Next at Home: Tour of Thailand: Practice Prawn Cracker

So I'm falling a bit behind in this adventure but it's definitely not from lack of trying, it's disorganization.  In getting ready to make this dish I realized a little too late that despite the Asian population in my humble little burg, dried shrimp simply don't exist here.  I turned to the internet, specifically, amazon and found what I needed but it took a little longer than I thought to get here.  Overall this was a really simple dish, but there are certainly some kinks to work out.

So the first part of this dish started a day or so ago when I made the chili oil for a portion of the vinaigrette.  The recipe called for dried thai chiles, which are on their way from Thailand and they'll be here in about another two weeks.  But in the mean time I used the dried chiles I had on hand and a bit of vegetable oil.

The chiles went into the oil in the pan and fried for about 10 minutes.

Then everything took a spin in the blender until combined.

Now time to make the crackers, palm sugar, white pepper, club soda, jasmine rice, coriander, the infamous dried shrimp, egg and limes.  The first step was to turn the rice to a powder which I did with the spice grinder we got as a shower gift. 

Everything got mixed together until it formed this. 

I started the oil in a non-stick pan and put my version of a ring mold in (a screw top from a mason jar) and then spooned in the cracker mixture.  This is where the fine tuning comes in.  I put so much oil in that it sort of forced me to put more of the cracker mixture in which resulted in a patty, not a cracker.  Once the cracker had been seared off, I put it in the oven to dehydrate for a few hours.  The recipe called for 4 hours at 135, my oven only goes down to 170 so I was hoping for about 90 minutes at that temp.  However, given the thickness I went for about three hours.

While the cracker was drying I made the chili lime vinaigrette.  I took some of that chili oil from earlier along with lime juice and combined them.

The final plating, sloppy I know, the cracker was drizzled with a bit of the chili oil and garnished with a bit of lime zest.

I wish I would of had the proper thickness of the cracker.  The way I ended up doing this it was like a overdried fishy hamburger.  But, mistakes like this are why I'm practicing rather than going full bore into this.