After I had been roaming around in Asia for a couple of weeks again, it again struck me how good and tasteful the kitchen is. So many countries, so many different flavors and most of all, so much better than are flavor-lacking traditional Dutch cuisine.
A couple of months back a friend of mine had made us some home made Kao Soi, which is a traditional dish coming from the north of Thailand. It was fantastic, full and rich, tasteful and most of all, quite reasonable to make at home for yourself.
Isn't this end product a picture pretty something
So using this recipe from Hot Thai Kitchen which very often has super nice recipes in there, I took some time to go for it.
Spoiler alert: This didn't disappoint at all!
It all starts with making the paste
The base of the recipe is the marination paste, and that takes some effort to make. The good thing is that you can do this at any time and in any amount, as you can stick this in the freezer for another session and it will still be perfectly to use.
Here you can essentially see what the paste is made of. ** Shalot onions* which you will burn a little in the pan. Also a healthy amount of sliced ginger and also sliced tumeric which I was smart enough to put on some gloves before slicing since literally everything becomes orange when handling this.
Apart from this you also need a very decent amount of dried peppers which I used all of my homemade dried ones for it. Since the stash was not sufficient anymore I also took some fresh peppers to still get the heat in there. The interesting thing is that even though it feels like there is so much in there pepperwise, the dish really is not that spicy at all.
But it all starts with toasting a crazy amount of coriander seeds and also black cardemom seeds in the pan. You do this to release the flavors and even though these feel like weird ingredients to have, this is literally the base of the dish. So might as well buy some of the seeds, because whatever you don't use will just last forever.
After charring these seeds on high heat in a pan they are ready when they are starting to turn in color to the more brown side. An also, they start to smell which is really just a yummy type of smell.
When these are ready, you head over to charring the ginger and the turmeric in the same kind of way. When they start to turn color, that means they are ready. Again you take them out.
After that you also char the shallot and the peppers and again.....you have guessed it, when they start to turn you take them out again.
Now comes the fun part!!
This requires and pestle and mortar and endless amount of time. And admitting as you also will see. My wooden pestle sucked. Because in this pestle you need to grind the turmeric slices, the ginger, the pepper and the seeds. And since not everything was rock solid, that meant that I was grinding like a madman.
The thing is with the grinding it with pestle and mortar, it just releases a ton of extra flavor. But hey in this blog you get the good the bad and the ugly, and the ugly was that afterwards I got rid of this pestle and mortar and got a stone one, and I eventually tossed this paste into the grinder to get it a lot more chopped up.
Butttttt......The paste was ready now!!!!
On to the easy part which is the actual cooking!
There I said it. Cooking is all about preparation and getting everything into place. Once you have the ingredients ready to go, it was just a matter of time and simmering to get everything done.
So! After heating a giant pan with some coconut milk in there it was time to add the precious paste and the flavors out. You always can see that that is ready because the oil starts to separate from the rest of the mixture. I added some additional coconut milk to blend it all together. Then I added some soy sauce, also some black soy sauce (this stuff is truly something different, surely get both of them) and also some sugar and just stir everything in there.
When you get that mixture going it is time to add in the chicken drumsticks. I stacked in as many as that I was able to tetris on the bottom of my pan, which was 8 pieces.
With some twisting and turning most of them were dunked under the water line . Now you just let this simmer, sit back and relax for like 45 minutes or longer.
And the reason why this was chillmode for me, is that I decided to let go of one of the essential elements of Kao Soi: the fried noodle.
'*Owwwww, she didn't make the fried noodle, now the dish is incomplete'
True, very true actually, but I just wasn't feeling the hassle and honestly, you don't taste it. It is a texture thingy.
But what I did do in the mean time, was pickle some red onions.
As in...I made a nice warm mixture with some inspiration from this recipe but also added some star anise and cardemom seeds to enhance the flavor.
Assembly Time!!
When the drumsticks were ready to go, that means the soup is ready to go. I added some fish sauce and also some lime squeeze in there, but left most of the lime on the side because that is for adding afterwards.
I took a bowl with some noodles in there on the bottom, added some of the Kao Soi fluids soupmix and a drumstick.
Finishing it off with pickled onion, lime, cilantro and sping onions just made this an awesome bowl!! (even without the fried noodles!)
Have you ever tried making this? Because it was certainly doable to make and what did you think about it? And please don't kill me for leaving out an essential ingredient because it was my Sunday ;)