I’ve known Kelvin Kong for a while now and there are two things I know for sure when it comes to Kelvin:
1. He likes to read
2. He’s a great cook
He expressed interest in checking out Naomi Duguid’s Burma: Rivers of Flavor on Twitter and then I came up with a brilliant idea… Why not get him to cook from Burma and guest blog about his experience on Crave? So without further ado, I share with you two days of Burmese Cooking with Kelvin Kong.
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Lindsey Reeder from Random House asked me to write a blog entry about cooking from the Burma cookbook. I’d cook things, take photos, and write about the experience. Because I’m a glutton for punishment, I agreed, and cooked seven dishes for a party of four. Join me on an adventure of discovering a new cuisine, misreading recipes, breaking kitchen equipment, having meticulous plans fall apart, and in general, deliciousness.
DAY ONE
Burma, with its close proximity to Malaysia, Thailand and India, incorporates many flavours common to Southeast Asian regions, such as turmeric, shrimp paste, fish sauce, lime leaves ,lemon grass, and so on. The building blocks that give the dishes the “Burmese” flavours tend to fall under the “slightly hard to find unless you’re in close proximity to an Asian supermarket” category. Fortunately, I do, and I already had most of the ingredients at hand to make what Naomi Duguid calls the pantry basics.
Two days prior to making the dinner, I spent an afternoon cranking out pantry basics:
Toasted Chickpea Flour (page 32)
Chopped Roasted Peanuts (page 35)
Fried Shallots and Shallot Oil (page 24)
Fried Garlic and Garlic Oil (page 25)
Shrimp Powder (page 30)
Red Chile Oil (page 25)
Toasted Chickpea Flour (page 32) and Chopped Roasted Peanuts (page 35)
These were the easiest to make. Both peanuts and chickpea flour were toasted in pans, and in the case of the former, slightly pulverized in a food processor.
The chickpea flour is used as a thickener for sauces and soups, and it adds nuttiness (oh, how I hate that word) to dishes. The roasted peanuts are a salad garnish.
Fried Shallots and Shallot Oil (page 24)
Sometimes, I think that kitchen prep is almost zen — repetitive tasks that let your mind wander into a semi-meditative trance. Doing it, on the other hand, is another story.
Chop a bag of shallots, cry a bit, then fry shallots in oil. Divert attention away from shallots at crucial frying stage and notice shallots burnt. Cry again, but for different reasons. Chop another bag, and watch the frying like a hawk.
The fried shallots are used as garnish in many Southeast Asian dishes as flavour and textural contrast, adding crunch and mild sweetness. The shallot-infused oil is an essential cooking component, and handy for salad dressings.
Fried Garlic and Garlic Oil (page 25)
Same procedure as the shallots. I paid much more attention this time as garlic has an annoyingly low threshold for heat and oil. If you’ve ever watched garlic in a pan turn from golden brown and delicious to rancid black in the span of five seconds, I know that you know my pain.
Like the shallots, the fried garlic and the flavoured oil can play a role in dishes from start to finish.
Shrimp Powder (page 30)
Sun-dried shrimps are fantastic little packets of concentrated salt and flavour, if you can get past their appearance. And you should, because they’re used widely in Asian dishes, adding depth of flavour and umami. In Burmese cooking, they can be fried as an aromatic like anchovies in Italian cooking – the shrimp’s sweetness and fishiness give way to smoky nuttiness when heated. It’s also a garnish for dishes like salads.
The book calls for reconstituting the shrimp in water before pulverizing them in a food processor, but because my mini food processor had trouble handling the wet shrimp I toasted the shrimp in a pan to slightly dry it out, which made for a much easier process.
Red Chile Oil (page 25)
Like the other oils above, it’s handy as an aromatic during cooking, or a garnish on finished dishes for a good spice kick. Be careful — if you’re using dried Thai chiles in this recipe, the oil is very potent. But it smells so, so good.
I recommend straining the oil after preparation, especially if you do not have a high tolerance for heat.
DAY TWO
I planned to prepare seven dishes. They’re not the most well-known or representative dishes from Burma, but they were accessible. I would have loved to make something like a mohinga, but some of the essentials for the recipe, like banana flowers, was harder to source. Also, I figured I’d start with simpler dishes since this was my first foray into making Burmese food.
Excuses aside, here was the menu:
Pre-dinner snack: Spice-Rubbed Beef Jerky (page 196)
Soup: Fish Soup with Lemongrass and Chile (page 87)
Salad #1: Tender Greens Salad with Crispy Fried Shallots (page 49)
Salad #2: Cucumber salad with shallot/chile chutney (page 218)
Curry: Traveller’s Eggplant Curry (page 104)
Meat: Aromatic Chicken from the Shan Hills (page 167)
Egg: Easy Coriander-Tomato Omelette (page 121)
Prep
Making seven dishes in quick succession to be served together is not easy; in fact, I failed horribly at it, as you’ll see later. Regardless, to even be able to crank out that many dishes in a short span of time requires a good mise en place. Naturally, I spent the afternoon before dinner chopping, slicing, marinating, and on a few occasions, pounding.
Tangential rant: Mise en place roughly translates to “everything in its place”. It’s not just an act, it’s a mindset. In a nutshell, it’s being organized enough to have all your ingredients prepared and at hand when cooking, so that no time or movement is wasted except to move food on, around or off the stove.
I first learned about mise en place from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. Given the amount of space and profanity he devoted to mise en place, I figured it was important. It really, really, is. For the home cook, a good mise en place can save quite a bit of time. For the line cook, it’ll save that and a job.
Turmeric is an essential ingredient in a few of of the recipes, as an aromatic and colouring. I forgot that I threw away my old tumeric powder, so I had to pound tumeric root with a mortar and pestle after it broke the spice grinder. Twenty minutes of my life I’ll never get back. Important life lesson: check your spices before you go grocery shopping.
Spice-Rubbed Beef Jerky (page 196)
This is an upscale, Southeast Asian version of your favourite truckstop snack. If you frequent truckstops, I guess. It’s salty, packed with spice, and pairs well with drinks or as a main dish.
It seems simple, but there is a bit of work involved in making the spice paste that flavours the beef. I assure you, it’s worth it. I admit misreading the recipe here: the beef is supposed to be sliced after it dries, whereas I did so before I added the paste. I’ll pretend that my intention was to cover a greater surface area with the spice paste for more flavour penetration. Regardless, it turned out well and my guests had to move the bowl of jerky away before it was finished.
Fish Soup with Lemongrass and Chile (page 87)
There are two stages: making the fish broth (page 84), then the soup. The broth is simple: aromatics, shrimp paste, and fish (a combination of sole and snapper fillets, for the price and lack of fish bones at the place I shopped). I found the shrimp paste an unusual ingredient for a soup given the pungency of its raw state, but it added a depth of flavour to the broth without being overpoweringly fishy.
The broth is then infused with ginger and lemongrass, and served with chiles, limes, shallots, and cilantro as garnishes. The trick is to never let the soup reach full boil for too long, which will muddy the aromas and flavours. Always simmer.
Flavourwise, the soup resembles a refined Tom Yum Goong (Thai hot and sour shrimp soup), especially with the lime juice squeezed in right before eating. Light, sour, and refreshing, it was a great starter to open up the appetite for the rest of dinner.
Tender Greens Salad with Crispy Fried Shallots (page 49)
I don’t like many salads. I make them out of necessity for dinner guests so no one can accuse me of pure carnivorism. That being said, this salad turned out great. It’s also low maintenance in comparison to some of the other dishes, especially if you have many of the Burmese pantry basics.
Blanch greens (and here, you can use almost any greens you like) and drain, toss in the Burmese pantry basics like the sliced shallots, dried shrimp powder, chickpea flour, and shallot oil, then add lime juice and fish sauce, and toss. Top with fried shallots and fried garlic for crunch.
A basic green salad infused with a variety of different flavours and textures.
Cucumber salad with shallot/chile chutney (page 218)
Another quick salad – chop up some shallots (recipe says shred with box grater, but I didn’t have the time or inclination, so pretend that I wanted a chunkier texture, because I minced them instead), toast shrimp paste, add some other flavourings and set aside. Add cucumbers for a quick salad.
Toasted shrimp paste is a revelation. Like dried shrimp, the raw paste is pungently fishy, but once it’s toasted, it takes on smoky and nutty (there’s that word again!) aromas, adding complexity to dishes.
The cucumber’s crisp blandness goes really well with the the chutney’s sourness and complex flavours. It’s also a very cooling dish.
Two light salads and a soup to start a meal. After which, my timing fell apart.
Traveller’s Eggplant Curry (page 104)
Because of my preoccupation with making the salads and talking to my guests, I forgot the curry takes a half hour to simmer. This meant a half hour between the initial dishes rest of the other ones, because I wanted the other cooked foods to be on the table at the same time.
This is a straightforward and quick curry to prepare if you have your mise en place – fry aromatics, throw in eggplant, add water and shrimp powder (which I substituted for the dried anchovies in the recipe, which might have been off putting to my guests, with their little heads and lifeless eyes and all)
The eggplant curry is a nice stew, the eggplant absorbs all the flavours, and goes really well with rice, as Naomi Duguid writes. Not sure about the “traveller” in the name — maybe because it’s easy to put together?
Aromatic Chicken from the Shan Hills (page 167)
No marinating ahead of time. Just fry the chicken, aromatics, paste, more aromatics, and simmer. The hardest part is making the ginger/chili/garlic paste, which is pounded in a mortar and pestle.
At this point, you might be wondering why I’m using a mortar and pestle, when I have a perfectly good food processor. To you, I answer that I’m too lazy (and afraid of food processor blades) to constantly clean it. The mortar and pestle is easily rinsed out with some water.
It’s a great dish — result tastes like a rich curry, but without having to rely on coconut milk.
Easy Coriander-Tomato Omelette (page 121)
This was the final dish, because it can be made while the eggplant curry and the chicken were simmering. It’s a much easier dish to make in a nonstick pan. It’s also much easier if your pan is smaller, which I learned the hard way, by trying to flip the omelette. My plan to serve the omelette in smaller pretty wedges was wiped by one bad flip.
It’s an omelette with tomatoes and coriander, but that was about it. The other dishes were much more interesting. Still, tasty!
And that’s it! Seven Burmese dishes, served with rice. There were few leftovers, so I’m guessing dinner turned out well. I had a great time making these dishes, and got to share them with some good friends. Plus, I got a great cookbook as a bonus. Thanks to Lindsey and Random House for the cookbook, and for having me as a guest blogger for Crave!
P.S. We drank white wine and beer throughout the dinner. The dishes are spicy and sometimes oily, so crisp light drinks were the best pairing.
Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid 
Published: Oct 09, 2012 by Random House Canada
ISBN: 9780307362162
Price: $39.95
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