So I told you guys earlier this week that I would start practicing my way through the Next: Tour of Thailand cookbook this summer. Well tonight I did the first component of the opening street food course; Thai Banana.
The first step of this dish was to get the pickled shallots made.
So somehow I missed the picture of the ingredients of the pickling liquid, which was rice vinegar, sugar and salt. This is a picture of the mixture in the pan heating up.
This is the completed pickling liquid.
I then added some previously sliced shallots to the pickling liquid and put them in the fridge until I was ready to plate.
Next up was the fried garlic garnish. One clove of garlic and some vegetable oil.
The thin slices went into the hot oil until they were golden brown.
Then the shallots got the same treatment.
Next up was what was called chili curls. Which are only sort of chili curls in that the bell pepper only has a relation to a chili. Maybe when I do this restaurant style I'll actually do a red jalapeno to see how it changes the dish. To make these you cut the top and bottom of the pepper and then take out the membrane and seeds and then slowly take sections of the pepper off from the middle out until the very outside is left. The curl part of the garnish comes from the ice water that the final slices get reserved in until ready.
Now that all t he garnishes were all done time to make the banana portion of the evening. This requires by first roasting the mini bananas which is the star of the show as well as the regular bananas for the glaze.
After about 6 minutes in a 300 degree oven I cut a little slit in the top to make sure I didn't get banana guts all over my oven and then let them go for about another 12 minutes and this was the result.
Now that the bananas had roasted it was time to work on the glaze. The glaze was to be made out of the regularly sized bananas. They got combined with palm sugar, ascorbic acid and a bit of salt.
To make the glaze I set up a double boiler with the bananas and sugar.
This whole mixture set up over the double boiler until everything combined.
Once the glaze was completed it was time to plate. I cut a little bit more of the roasted peel off the mini bananas. From there, I coated it with a bit of the glaze and then began to top with the fried garlic, fried shallots, pickled shallots and chili curls. On a whim, I knew I needed greenery so I found some chives and my chive plant happened to have some chive flowers that I utilized as well.
Overall, I enjoyed this dish, especially since I'm not a huge banana fan, but this was a good dish and will be a good way to start the meal.
On a lighter note, after I finished the dish I decided to tweet the above picture out to the Next Restaurant guys, primarily for shits and giggles because, hey twitter can be fun some times. This is what I sent out with the picture attached.
@DavidDudley5
Six minutes later I got this response from Dave Freaking Beran, Head Chef of Next and 2014 James Beard Award winner.
@dcberan
