Making a curry paste from scratch – prik khing

When I first starting cooking the idea of using a mortar and pestle to make a curry paste by hand seemed like a waste of time. It’s time consuming, onerous and messy. It’s like using a typewriter to type a letter instead of a computer. We have food processers and blenders which can do the job quickly and cleanly, so why bother with a mortar and pestle? But when a recipe asked to use a mortar and pestle, I used one because it seemed a bit more authentic I guess and I wanted to ‘try’ to be true to the recipe. But now I really appreciate using a mortar and pestle, and the benefits it has over a food processor/blender in producing a superior texture and balance of flavour. 


What’s the difference between using a mortar and pestle and food processor?


One pounds and the other one chops.


With a mortar and pestle, ingredients are smashed, crushed and pounded. As the ingredients are pounded, their oils are extracted and they release their fragrance, and from these aromas you can perceive the balance of the paste and adjust the ingredients to your desired tastes while it is being made. You end up with a paste that is layered and balanced. While a food processor/blender chops and shreds ingredients, and you end up with a coarsely chopped mixture. A little water usually needs to be added in to facilitate the blending process, to whirl it into a pulp. 


So as you can imagine, a mortar and pestle would produce a different paste from a food processor/blender. A pounded paste is more aromatic, and has more breadth and depth of flavour than one produced from a processor/blender.


Using a mortar and pestle is time consuming but it is worth all the effort, so I definitely recommend trying it. Think of it also as a way to release any tentions, anger or frustations you have and pound them all away. This way no one gets hurt.


I made some prik khing which is a dry chilli and ginger curry paste with some prawns and string beans. It’s different from your usual Thai red or green curries as it doesn’t contain some sort of liquid stock like coconut milk. 


Ingredients
• Curry paste
- 10 small dried red chillies (soaked and drained)
- 4 red Thai bird’s eye chillies
- 1 ½ tablespoon galangal
- 2 tablespoons garlic
- 3 tablespoons shallot
- 2 tablespoons lemongrass
- 2 tablespoons coriander root/stem
- 1 teaspoon kaffir lime zest (or lime zest)
- 1 teaspoon shrimp paste
- ½ teaspoon white peppercorns
- ½ salt
(you can choose to deseed the chillies to reduce the heat)

• Peanut oil
• 15-20 prawns, shelled and deveined
• 2 cups string beans, chopped into 1cm lengths
• 4-5 thinly sliced kaffir lime leaves
• 2-4 tablespoons water
• 1-3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 1-2 teaspoon palm sugar
• 1-2 tablespoon lime juice
• 2-3 tablespoons crushed peanuts


To make the curry paste – chop up the ingredients the ingredients (this will make it easier to reduce into a paste) and add them in gradually into a mortar and pestle from the hardest and driest to the softest and wettest, with each being reduced to pulp before the next ingredient is added. A curry paste should be pureed as finely as possible, but for this dry paste I didn’t pound it so much so that there would still be some texture.

Blanch the string beans in boiling water for 30 seconds and then rinse thoroughly with cold water.


Heat the up a wok, add peanut oil and cook the prawns until halfway done, remove and set aside.


Add in 2-3 tablespoons of the curry paste and stir fry the paste for 2-3 minutes until it dries slightly, darkens and is aromatic (as it dries out, add in spoonfuls of water to rehydrate and continue frying). Season to taste with some fish sauce and palm sugar. 


Add the prawns back into the wok, add in the blanched string beans and stir fry for a bit. Taste the sauce (if necessary, add in more fish sauce or palm sugar).


Add in some lime juice, crushed peanuts and kaffir lime leaves. Stir fry all together and then serve.

Leftover paste can be stored for up to two weeks, sealed tightly with plastic wrap pressed against the surface of the paste and refrigerated in an air tight container.

Bakewell Tart

I made a bakewell tart on the weekend, it’s a famous traditional English dessert which consists of a sweet shortcrust pastry, spread with jam and covered with a sponge-like almond filling (known as frangipane). 


The Origins of this tart as I found on the internet is this – 

In 1820, the owner of the White Horse Inn, (now called the Rutland Arms) in Bakewell, a small market town in Derbyshire, England, left her cook in charge of making a jam tart. The cook, spread the jam on the base and top it with frangipane, instead of mixing the lot prior to topping the tart case. The newly created desert went down rather well with the patrons who declared that it was "baked well". Thus, this tart acquired the name Bakewell, a pun on the town of Bakewell and customers descriptions of it being ‘baked well’! 

Ingredients


Sweet Shortcrust Pastry
• 225g plain flour, sifted
• 30g caster sugar
• ½ t salt
• 110g butter, cold and diced
• 1 egg yolk, lightly whisked
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons, chilled water


Frangipane filling
• 125g butter, softened and diced
• 125g icing sugar
• 125g almond meal
• 3 egggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 30g plain flour
• zest of 1 lemon (or an orange), around 1 tablespoon


Plus
• Some jam
• flaked almonds and more icing sugar for dusting.


(I would like to be able to say that I used my own homemade jam but I used store bought jam from Fresh Provisions. One day I will try making my own jam. There were many varities of jam to choose from making it a very hard decision to pick which one. In the end I choose this particular jar because it had a checkered lid, it was the defining point of difference for me!)

Method


Pastry 


Combine flour, sugar and butter in a food processor. Process until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Add in the egg yolk, vanilla extra and 1 tablespoon of chilled water. Process until the dough just comes together, adding more chilled water if necessary.


Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead until smooth and shape into a disc. Cover with glad wrap and refrigerate for 2-4 hours. 


Preheat the oven to 180C, lightly grease and flour a tart pan (3cm deep, 22 cm base). 


Roll out the pastry between two sheets of baking paper until ~4mm thick. Line pan with pastry and trim excess. Refrigerate for 30-60 minutes. 


Prick the pastry base with a fork, line it with baking paper and fill it with some pie weights. Blind bake the tart for 15 minutes or until the edges are light golden. Remove the pie weights and baking paper, and bake for another 7-8 minutes or until the base it light golden. Set aside to cool for a bit. 


Meanwhile, make the filling.


Filling


Beat the butter, icing sugar and lemon rind until light and fluffy. Add in vanilla extract and beat the eggs in one at a time until just combined. Then fold in the flour and almond meal.


Reduce the oven to 160C. Spread the pastry case with jam, then spread the filling over the jam.

Bake for 25 minutes, then take the tart out and scatter flaked almonds all over the top of it and continue to bake for another 10 minutes until golden brown and when a skewer is inserted in the middle it comes out clean.


Cool slightly, then dust with icing sugar.

I have made shortcrust pastry quite a few times now so here are a few tips that I have accumulated about making shortcrust pastry that I would like to share.

• In order to get a flaky, light and crumbly shortcrust pastry it is important to chill, it likes to be cold! Used chilled ingredients (I even put the flour in the fridge before using it) and allow adequate chilling time for resting, and don’t handle the pastry too much as your hands will add warmth to the dough. 
• Resting and chilling the pastry makes it easier to handle, prevent cracking when it is rolled out and prevent shrinkage as it bakes. 
• When adding water to the dough, be careful to add only enough to bring the mixture from a crumbly dough to one that can be kneaded and rolled easily. To much water in the mix means that the pastry will steam as it cooks, so add small amounts of water gradually until you have achieved the desired result. 
• Don’t over process or over knead the dough it as it will develop the gluten which will result in a tough and chewier pastry.
• Take care not to stretch the pastry when placing it in the tart pan because when the pastry bakes, the heat will cause it to shrink down in the pan. 

Macarons and Chaos Theory

Why are some people so scared of baking?…and why is it that the people who I know that don’t like baking are generally guys, but they like cooking…


Baking is often viewed as a science and it can be a tricky business. 


Macarons are meringue-based cookies that have a smooth, light and crispy dome shaped shell which have a frilly foot. They are soft and chewy on the inside and sandwich some sort of cream or ganache filling. 


My recent endeavours into baking macarons, revealed to me, the chaotic nature of baking.

Chaos Theory studies the behaviour of dynamic systems and reveals that small differences in initial conditions can lead to large variations in the ending conditions. 


This chaotic behaviour is observed even though dynamic systems are deterministic, meaning that their future state is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. However, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This is because we cannot exactly recreate its starting position or measure it perfectly.


Edward Lorenz, a meterorologist, discovered chaos theory accidentally through his work on weather predictions in 1961. Lorenz was running a computer program to theoretically model and predict weather conditions. One day, he wanted to see a particular sequence of data again and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course, instead of the beginning. The weather that the computer began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before, the sequence evolved differently. Eventually Lorenz figured out what had happened. The computer worked with 6-digit precision, but the printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, so a value like 0.506127 was printed as 0.506. 


This difference was tiny and it should have had practically no effect, and a sequence very close to the original sequence should have been printed. After repeated experimentation, Lorenz concluded that small changes in the initial conditions can produce large variations in long-term outcomes, this made prediction of future outcomes impossible, in general, an idea that violated the basic conventions of physics at the time! (This is why we can’t predict the weather accurately for next week).


I feel that the ideas behind chaos theory can be used to explain the difficulties that I experienced with baking macarons and my disastrous first attempt.

My macarons actually exploded - it looked like a natural disaster has occurred on the baking tray. 

(I think these two are trying to mate with each other!)

(Erupting volcano!)

What happened? Before baking the macarons, I did my research and read up on the art of making macarons by reading some cookbooks, internet recipes and blogs.


Picture-perfect macarons are not easy to make. Macarons are all about exactitude and technique, rather than about just following a recipe. Almost anyone can bake a decent cake by following a recipe – you just mix the ingredients together, pour into a cake tin and bake. If you can follow a macaron recipe, it does not necessarily mean that you will get a successful result. For this reason, it is a notoriously difficult recipe to master and a frustrating endeavor for the amateur baker.  


A basic maracon consists of four ingredients.
• Almond meal
• Icing sugar
• Egg whites
• Caster sugar


There is much to take into account when baking macarons and there is also a lot of debate over what you should or shouldn’t do – there is no consensus as to best practices!


• Use old or aged egg whites 
Using old or aged egg whites are better as they have lost some of their water content which will make the macaron batter more stable. Although some recipes don’t even mention this or say it doesn’t matter.
• Dry ingredients need to be very fine
The icing sugar and almond meal needs to be very fine so that the macarons will have a smooth surface. Most recipes suggest finely grinding in a food processor and then sifting it a few times to obtain a fine powder. 
• Meringues
There are two types of meringues you can use which will result in minor variations in the density and flavour – French or Italian. A French meringue is made by simply whisking egg whites with sugar until stiff peaks form, and are firm and shiny. An Italian meringue is made with a hot sugar syrup which is beaten into the whisked egg whites until stiff peaks form. 
• Mixing the batter
The goal is to incorporate everything together quickly without excessive mixing when combining the meringue and icing sugar/almond meal together. You don’t want to be gently folding the mixture (like you would with a cake as you will end up with air bubbles in your macarons) but you don’t want to be beating it quickly either (because you will end up overmixing and the batter will become too runny). You need to make sure that you don’t overbeat it but don’t underbeat it either. The mixture should be smooth, shiny and ‘flow like magma’ which means a ribbon of batter dropped from a spoon onto the top of the remaining batter should take about 30 seconds to disappear. 
• Tapping the baking tray
Once the macaron batter has been piped onto baking trays, tap the underside of the baking tray on the kitchen benchtop to settle the mixture and knock any air bubbles out.
• Resting the batter to form a crust
The trick to obtaining the signature gloss and crust of the macaron is the resting time, which allows a thin skin to form before baking. Let the piped batter sit at room temperature to allow a crust to form, the stated standing times for macarons varies between 30 minutes to 5 hours! Exactly how long this should take depends on atmospheric conditions such as the temperature and humidity of the room. Some say it is essential to rest the batter but others say resting the batter makes no difference to the final product.
• Baking the macarons
For even heat distribution underneath the macarons, some recipes recommend using two or even three baking trays stacked on top of each other. The oven temperature needs to be carefully monitored so that the macarons will lift and develop a frilly foot when baking and don’t burn. Some advise to start baking the macarons at a higher temperature and then drop it (as higher temperature at the beginning will help the macarons to pop and rise), while others keep the oven temperature level and recommend that the oven door be kept slightly ajar for the entire baking period or halfway through the baking period. Macarons are generally baked for around 10 minutes and at the 5 minute mark, the macarons should have lifted and developed little ‘feet’, otherwise it is unlikely a foot will develop at all (this means a fail!).
• Removing the macarons
Sometimes the baked macarons will stick to the baking paper. If you try to forcefully remove them, you will end up breaking the shell because they are quite fragile. Some recipes recommend brushing a little water under the baking paper to moisten the paper and soften any stuck bits, and others will tell you to let the macarons sit for a few hours and you should be able to peel them off once they have cooled and their bases have dried a little. 


And another thing - you should let the macarons stand for at least one day in the refrigerator to meld the flavours and then bring the macarons to room temperature before eating them. The macaron shells are not at their best when fresh, they will be slightly chewier around the edges. 


However, even if you take into account every little tip and trick, it does guarantee that you will make a perfect macaron (as I have demonstrated).

(It's an orgy central here!)

I used this basic macaron batter recipe from aLa Cuisine. Many things could have lead to my disaster:
• I think I overmixed the batter, it was probably a bit too runny.
• There were too many air bubbles in the batter? - a result of the way I was incorporating the batter and overmixing.
• I forgot to tap the baking trays on the table to remove the air bubbles
• I think I let them sit out for too long (I let them sit for 3 hours and I didn’t think it would be too much of a problem as the resting time varies so much between recipes. This wasn’t intentional either as I was just going to quickly pop out and do my grocery shopping but the Cookbook kitchenware and cookbook store on Beautfort street was having a closing down sale – so instead of being out for around an hour I came back 3 hours later!)
• The macarons came out quite brown so the oven temperature was probably too high or I needed to kept the oven door slightly ajar earlier in the baking process.

(A distraction from baking - keep me away from kitchenware and cookbook sales!)

Anyway, I tried making macarons again and my second batch was a success!

I used the same recipe but altered my technique.
• I incorporated the mixture together differently being careful not to overmix and reduce the amount of air bubbles (after piping the batter, I even used a toothpick to poke out any air bubbles I could see).
• I remembered to tap the baking tray to settle the mixture and knock out any air bubbles.
• I let the piped batter stand for 30 minutes to develop a crust instead of 3 hours. I noticed that the crust which developed for the second batch was not as hard at the first batch.
• I closely monitored the oven and kept the door ajar earlier on in the baking process.

What are the differences between cooking and baking?


With cooking, you have a lot more leeway, there is flexibility in the ingredients and the proportions used. You can be quite spontaneous and make up something based on what you have in the fridge and tweak recipes as you wish. When you are cooking, you can always keep adding ingredients and seasoning to a dish until you are happy with final result. For example, if you are making a pot of soup, it doesn’t really matter if a little less celery is added or an extra onion is included – you will still get a pot of soup and if the flavour is off, you can make adjustments can be made along the way.


With baking, you can’t just make it up or make adjustments along the way, baking requires a formula (the right ratios for different ingredients ie: flour to eggs to sugar etc.) and you have to follow a certain method in order to yield an end result. 


Each ingredient serves an important purpose, for example:
• Flour gives baked goods their structure and form.
• Sugar tenderizes, moistens and helps baked goods brown.
• Eggs provide structure and volume where the protein helps bind flour particles together and coagulate during baking to add solidity. Eggs whites are a leavening agent, while egg yolks provide richness and moisture to baked goods.
• Fat such as butter contributes to a baked goods tenderness and fluffyness.
• Baking soda reacts with acids to produce carbon dioxide which in turn puffs the batter. 
Thus, baking is like a science in that you are trying to process all the ingredients according to their chemistry with each other. You have to understand all the elements of baking and how they react together in order to get a successful outcome. 


Baking requires more care and attention to detail. 


You need to measure ingredients accurately, a little more or less than the correct amounts will affect the outcome. I have been reading How Baking Works by Paula Rigoni and apparently adding extra eggs will make brownies more cake-like, brownies should be dense and fudgy, eggs provide aeration and also add more moisture which converts to steam when heated and will make the texture of brownies more lighter and cake-like than fudgy. 


There isn’t much room for error, if you stuff something up, you have to start again. For example, with tempering chocolate, you heat and cool chocolate in order to form chocolate which has a smooth and glossy finish and you get a crisp ‘snap’. You need to carefully control the temperature of the chocolate so that when it heats up, it does not exceed 45C and when it cools down it needs to be about 26C. Failure to properly temper chocolate can result in dull-looking pieces with poor texture. 


You also need to have the baked good all prepared at the start because once you put it into the oven, there is no room to make alterations, you can’t pull out a cake halfway through baking and add a little more flour or another egg. 


Thus, in many ways baking exhibits a sensitive dependence on initial conditions like dynamic systems in chaos theory. The initial conditions of a baked good that you make will determine the outcome and small differences in the method and the proportion of ingredients can have a large effect on the quality of the baked good (as I found out when I baked macarons for the first time!). Baking is a lot more unpredictable than cooking and for an amateur the rate of success with baking is lower than cooking. 


Why do some people prefer cooking over baking? Maybe because cooking is less chaotic than baking! (ie: it is less susceptible to small variations leading to large variations in the final outcome).

Chicken Nanban

I often cook dishes which I have never eaten before, it may be a dish that I have:
(a) seen a cookbook and it looked tasty so I wanted to replicate it;
(b) often heard about but never gotten around to trying out; or
(c) had a friend cook and describe it to me, and recommend that I try it. 


I tried to make some Chicken Nanban, brought about by option (c). It’s Japanese and basically fried chicken with a spicy and sour sauce dipped in tartar sauce. 

For the tartar sauce I made mayonnaise from scratch for the first time! Mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil (as much as 80% if its volume is oil), egg yolks, vinegar or lemon juice and often mustard which provides both flavour and stablising particles.


Ingredients (makes around 300ml of mayonnaise)
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• 1 teaspoon white wine vinegar
• 250ml EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)
• 2 teaspoons lemon juice
• salt and pepper


Notes: Make sure all the ingredients are at room temperature as they are difficult to emulsify when cold. Olive oil can be rather overpowering in mayonnaise, so you can use an unflavoured oil such as sunflower or canola.


Place the egg yolks, mustard, vinegar in a mixing bowl with a pinch of salt and pepper. Stir quickly with a whisk and as soon as the mixture is smooth, slowly add in the EVOO, drop by drop to begin with and then a thin trickle (it is important to add the oil in slowly and sparingly to avoid curdling) whisking continuously to keep the emulsion stable. When all the oil has been incorporated and the mayonnaise is thick stir in the lemon juice and adjust seasoning to taste.

For tartar sauce


• 1 boiled egg, chopped
• ½ shallot, finely diced
• 2 sweet spiced pickled gherkins, finely diced
• 5 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon ketchup
• 1 tablespoon fresh parsley, finely chopped
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• salt and pepper


Mix ingredients together in a bowl and refrigerate for at least an hour before serving.


For the chicken


• 500g chicken thigh
• salt and pepper
• plain flour
• 2 eggs, lightly beaten
• vegetable oil (for deep frying)


Chop the chicken into bite sized pieces, season with salt and pepper, set aside. 


Heat up the oil in a saucepan for deep frying (at least 2-3 inches deep). 


Lightly coat the chicken pieces with flour and then dip them in the egg mixture and gently place them into the oil. Deep fry the chicken pieces until they are golden brown. Remove and place on a plate lined with paper towels.


Nanban sauce


I haven’t had nanban sauce before so I don’t know what it tastes like but I know that it is a spicy and sour sauce. I found 3 difference recipes for nanban sauce and used them as a guide to come up with my own nanban sauce. I mixed the ingredients together in a saucepan over low heat and tasted until I got a spicy and sour taste which I felt was good. I dipped a piece of fried chicken into the sauce to see how they tasted together and was happy with the result. Below are the quantities of the ingredients which I used in my nanban sauce. Next time I cook it, I will change the quantities to come up with a different tasting nanban sauce, I will probably add a bit more sugar as in hindsight I think it could have been a bit sweeter. 


• 3 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
• ½ teaspoon dashi granules
• ½ tablespoon sugar
• 1 ½ tablespoon sake
• pinch salt
• 2 red bird’s eye chillies, chopped
• ½ shallot, finely diced


To serve – place the fried chicken pieces on a plate and some tartar sauce on the side, spoon some nanban sauce over the chicken. Dip the pieces of chicken in the tartar sauce and eat.

Shak Shuka

I don’t really eat much breakfast, I usually have some fruit and then I’m out the door and on my way to work. But I love going out for a big breakfast on the weekends and catching up with friends. Last weekend I had breakfast at Riki Blakes Café (4 Blake Street, North Perth), this place was recommended to me by a friend who said that they make some great North African and Middle Eastern dishes for breakfast. When I saw the menu, I was drawn to the Shak Shuka dish, it sounded delicious and it was something different from the usual breakfast of bacon, eggs, mushrooms and toast etc.

Shak Shuka is a spicy tomato mixture served in the pan that it is cooked in with poached eggs on top, it is eaten with pieces of bread dipped in it. It was very flavoursome, the tomato mixture was rich and aromatic with different spices. All my friends who ordered Shak Shuka agreed that it was delicious.

When I have a dish that I enjoy eating, the next thing I want to do is learn how to cook it myself. 

Shak Shuka is a North African dish and was brought to Israel by Tunisian Jews after the Jewish exodus from Arab lands. It’s a popular Israeli vegetarian dish that is eaten for breakfast. The name Shak Shuka is a combination of North African and Hebrew words, and means “all mixed up.”  I looked up some recipes on the internet and it’s a very simple dish to make. It’s also very versatile in that it can be vegetarian or you can add in some sausages, and there are many different versions of the spicy tomato mixture where you can add other vegetables and vary the combination of spices used. So you can basically put in anything you want and then ‘mix it all up’.

Over the Anzac day long weekend, I cooked up some Shak Shuka! 

This is my version of Shak Shuka, an amalgamation of numerous internet recipes and my continual tasting as I cooked to try to get the flavours as close to the one that I had at Blakes Café…as I could remember…

Ingredients
• Olive oil
• 2 eggs
• bread (any bread will do – white, pita, Turkish, a baguette)
• crumbled goats cheese (or feta)
• parsley for garnish
Tomato mixture
• 1.2 kg Roma tomatoes
• 1 red capsicum
• 1 red paprika
• 2 shallots
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1-1 ½ cup stock (I used chicken stock)
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• salt and pepper to taste
Spices
• 2 teaspoons sweet paprika powder
• ½ teaspoon cumin powder
• ½ hot paprika powder
• ¼ cayenne powder
• ½ turmeric powder
• ½ coriander powder
• ¼ teaspoon caraway powder

Optional 
• For more heat – add in a jalapeno into the tomato mixture or some harrisa paste.
• The tomato mixture can also have other vegetables like corn, peas, mushrooms or eggplant.
• You can also add in a little tomato paste (I had this written down but forgot to add some in).


Method
 
Preheat the oven to 200C and roast the capsicum and paprika for 15-20minutes. Then peel off the skin and finely dice.

Blanch the tomatoes, peel the skin off and dice them (removing the seeds and jelly).

Finely dice the shallots and garlic.

Heat up a small pan and then add in some olive oil. Saute the shallot and garlic together until fragrant and shallots become translucent.

Add in the tomatoes, capsicum and paprika and fry together for 5 minutes.

Add in a pinch of salt and pepper.

Then add in the spices (use the quantities listed above as a guide, feel free to alter the mix of spices to your desired taste)

Add in 1 cup of stock, reduce the heat to low and simmer uncovered for 20-30 minutes until the mixture is thick and little liquid is left, stirring occasionally to make sure that the vegetables so not stick to the bottom of the pan (add more stock as needed, ie: if it becomes to dry).

Then break in two eggs onto the surface of the spicy tomato mixture. Cover and cook for 3-4 minutes or until the eggs are done to your liking.

Remove the pan from the heat, sprinkle some chopped parsley on top and crumbled goats cheese. The dish is served in the pan that it is cooked in. Eat with pieces of bread dipped into the spicy tomato mixture with some egg.

(The eggs were a bit overdone, I would have liked the yolks to be more runny)