up while we were learning. We're going to have to take our beatings the ol'-fashioned way via experience.

What is it?

It's a simple water-based "sour" curry that's really quite "primitive" (to use David Thompson's description) in which vegetables and fish are simmered. It's served with rice (of course!)

There are only five ingredients that matter - chillies (which are emphatically not Thai but New World), garlic, shallots, shrimp paste, and tamarind.

There are also ingredients that will "balance" it - e.g. palm sugar, etc.

All the magic is in the paste which takes a bit of effort with a mortar and pestle. Thai curries simply don't work with food processors. You need to pound the ingredients.  (The neighbors rang the bell to check that everything was OK since the sound of pounding wafted out the kitchen window. It sure was, kids, it sure was!)

For the record, it's harder to pound soft ingredients into the right consistency than hard ingredients. This one is filled with soft ingredients — garlic and shallots.

If you persist, and the CC is sure that the readers on this blog are the kind that would do so, you'll be rewarded with sheer magnificence. Everything that is so wonderful about Thai food distilled down into one elegant minimalist package.

Ingredients

Paste

2 tbsp dried shrimp

4-6 long red chilies
3 red shallots
3 cloves garlic
1 tsp shrimp paste

2 cups water
tamarind water (thin)

vegetables
fish

fish sauce (nahm pla) to taste
palm sugar (optional)

Note 1: The kinds of vegetables you can add varies. Long beans are classic as are bamboo shoots, or raw papaya but the CC has seen modern stuff like cauliflower, cabbage, etc.

Note 2: The village roots of this dish should be "obvious".

Note 3: There is a relatively modern variation that plonks in a square-piece of cha-om omelette. Cha-om is going to be impossible to find outside of California. It has a strongly sulfurous smell exactly like that of kala namak in Indian food. The texture is not dissimilar to samphire. If you're feeling particularly flush with money, the combination would do the trick. Otherwise substitute a bitter green and kala namak for a rough approximation.

Note 4: You still need to make the square "omelettes". Cook them thick with egg in a pan like a frittata. Flip, cook the other side. Cool and cut into squares. (They should be quite dry since you're going to plop them into a curry.)

Note 5: This is not a "fancy" dish. All the crazy caveats aside, this is closer to the fast and the furious. You should be able to make it in at most 30 minutes if you get all your ingredients in a row.

Note 6: There is considerable warfare even among the Thai population about how "thin" the curry should be. The CC is going to stay out of this particular "Vietnam".

Note 7: Side dish. The ultimate test of serving Asian food. Keep it simple. The dish is spicy hence sliced cucumbers.

Note 8: You need a fish broth ideally. David Thompson suggests pounding some dried shrimp as the first step of the recipe. Works like a charm. Instant "fish broth" as the deeply dead great-great-great-grandmother would've understood and appreciated.

Note 9: The "correct" sequence of pounding is the driest hardest first to softest wettest last. This just makes it easy to do the pounding. In this case, it would be dried shrimp, soaked chilies, garlic, shallots. and finally shrimp paste.

Recipe

First make the tamarind water. Soak the lump of tamarind in 1/2 cup of boiling water for 20 minutes. Strain it squeezing the tamarind. You can do this directly into the boiling water later.

Soak the separately chilies in boiling water for the same 20 minutes. Pull out the chilies. Reserve the water to add to the broth.

Roast the dried shrimp briefly on a skillet. Put aside. On the same skillet, roast the shrimp paste wrapped in aluminum foil. Flip and keep roasting until it gives off its characteristic smell. Be careful not to burn it.

(These first three steps can clearly be done in parallel.)

Start making the paste. Pound the dried shrimp followed by the chilies, the garlic, and the shallots. Add the roasted shrimp paste and make a smooth paste.

Combine the stock, tamarind water and paste and bring to a boil. Add fish sauce to taste. Add some palm sugar to balance the flavors. Let it simmer for 4-5 minutes.

It should taste hot, sour and salty.

Add the vegetables and let them cook through. Add the fish and let it poach for 2-3 minutes.

Serve at once with rice.

Things that make you go hmmm ...

Have you ever read a recipe in a cookbook and said to yourself, "There's no fuckin' way that can work!"?

Happens to the CC all the time. He then ends up yelling at the book which classifies him as one of the crazies but that's him, isn't it?

It comes with experience to all cooks even if you are not familiar with the cuisine in question. It's frequently just a matter of timings which have clearly not been tested and/or are more than a touch speculative. The amount of the sizes could also be all bollocksed to high heaven (tablespoons instead of teaspoons is all too common), or the proportions could be upsized and upchuck-worthy. (4 cups of water in 1 cup of flour will not yield a dough — it will yield a liquid mess!)

Here's a classic blooper from Lathika George's "The Kerala Kitchen".

(In the parlance of our time, this bitch be smokin' some serious crack!)

It's a classic egg curry found all over India. You hard-boil some eggs and separately make a curry. At the end, you cut the eggs length-wise and mix with the curry, re-heat and serve. Hardly complicated.

The trick that makes this specific recipe work is the same trick that makes classic French Onion Soup work. It requires a mass of onions to be browned and then a whole ton of spices and tomatoes are added to it. This turns into a dry curry.

The recipe in the book calls for the onions to be fried for 2-3 minutes and after that, the tomatoes to be cooked for two minutes.

In your fuckin' dreams, lady!

Even twenty minutes is too little for this to work. The last time the CC made a French Onion Soup, it took more than an hour for the onions to do their magic.

This is the principle of IST (Indian Stretchable Time) applied to cooking where five minutes really means fifty. (A lot of cultures have this principle encoded as a joke. There is even the concept of NST used by the "suitable in-crowd" and the CC will not translate that particular one.)

Now admittedly, this stuff is cooked at medium-high heat instead of the relatively gentle burble of the onions for the soup and the soup calls for a vastly larger number of onions but still. There is absolutely no fuckin' way in hell a mass of onions plus tomatoes is going to give up all that moisture in a total of five minutes. Incidentally, that's what frying really is — a precise way to remove moisture.

A significant fraction of this can squarely be blamed not on the author but on the editors. You needn't look towards the travesty of Rachael Ray and Sandra Lee. They are just the logical culmination of something that has been going on since Edouard de Pomiane in La Cuisine en dix minutes, ou l'Adaptation au rythme moderne.

We like speed. We like convenience. Cooking can be a chore even for the most committed amongst us. We are, alas, all too human.

Except that Pomiane was a genius. He clearly states what can and can't be hurried up and his entirely elegant solution for "hurrying up" is that if a recipe can't be hurried up, you shouldn't make it or serve it to your guests on a weeknight. Genius!

Pomiane's book is hands-down a work of a master and someone deeply steeped in the art of cooking. You will learn better from him how to make a classic sauce hollandaise than from all the textbooks and French chef's of the world. He has idiot-proofed something that is considered a "junior chef's challenge". (Science is why his technique works and since he was a physician and microbiologist, chances are that he understood in detail what he was doing.)

Editors, listen up! There is no shame in saying that something takes thirty minutes instead of three. There's no fuckin' shame in explaining in simple terms the science behind a recipe. People are smarter than you think and those that are likely to buy an obscure cookbook are much more likely to spend thirty minutes than three.

So don't try and push it. Not only do you get a travesty of a recipe but also you get an inedible fuckin' mess!

Isn't this entirely obvious?

So here's the classic egg curry from Kerala reworked for your benefit.

(And yes, the CC used a timer to time it as opposed to the gormless Ms. George who clearly did not test worth the proverbial Indian dam!)

Egg Curry

Ingredients

6 eggs (hard-boiled)

3-4 cups onions (very thinly sliced)
2 tomatoes (finely diced)

12 curry leaves
1 tbsp ginger (chopped into very thin slivers)
4 cloves garlic (sliced thin)
3-4 chillies slit lengthwise

1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp chilli powder (or to taste)
4 tbsp black pepper
salt

Recipe

First make the eggs. Cover them in cold water. Bring them to a boil and turn the heat to low. Cook for 8 minutes. Remove and immediately dunk into an ice-bath to cool off.

You will get perfectly hard-boiled eggs without the yolk turning chalky and none of the green sulfurous ring around them.

Peel them and set aside.

Combine the turmeric, salt, chilli powder and black pepper with a few tablespoons of water to make a thick paste. Don't add too much water.

Heat up some oil and when heated (7 mins) dump in the mass of onions. Let fry on a medium-high heat until they change color but are not blackened. Roughly 17 minutes.

Twenty-four minutes and counting.

Dump in the curry leaves, ginger, garlic slit chillies, and let fry for a bit (3 minutes.)

Add the tomatoes and spice paste. You may need to add some water to make sure it doesn't burn. Let cook at a low heat for about 8 minutes until the tomatoes turn saucy.

We're up to 35 minutes now, you clueless bitch!

Cut the eggs length-wise into halves and add them yolk-side up and let them gently heat up to the sauce. About 3 minutes. Serve.

So nearly 40 minutes not counting the time to make the hard-boiled eggs.

Cashew Curry

This recipe really really rocks!

(Source: S. H. Fernando with some help from Peter Kuruvita.)


Cashew Curry

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups raw cashews
1/2 tsp turmeric

1 onion (diced fine)
2 cloves garlic (minced)
2" piece ginger (minced)
2" stalk lemongrass
3-5 green chillies
1 sprig curry leaves

1 tbsp Maldive fish flakes

1 tbsp coriander powder
1 cup coconut milk
1/4 cup cilantro (diced fine)
salt to taste

Recipe

Soak the cashews in water overnight. Yes, this is important.

Boil the cashews along with the turmeric until tender roughly 10-12 minutes. The CC used fresh turmeric but feel free to use the powdered stuff. Drain and set aside.

In a pan, heat some oil. When shimmering, add the curry leaves. Be careful since they tend to splatter. Add the onions, green chillies, garlic, lemongrass, ginger and fish flakes and fry for a bit till the onions are soft but not so much that they caramelize.

Add the cashews and the coconut milk, and bring to a boil on low heat. Add the coriander powder and let cook for about 6-7 minutes at a very low heat.

Sprinkle the cilantro just before serving.

Rice

Ingredients

1 cup basmati rice
6 pods cardamom
1 leaf pandanus (optional)

1 3/4 cups water.

Recipe

Fry the whole cardamoms in some oil until fragrant. Add the rice and the pandanus leaf and fry till well coated. Add the water and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and let cook covered until done (roughly 10 minutes.)

The Story of Curry Powder

Everyone who's not completely demented about cooking knows there is no such thing in Indian cooking as "curry powder".

Yet, this yellow-looking vaguely Indian-ish powder is a global phenomenon showing up everywhere in menus from the finest French restaurants to Japanese fast-food ones serving kare raisu — curry rice that is gloppy, disgusting, and the staple of Japanese businessmen everywhere!

It should be noted that the fastidious Japanese with their ethic of purity and order eat this extraordinarily sloppy dish that would never show up on a kaiseki menu. And the main ingredient is an extraordinarly gaijin thing known as "curry powder".

So what's the story anyway? How did "curry powder" (which doesn't even exist in India) become French and Japanese? Why are there "curry ramen noodles"? Why are there Singaporean "curry noodles"? Which Frenchmen first served "curried cauliflower soup" and "curry vinaigrette"?

To answer this question, we're gonna have to rewind the clock and examine the mores of the 19th century. And we're gonna find that the people behaved, quite unsurprisingly, like people at any other time and place.

In short, they craved novelty.

And once novelty was provided, an equivalent market opened up to serve the novelty at the cheapest possible price, or to phrase it in modern lingo, they "commoditized the consumption".

There are virtually no cultures that don't appreciate novelty. Once novelty is provided, instantaneously the influence becomes "indigenized" - converted into the "native" framework of cooking. This is as true of tomatoes in Italy as green peppers in Thailand as potatoes in India. None of these are native to any of the regions (they are all "New World".)

The short story is that with the rising power of the British Empire in India, it became fashionable to serve all things "Indian". Queen Victoria, the Empress of India, was photographed wearing stereotypical "maharani" regalia. She even went as far as to appoint an Indian khidmatgar (servant), Abdul Karim, who rose to be her chief confidant. Poems were written (see here) and balls held in London where the guests dressed up in "Indian" costume and ate "Indian" food.

Needless to say, the British East India company did everything it could to market this phenomenon. When men go mad, avenues open up to supply them with the very objects that they need to go mad with so that profits can be made.

Enter "curry powder" — marketed to busy housewives so that they didn't need to concern themselves with the details of the "very foreign, very difficult" yet "deeply desired, and exotic" cuisine.

Unsurprisingly, the cheapest stuff correctly marketed turns out to be a monster hit. Same today as in the 19th century.

Commercial curry powder consists of the four cheapest ingredients in Indian cuisine -- coriander, cumin, fenugreek and turmeric (the latter giving it its yellow color while the fenugreek carries the characteristic bitter edge.)

That it spread to France from Britain should come as no surprise to anyone. Les rosbifs have always exhibited more than a little cultural fascination for "the Frogs" (ditto for the reverse.)

But the fastidious Japanese?

Kare raisu singlehandedly fails every Japanese culinary norm. Unsubtle, pungent, oil-based — the muddy yellowish sludge poured over rice could not be less Japanese. And yet, it's to be found in every train station and shopping district. It's chowed down by locals at lunch like it was going out of fashion. Irony of ironies, it's one of the most-requested "home-cooked" dishes in Japan.

How did this inauthentic powder turn Japanese?

The answer, of course, is the East India Company that nakedly peddled this powder all through the West and the East. Imported verbatim from the British idea of the dish, one can clearly see echoes of the dish in the 1872 Seiyo Ryōri Tsu ("Western Cooking".) The recipe is nearly identical to modern concoctions.

However, that explains the origin of the dish but not its overwhelming popularity. For that, you must look at the dish itself. It's warm, cheap, soothing, hearty, filling — all qualities that the Japanese have traditionally respected as an agrarian society must. Cheap sustaining fare that fuels the working masses. Does that or does that sounds Japanese?

The origins aside, the brute fact is that "curry powder" is global. Has been global for more than two centuries now, and authencity be damned, quite delicious.

Curry Cauliflower Soup

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower (cut into florets)
1 red onion (diced loosely)

1 tbsp curry powder

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Toss the cauliflower florets with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast in a 400°F oven for 30 minutes until lightly browned.

Fry the onion at a low heat for 10 minutes. Toss in the cauliflower, water, and curry powder and purée.

Roasted Curry Cauliflower Soup

The CC's mom used to make a cauliflower soup when he was growing up. He always felt that there was something missing. The soup was too boring and bland.

Of course, it wasn't the spices that were missing but Maestro Maillard.

The soup here takes longer to make(you don't have to do anything; you can lay back and drink your martini) but the results speak for themselves.

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower (cut into florets)
1 large red onion

1 1/2 tsp curry powder

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper


Recipe

Preheat the oven to 450°F. Toss the cauliflower with olive oil, sea salt and plenty of black pepper. Roast for 25-30 minutes until it is lightly brown.

Fry the onions at medium low heat until they are softened. Add the roasted cauliflower, and the curry powder and fry for a minute or two. Add the water, and let it come to a boil. Skim if necessary.

Blend the mixture, and pass through a sieve. Reheat if needed.