kakapo
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Posts posted by kakapo
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I foresaw all of this 11 years ago with the LTM debacle, but America didn't heed my warning. And now you weep like teased vaginas.
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The Campfire Headphase
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I cook vegan and vegetarian thai from time to time. Usually its a root veg substituted in if its a thicker oilier curry like a massaman or panang, any other veg if its a soupier curry, but be careful of brassicas. Broccoli and cauliflower is fine, but I once added sprouts to a green curry and it was the worst thing I've ever made. You have to be careful when using root veg too as the starch will come out and change the consistency of the curry and sometimes act as a homogeniser for the split coconut milk as well and you just end up with gloopy wallpaper paste. Sometimes it's best to roast separately. Used celeriac for first time over christmas and worked surprisingly well.
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Not without its own problems, but this gives you a good idea of how distorted the Mercator projection is:
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56 minutes ago, mister miller said:
the type of food where it seems like you absolutely must have authentic ingredients to make it taste good
ive still never been able to recreate thai red curry myself in the kitchen. idk what i'm doing wrong.
The most common mistake I've seen friends do is not cracking the coconut cream so the paste ends up boiling rather than frying. See note above about what coconut milk/cream will work. The following video might be helpful. David Thompson is the godfather of thai cookery and a massive influence on the wave of trendy thai restaurants both here and the States over the last decade, and presumably his native Australia too. His other videos are worth a watch too.
Look at about 1.33 for what paste cooked in cracked coconut cream looks like. Note that this is definitely towards the oilier, thicker end of curry sauces. Also most recipes will call for the coconut to be cracked prior to the paste being added. He's using fresh coconut milk and knows that it will crack quickly and easily, so just adds it straight in. He's also using very good quality palm sugar which won't have been adulterated with refined sugar and additives, so he can get away with using a bit more than the stuff we can get our hands on. The paste is freshly made so he's also pretty free with the fish sauce.
If you can't get fresh ingredients get a thai brand paste, a coconut milk that will reliably crack, fish sauce and palm sugar and just practice the seasoning until you get it right. One thing I often do is cook the other ingredients separately, so I might braise some beef in coconut milk first before adding it to the curry. This gives you more control over both the meat and the curry sauce. There's very few thai curries that benefit from prolonged cooking.
As with just about every cuisine, mise en place gets you most of the way to good cooking.
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58 minutes ago, sweepstakes said:
Is Thai food supposed to be sweet? I've heard conflicting reports on this.
Thailand is a big country. It's a lot bigger than it looks due to it being close to the equator and the whole Mercator distortion thing. From the hills and jungles of the north to the beaches of the southern peninsula is the same distance as from the far north of Scotland to the south coast of France. It's also surrounded and influenced by other big hitter cuisines like India/Burma to the west, Malaysia to the south, China to the north, with large immigrant communities as well. So obviously you can only speak about it in generalisations. But...
What most people think of Thai food is the curries and noodle dishes of the central plains and Bangkok. When Thai expats set up the first restaurants and takeaways in the states and the UK they adjusted recipes to take into account less sophisticated palates and invariably this meant sweetening things up, while toning down some of the hotter and fishier elements. I don't think it was a case of westerners having a sweeter palate per se, just that the Thai combination of spice and real chili heat with sourness and sugar is a total revelation if the most sophisticated thing you've eaten is lemon chicken.
There is a cliche that thai food is a balance between sweet, sour, salty and hot. This doesn't means that every dish has to have the same balance, just that these elements often exist in varying degrees in the same dish, e.g. Som Tam. Sweet = palm sugar, sour = tamarind/lime, salty = fish sauce, hot = chilies. The som tam up near the Lao border is going to be hotter, less sweet and more pungent than the one you get in Bangkok. There's also an appreciation that people will want to adjust this balance to their own personal preferences. This is why for certain meals you'll see the little plastic trays of condiments like white sugar, dried ground chilies, fish sauce, chilies in vinegar etc. For certain street foods it's fine to ask for more or less chilie, or less sweet or whatever. Thai's also have an appreciation of bitterness. However the means of imparting this bitterness, such as bile in a northern laap salad of minced meat and blood, or certain wild growing herbs, mean that you are unlikely to see this end of the spectrum outside of Thailand.
So Thai food can be anywhere from achingly sweet to puckeringly bitter and sour and everywhere in between. Most Thai food outside of Thailand is probably to the sweet end of the spectrum though.
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Just now, dingformung said:
Why is it that Galangal isn't available in my supermarket? Outrageous
I'm sure you know this, frozen is ok but never dried. General rule that applies to all thai food ingredients. Fresh is best, frozen is least worst alternative, never dried. You'd be better off adding grass cuttings into a curry than dried kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, galangal.
This leads to my next topic, substitutions in curry pastes. This is not a question of authenticity, but of what does and does not work. If you are new to thai curries or cannot get the ingredients, using thai brand curry pastes is fine, but be aware they tend to be very salty and you will need to adjust seasoning.
Green chili. In a proper green curry this will be bird's eye. You can substitute in the ubiquitous green finger chilies that are everywhere, usually from Kenya and sometimes mislabeled as bird's eye. Remove seeds first, they're acrid. If you want a less hot green curry but want it to be more on the green than khaki side then feel free to add in any of the larger green chilies as well, i.e. dutch or anaheim. If I was using the green finger chilies I would look to add in some fruitier larger green chilies as well.
Red chili. If we're talking a standard 'Red Curry' then it will be made with larger dried red chilies. These are difficult to get outside of thailand and the big dried red chilies you find in chinese supermarkets are a poor substitute (also more difficult to work with when pounding the paste). You're better off substituting out with Mexican dried chilies. For a standard Red Curry Guajillo is probably your best bet. Puya and Arbol have their uses, but feel free to experiment. I've used Ancho in a mussaman for example. Note that there is a distinction to be made between 'Red Curry', the iconic central plains/Bangkok curry that is on every menu and 'red curries', which is pretty much any curry using red chiles. Here you will find more variation, including the use of fresh red chile and dried bird's eye chile, particularly in the south of the country.
Garlic. Thai garlic is smaller than standard garlic, which is a perfectly ok substitute, but check which your recipe is using. Use same weight/volume.
Lemongrass. There is no substitute. Do not try and use lemon peel/lemon juice. I think I did this once about 20 years ago.
Galangal. If your only option is ginger, so be it. You're probably better off making a Malaysian curry, which can share many of the characteristics of a Thai curry, but will usually use ginger or a combination of ginger/galangal instead.
Kaffir lime peel. Difficult to source, though frozen ones can usually be found by digging in the freezers in London's Chinatown. New Loon Moon is best bet. If I don't have any I will add a finely chopped kaffir leaf to the paste.
Coriander root. Stalks are ok, the less green the better. Don't use coriander leaf. Important historical note. You will find various 'farang' green curry recipes that include adding in lots of coriander leaves, sometimes even in the paste, sometimes in supermarket readymade sauces (which are invariably shit anyway). These are remnants from the 90s when you couldn't get many of the ingredients. You will find lots of thai food experts then deriding and mocking this as inauthentic. However, one of the very earliest written recipes for green curry includes a reference to using chlorophyll rich herbs such as coriander to make the curry vibrantly green. I'm not suggesting you try and replicate this but it highlights why calls for authenticity in food are often an appeal to their own authority, rather than historical accuracy. See also Italians.
Thai shallots. Equal amount by volume of banana shallot.
Shrimp paste. Omit, but adjust seasoning. Salt if none is already in the paste. Fish sauce at end of cooking.
Palm sugar. Thai brand. The better ones are soft enough to scoop with a spoon. The hard pucks that you find in chinese supermarkets are ok, but avoid the darker coloured ones as this will be indonesian palm sugar.
Thai (sweet) basil. Italian basil at a push. Holy basil is used in some regional curries, but if you can get holy basil you'll be able to get thai basil.
Coconut milk/cream. It's possible to make your own at home, but this is a whole other topic. If not, you've got two options. Most thai curries that use coconut milk require you to split or 'crack' the coconut milk, so that the paste fries in the coconut oil that is released. Most tinned coconut, including thai brands, include a homogenising agent that prevents this or makes it very difficult. That's why some recipes call for vegetable oil, which should be totally unnecessary. Aroy D brand in a carton cracks reliably. Most organic tinned coconut milk will crack as long as it doesn't have guar gum in it.
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Copied from fwp thread:
On 11/30/2020 at 6:48 PM, kakapo said:This involves a bit of prep but is pretty straightforward.
Make a thai dressing. Start off with equal parts by volume:
salty (fish sauce, soy at a push)
sweet (palm sugar syrup, but white sugar will do, reduce amount)
sour (lime juice, or maybe tamarind at a push)
Pimp it with chile, ideally fresh but dried can work. You could also add in finely sliced garlic, shallots, ginger, lemongrass or any combination.
Adjust seasoning to your own particular taste. You can at this point give the dressing 20 seconds in a medium hot clean wok/pan to help bring the flavours together, but I usually miss this out, less washing up. Also if you get the timing wrong your lime juice will go bitter.
Dress a salad. Add in a protein. Chopped up fried eggs or tinned tuna are both good, cheap and easy. Garnish with coriander.
You've now made either Yam Khai Dao (eggs) or Yam 'Tuna'.
Serve with rice. This hits a sweet spot of just enough work to feel like you're not a slob, but is still quick and easy and will make any day feel a bit better. It's also reasonably well balanced if you don't overdose on the rice.
On 11/30/2020 at 11:04 PM, kakapo said:Stick some chiles and garlic under the grill until the skin is charred but not burnt to a crisp. Larger chiles work best, but you can try a mixture and throw in some birds eye chiles if you like it extra hot. Let them cool and take garlic out of skin. Chiles are fine leave the burnt skin on, but chop them up. Mash up with pestle and mortar to a coarse paste. Add a pinch of salt and a pinch of white sugar. Add just enough vinegar, ideally coconut but any white Asian vinegar will work, to cover and mash all together. You've now got burnt chile vinegar that is infinitely nicer than sriracha and works with just about any noodle dish as a condiment. Also works well with Thai braised meat dishes like Pa Lo.
On 11/30/2020 at 11:21 PM, kakapo said:Prik nam pla is the quintessential thai seasoning/dip and at its simplest its just diced chile soaked in fish sauce. Adds an umami hit to just about anything, but dishes with fried eggs like pad krapow work well. But you can take it further. Tomatoes don't feature much in thai food but they do crop up in some mainly northern regional dishes. If you soak them in fish sauce you get a double umami hit. Slow roast or gently char first and then soak and you've got a triple hit. Rice, fried eggs and these tomatoes makes a pretty great breakfast.
On 11/30/2020 at 11:27 PM, kakapo said:If you can get it i recommend the megachef brand of fish sauce. Its worth paying a little bit extra. If not the ubiquitous squid brand will do. Vietnamese fish sauce, although often more artisanal, is a different flavour profile, being generally sweeter and milder. Will work at a push but you will need to taste and reseason carefully.
2 hours ago, dingformung said:I usually get the Healthy Boy one, it seems to be the most widely available brand of Thai seasonings outside of Thailand that is actually produced in Thailand. I think that fermented shrimp paste is an easy and fun way to add umami, too. Khao Klook Kapi is easy, quick and satisfying. Spend extra $€£ for this brand as it doesn't contain any additives:
13 minutes ago, kakapo said:Healthy Boy is ubiquitous in the UK for thai soy and seasoning sauces, but I've never seen their fish sauce here. It's nearly all Squid brand. Shrimp paste is impossible to get really good quality in the UK (and I imagine everywhere else outside of Thailand), and the ones readily available are pretty much salty crap, ok for a curry paste, not great for a nam prik or khao klook kapi. I can see I can get this one on line, will put in an order and give it a try. I'm going to start a new thai food thread.
2 minutes ago, dingformung said:It's definitely more salty than it is umami, even if you don't get a rancid 40 year old one.
I order a lot of Asian stuff online because Asian shops or Asian sections in supermarkets in Germany are probably even worse than in the UK. Asian restaurants here offer tasty but extremely inauthentic food, made to fit the taste of people who can't stand spices and like to occupy public swimming pool loungers with towels.
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This is the Thai food thread. We can allow tangential discussion of other SE Asian cuisine and food culture. I do not want to hear about how you love Sriracha, you basic bitch.
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1 hour ago, dingformung said:
I usually get the Healthy Boy one, it seems to be the most widely available brand of Thai seasonings outside of Thailand that is actually produced in Thailand. I think that fermented shrimp paste is an easy and fun way to add umami, too. Khao Klook Kapi is easy, quick and satisfying. Spend extra $€£ for this brand as it doesn't contain any additives:
Healthy Boy is ubiquitous in the UK for thai soy and seasoning sauces, but I've never seen their fish sauce here. It's nearly all Squid brand. Shrimp paste is impossible to get really good quality in the UK (and I imagine everywhere else outside of Thailand), and the ones readily available are pretty much salty crap, ok for a curry paste, not great for a nam prik or khao klook kapi. I can see I can get this one on line, will put in an order and give it a try. I'm going to start a new thai food thread.
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I'm so traumatized that I can only express myself through poetry.
What the fuck was that,
That just came out my arse?
That was not a normal poo
Am I having a psychotic episode
And have I been eating cat food again?
It remains a possibility
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Had a game of Bum Snake on the bed with the cat. Made an illegal move. She was not happy. Now she's refusing to play any more Bum Snake.
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Watmm can be as cynical as it wants about christmas being cancelled, but imagine if sitting down to piss was cancelled. You'd all be crying in the shower, while your shadow brain attempted to scream its way out of your hideous meat prison.
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1 minute ago, perunamuusi said:
Yeah, doolittle was getting played a lot in 1990 round mine
I didn't get to listen to doolittle until about '93. 91-92 was just full of so much good new music, and we had to rely on someone buying a cd and then passing it around to be copied as my 12 year old's budget would maybe stretch to half a dozen cds a year. But back in '90 (maybe early 91) one of the older boys on the bus home from school passed me a copy of bossanova. Rock Music full volume on walkman = mind blown. Its one of the reasons I've always had a soft spot for it and why I dont see it as lesser in any way compared to doolittle and pilgrim.
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I was not yet a teenager in 1990, but it was the start of the transition from listening to parent's collection to swapping tapes with friends. So from Beatles, Kinks and Morricone to Jarre and Pixies.
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Spiral, are you still working in a prison? I would've thought this was perfect for bonding with your clients.
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Blerp seem to be having a few problems getting stuff out the door, probably for the obvious reasons. Anyone else seeing significant delays at moment?
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6 minutes ago, TubularCorporation said:
Got a smaller version of this and so far it's the most convenient power strip I've ever owned.
What brand is this? The most i could find was 12 sockets.
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My cat is a willy watcher.
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These last couple of pages have been the worst experience of my life.
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6 hours ago, Cryptowen said:
i don't think i've actually clicked on a joe rogan video in a few years, but he still comes up near the top every time. also any time i get nostalgic & listen to some old video game ost track i end up getting pasty gamer dude reaction videos for a solidcouple weeks.
that being said, it's usually 85% outsider music cassette rips + hour long videos about continental philosophy, so compared to the default yt recs i'm doing alright. i get kinda sketch vibes from youtube overall tho so fingers crossed that more (non-fringe, non politically-polarized) competition emerges
B*n Sh#piro videos began appearing today. I've never searched for him through any medium. I think the only thing I've seen of him was his embarrassing O'Neil interview. All my subscriptions are music and science based. Im in the UK. I got a new phone recently and it couldn't work out what news to try and spam me with until I'd watched a couple of pbs spacetime videos. After that it spammed me every morning with shit like 'the Milky Way is on a collision course and you won't believe what it means for life on earth.' I dont even need to open it to know its clickbait bollocks about the largely peaceful merging with Andromeda in several billion years time that has zero implications for life on earth. But apply that same paradigm to politics and 'news' and its not difficult to see how insidious it is, and why its one of the reasons the uk and us are in such a mess.
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Deleted as much internet history as possible to see if I could reset youtube algorithm and get sensible recommendations. Youtube now thinks I really love elephants. I mean I like them but...
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6 hours ago, brisk said:
Dismissing artists cos of their skin colour? I'm sure there's a word for that.
Yes, it's called positive discrimination, but that's not what I'm suggesting. I don't have a problem with Whambient! I think people should be prepared to increase their normal expenditure on music, and spend it on music made by marginalised groups, even if they don't like or won't actually listen to the music. That's how I ended up with 4 copies of Lara Rix-Martin's ewok tribute album Sleepmoss.
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Meemo Comma - Genesis: Soul Into Matter² (ZIQ429 March 19, 2021)
in New & Upcoming Releases
Posted
On Neon Genesis: Soul Into Matter² Meemo Comma (a.k.a. Lara Rix-Martin) takes Kabbalistic text and Jewish prayer and guides them through twinkling ambient synths, breakbeats and cranking industrial noise, full of strange wonder and drama. You can hear soft synths transmuted into choirs of seraphim and moments of occulted dancefloor rapture, from Aramaic chanting and ravey breakbeats to readings from the Zohar. It is quite beautiful at times. The album is the follow-up to her well received 2019 Ewok concept album Sleepmoss.
Jewish mysticism is at the root of Western esoteric beliefs and therefore has formed the structure of many films and books that explore the question of humanity. Inspired by the visuals of Evangelion and nineties anime soundtracks such as Ghost In The Shell (and its later Stand Alone Complex series), the new Meemo Comma album is a soundtrack to an imaginary anime that, like its real counterparts (e.g. Full Metal Alchemist), takes the beautiful parts of Kabbalah and sets them to science fiction stories.
When asked about the themes that inform her new album, Lara Rix-Martin says Judaism is filled with many tales and teachings that prevail in science fiction to this day - whether consciously or not. Sci-Fi is the genre best equipped to explore the immensity and challenges of human experience. Something that Judaism has also been attempting for over three thousand years.
I watched Ghost in the Shell when I was 14 and it was so striking, visually and sonically. The soundtrack has acted as a backdrop to explore my Jewish identity, and my cosplay as the leader of a Jewish space marine chapter in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. I have been reading the Talmud since last year, discovering a deeper love for Jewish stories and teachings. There are some beautiful, hopeful ideas in Kabbalah too, which were a central inspiration to this album such as the idea that the first human was non-gendered and just this form made up from the qualities of HaShem (God) who performed 'Tzimtzum', contracted their form using their Ein Sof (eternal light) to create 'Adam Kadmon' whose form split into all human souls.
Lara playfully subheads her album: “In the year 40,000 humanity is ever closer to becoming a singular consciousness. A team of humans are forming an android, Adam Kadmon (CODENAME: UNIT KADMON). First, humans have to gain higher consciousness guided by the Sefirot.“ While you don't have to know about these influences to enjoy the music, it stands true that the intention is an irreverent love letter to the way grand myths are birthed into the future through new forms, retaining their beauty and elegance.