Next at Home: Tour of Thailand: Practice Catfish

So here we go again, this is the second to last savory dish of this menu and this was a surprising one to me.  A fish that I don't particularly like mixed with a sauce that I wasn't sure would work. 

So this dish started with a couple of broths which I made back on Columbus Day.

The first broth was a chicken broth which included a whole chicken, onion, leeks, carrots, thyme water and ice. 

Everything went into a pot and cooked for 8 hours

The second broth was a fish broth which I used trout (The recipe called for sole), leeks, onions, mushrooms, wine, lemon, parsley, butter, thyme butter and black pepper.

The leek, onion and mushrooms were sweated in the butter.

Then the fish went in.  Again the recipe called for sole and just the bones, but sole isn't available in my area so I fileted out the trout as best as I could to get mostly bones and put it in. 

Then the rest of the ingredients went in and simmered for 20 minutes.

One the broths were done it was time to make the sauce base, which included both the broths, garlic, white pepper, cilantro root, garpeseed oil, palm sugar, fish sauce, shallots and celery.

I combined the garlic, peppercorns and cilantro in a food processor.  Once the mixture was a paste it was sauteed in the grapeseed oil.

Once sauteed, I stirred in the palm sugar  and fish sauce until it turned to basically caramel.

Then the broths went in and reduced until the entire mixture reduced by 1/3.

Once reduced I added the final flavor component of cilantro, shallots and celery.

One of the garnishes was pickled pearl onions.  to make this I needed salt, rice vinegar, sugar and pearl onions.

The salt, vinegar, and sugar were simmered together until combined and then the onions went in and were refrigerated until needed. 

The second garnish is celery ribbons.  I took this celery stalk and stripped it down with a vegetable peeler and then reserved the strips in ice water.

The third and final garnish was blanched celery.  Celery, naturally, celery see, fish sauce, salt, sugar and water. I sliced the celery thin and then mixed all the other ingredients together.  Once the other ingredients had come to a boil the celery went in a stepped for a while.

The closing moment of this dish.  I took the caramel base and warmed it up and then combined it with xantham gum.  Xantham gum is a modified starch that thickens anything its added to.

The main part of this dish was catfish.  Which to cook I took a filet of catfish and seasoned it with salt and pepper.

The seasoned catfish was combined with the grapeseed oil in a vacuum bag and then poached in water for 20 minutes.

Here is the final plate.  I first encountered this phenomenon in the Paris menu of making huge amounts of broth for a very small portion of the plate, but it is what it is.  This was the final plate and while every bite scared me a little bit, I couldn't help but be impressed by the balance of the course.  Catfish tends to be muddy and nasty, but that was well balanced with the other flavors on the plate. 

Next at Home: Tour of Thailand: Practice Rice with Relishes

First let me say, that it's good to be back.  I'm still not cooking through this menu like I'd like to.  Life is still busier than I care for sometimes.  But I did get this done, granted it was about 2 weeks ago now and I'm just now finding time to write about it.

Anyway, you see the title of this dish and you think simple right, well not so fast my friends.  This was one of the most complex dishes to cook with so many moving parts and ways to screw things up.

The first step of this dish was the sauces, this first one was spicy sauce.  Green thai chiles and grapeseed oil.

This definitely packed a little bit of a punch.

Second sauce was called funky sauce for a very very good reason.  Daikon radish, fish sauce and shrimp paste.  If you aren't familiar, fish sauce is made by taking fish, cleaning them and then letting them ferment in clay jars in the sun for months or years.  Shrimp paste, in the same vein, is shrimp that is mashed up and left to ferment.  Needless to say, these products carry a unique aroma, particularly the shrimp paste which is so potent it's in a ziploc bag in a storage cabinet in another part of my house away from the kitchen to keep the smell down.

This is the start of a condiment known as Nam Prik Pao.  The base of this dish is fried vegetables which include, onion, dried thai chiles, garlic, galangal and the recipe called for red fresno chiles which aren't available in my grocery stores so I used jalapeno instead.

Once the vegetables were fried separately, the rest of the ingredients came into play which include more fish sauce, salt, lime juice, tamarind paste, palm sugar and more shrimp paste.

All the ingredients went into the food processor until it was like a paste.

Once the paste was made, the mixture went back into the pan to cook for about 15 minutes and this was the finished result after the sugars caramelized and turned everything darker.

Next up was the salted duck egg relish.  This is why I love the internet and technology in general.  Given where I live, I'm not sure anyone has ever heard of a duck egg outside of knowing that that's how ducks reproduce.  One simple google search later and I have 2 dozen of them coming my way from California.  I did a quick hard boil on the egg.

I separated the whites from the yolks and then ran the yolks through a mesh strainer to break them up a little further.  I then recombined them with a bit of lime juice and chopped mangoes.

Next was the banana pepper relish.  I didn't get pictures of it, but I grilled the banana peppers until the skins were charred and then peeled them.  To make the relish, the peppers were combined with palm sugar, fish sauce, salt, lime juice, shallots, cilantro, mango and anchovies.

In order to put it together all of the ingredients were combined in a mortar and pestle.

To start the pickle portion of the evening I needed a pickling liquid which included rice vinegar, salt and sugar.

The first pickles to be made were shallots, garlic and ginger.  The veggies were cut and then simmered in a portion of the pickling liquid until they became pickles.

Then it was time to make real pickles, meaning cucumbers.  This included rice vinegar, palm sugar, salt, kafir lime leaves, cucumber and citric acid.

Finally, pickled watermelon rind.  Sugar, rice vinegar, watermelon, lemongrass, kafir lime, water, and citric acid.

Now it was time to actually eat this monster of a dish.  The primary component of the dish, the rice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

  

Each of the garnishes had it's own little presentation which is what I was finishing up with these photos.

The final garnish of the meal was a tamarind relish, palm sugar, tamarind paste, salt, shrimp paste, garlic and dried thai chiles. All ingredients except for the tamarind paste was combined in a mortar and pestle, and then finally the paste was worked in.

And finally, we eat.  The presentation was somewhat epic in its scope.  Overall, for the amount of work that went into this dish I though it just to be average.  I guess the expectation is that when you work as hard as I did for this one that you want to be blown away, and I wasn't.  Plus, rice just isn't exciting to me.  However, rice is fundamental to asian cuisine so it's no surprise something like this was on the menu.