From Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Beef With Cumin

Cumin is one of my favorite spices; however, it is not a flavor one overwhelmingly associates with Chinese food. Rather, it is better known as an ingredient in Indian curries, Mexican braises and Mediterranean stews, so I was intrigued to see this recipe when I first got my hands on my copy of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

Not surprisingly, beef with cumin is a specialty of the Muslim minority in China, and it is likely that cumin was brought to China along the silk road by spice traders from the Middle East and India.

The ingredient list is short and simple for this dish, and although Dunlop notes that one could use prime cuts of steak such as tenderloin to make it, she uses lesser cuts such as round and chuck, because cutting them thinly, on the bias against the grain, makes them nearly as tender as a more naturally tender cut of beef. I used a piece of top round to great effect here, in large part because that is what I had in my freezer. Left partially frozen and cut nearly paper thin with a very sharp knife, top round is just as wonderfully tender as a porterhouse steak, but with a deep beefy flavor typical of the tougher, more well-exercised muscles.At this point, I use top round for nearly all of my beef stir fries.

I do have to admit that I changed the cooking method. Dunlop uses the “velveting” method of cooking here; it is a method much employed by restaurants to cook meats to a slippery-tender result, but which I find messy, wasteful and extremely time consuming when done in the home. In short, it is a technique wherein the meat is marinated in a mixture that includes corn or potato starch and sometimes egg white. Then, it is “oil-blanched” in a vat of deep-frying oil for a very short time until it is partially cooked. Then, the oil is discarded or strained and saved, and the meat is stir fried until it is finished cooking, along with all of the other ingredients of the dish.

For a family dinner, I see no overwhelming reason to bother with the velveting technique. It results in the use of too much oil, time and energy for the result, which while it is good–is not -that- good! Not good enough to offset all of the work, mess, waste and nutritional impact.

So, instead, I followed my own usual method for stir frying meat, and found that the results were more than satisfactory; they were superb. In transcribing the recipe, I used my own techniques instead of copying out Dunlop’s.

The meat was tender and flavorful, and fragrant with the musky scent of cumin, which was beautifully enhanced by the umami of the soy sauces. Garlic, scallion and sesame oil rounded out the flavors while the bright taste of fresh red chiles really sent the dish over the top.

The stir fry went together quickly and easily and went beautifully well with a dish of gai lan and sweet red bell peppers simply stir fried and flavored with ginger and fermented black beans.

This is another dish destined to be seen on our table frequently.

Beef With Cumin

Ingredients:

1 pound trimmed beef top round steak, cut against the grain on the bias about 1/8-1/4″ thick
1 1/2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
1 teaspoon light soy sauce
1 1/2 teaspoon dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon cornstarch
3 tablespoons peanut oil
2 teaspoons fresh ginger, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh garlic
2 fresh red chiles, (seeded if you like) minced
2-4 teaspoons dried chile flakes
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1-3 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine as needed
2 scallions, green parts only, finely sliced on the bias
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Method:

Toss the beef in the wine, soy sauces and cornstarch until it is well coated with the mixture. Allow to marinate at room temperature for at least twenty minutes.

Heat wok on high heat until a thin thread of smoke rises from it. Add peanut oil and heat for another thirty seconds or so. Add beef, reserving any remaining liquid marinade in the bowl. Spread beef out into a single layer over the bottom of the wok and allow to sit undisturbed for at least a minute so it can sear. When you smell it browning and the top edges begin to turn greyish brown, then begin stir frying vigorously.

While stirring, sprinkle meat with ginger, garlic, chiles, chile flakes, and cumin. Continue stir frying just until all of the red color is gone from the meat, adding a bit of Shao Hsing wine as needed to deglaze any browned bits from the bottom or sides of the wok. Add any liquid marinade and stir fry just until the liquid thickens and clings to the meat.

Sprinkle with scallion tops, and drizzle with sesame oil. Remove from heat, give a few more stirs and then serve on a heated platter with plain steamed rice and a vegetable dish.

Uber-Umami, Part II: Beef And Gai Lan with Ground Bean Sauce

So last week, when I posted my recipe for Pork, Tofu and Gai Lan with Ground Bean Sauce, Rose, who is now living in Taipei, (and thus should not have any trouble finding the uber-umami ingredient!) asked if she could successfully substitute chicken or beef in it, as she does not eat pork. With the chicken, I answered it would be a simple matter of using about 1/3 less bean sauce and adding a splash more of the wine, but the beef was another matter.

Beef has a much different flavor than pork, and I have found that I am more successful with exchanging pork and chicken in recipes than pork and beef. There is an inherent sweetness and delicacy of flavor to pork that beef simply does not have, and In my experience, to exchange one for another in a Chinese recipe without changing the seasonings accordingly, is asking for a dish that tastes okay, but not great.

And why make something that just tastes okay? Why not excellence?

So, I thought about it, and since I had another bundle of that absolutely fresh and delectable gai lan that needed cooked up right away, I decided to pull out a piece of top round from the freezer and experiment.

Generally when I make a stir fry of beef and gai lan, I stick very closely to the classical Cantonese formulation, which pairs the two ingredients with umami-laden oyster sauce. Oyster sauce, with its oceanic fragrance, has the distinction of bringing out the deeper flavors of beef and softening them, enhancing the meat with a rich sweetness. I often also use fermented black beans, which with their sharp, musky tang, really bring out the darker flavors of beef, while also counteracting the slight bitterness that resides within the gai lan. The combination is so good that I often find myself reaching for the oyster sauce and fermented beans on a cold winter weeknight when I have beef and gai lan and I need a fast meal that requires little thought.

But, variety is the spice of life, is it not?

So, what is the harm of making up a different recipe for beef and gai lan?

It turns out there is no harm in it at all, it just requires that one reflect on the nature of beef and change the ingredients accordingly.

I changed the aromatics completely. For starters, I switched out the scallions with a thinly sliced onion–about 1/2 cup of very thin slices. These I cooked until they were golden and slightly caramelized, which laid a foundation of sweetness into the dish that beef inherently lacks. I lowered the amount of garlic and raised the amount of ginger; for whatever reason, I prefer the sweetness of ginger with pork and the tingling fire of ginger with beef. I then added to the aromatics two frozen small sliced red Chinese chiles. These were not too hot, but the zing that they brought to the dish really enhanced the strong flavors of the beef, greens and sauce. One could leave them out, but I thought they were a nice addition.

I revamped the marinade, as well. I switched to dark soy sauce, which is great with beef, and raised the amount of ground bean sauce to two heaping teaspoons. This I added to the marinade along with a full teaspoon and a half of chile garlic paste. I lowered the amount of sugar, and kept the Shao Hsing amount the same. Since I used more meat, I added a bit more cornstarch to bind the marinade.

Finally, I also added a small red sweet bell pepper late in the stir fry process so that the slices stayed crisp and brilliant colored. The reason for this was simple–I wanted to add another note of sweetness that was not sugar to the dish, and the contrast between the emerald greens and the scarlet pepper was stunning. One must always remember that the visual appeal of Chinese food is just as important as the flavor, aroma and texture.

How did it turn out?

I asked Zak and Morganna which version they liked better–the traditional one or the new one.

They could not make up their minds.

The ground bean sauce enhanced the natural flavor of the beef to the extent that the sauce, which clung to the meat, greens and peppers tightly, tasted as if it was nothing more than spicy meat juices. It was a very beefy, meaty, savory experience, and I couldn’t decide myself which recipe was superior.

So, Rose–here it is, just for you–my detailed and illustrated answer to your question.

If you get a chance to make it, let me know what you think!

Rose’s Beef And Gai Lan with Ground Bean Sauce

Ingredients:

1 pound top round, trimmed of most fat and cut into thin 1″X1/4″X1/8″ slices
1 teaspoon dark soy sauce (I used Pearl River Bridge Brand)
1 1/2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
2 heaping teaspoons ground bean sauce
1 teaspoon chile garlic paste
1/4 teaspoon raw or brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons peanut oil
1 small onion, peeled and sliced thinly (about 1/2-3/4 cup slices)
1 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
2 fresh or frozen red Chinese chiles, sliced thinly on the bias
2″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and sliced thinly
1/2 tablespoon dark soy sauce
2 tablespoons shao hsing wine
1 pound gai lan (Chinese broccoli), thick stems cut on the bias into bite sized pieces, and separated from the leaves
3 tablespoons chicken broth
leaves of the gai lan, cut into rough pieces
1 small red sweet bell pepper, trimmed, cored and cut into 1/4″ thick slices
scant 1/8 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Method:

Toss beef with the next six ingredients and allow to marinade for at least twenty minutes.

Heat wok on the highest heat setting your stove can manage until a thin thread of smoke wafts upward. Add the peanut oil, and allow to heat up for another thirty seconds. Add the onions and stir and fry until they turn golden–about two minutes. Add the garlic, chiles, and ginger, and stir and fry another thirty seconds or so.

Add the meat, spread it out into one layer and leave it undisturbed on the bottom of the wok to brown for at least one minute. When you can smell and see browning occur, begin stir frying, and cook until half the meat is brown and half is still red. Add the second measure of soy sauce and wine. Keep stir frying until only 1/3 of the beef is red.

Add gai lan stems and stir fry one more minute. Add the chicken broth and the gai lan leaves, and scoop up the meat from the bottom of the wok and lay it atop the leaves, and stir and fry until the leaves brighten in color and just begin to wilt. Add the bell pepper and continue stir frying until the leaves have wilted and become velvety, the meat is brown and the bell pepper is barely cooked.

Remove wok from heat and drizzle with the sesame oil.

Uber-Umami: Chinese Ground Bean Sauce

It is thick, salty and looks somewhat like peanut butter.

Everything you cook with it tastes better, but only if you don’t overdo it.

It is made from ground up fermented soybeans, rather like miso, but has a deeper, less salty flavor.

It is Chinese ground bean sauce, and is a “secret ingredient” in many very flavorful stir-fries, because it packs an oomfy wallup of umami flavor in every spoonful.

Remember umami–that “fifth taste,” for which receptors on our tongues have recently been discovered and confirmed? It is that savory, meaty taste that comes about from substances such as glutamate, other amino acids, and nucleotides. These substances, which are found naturally in meats, mushrooms, seaweed, fermented soybean products, fermented fish and some vegetables, enhance the natural flavors of foods, and as such have been utilized for centuries in the kitchens of Asia, long before the synthesis of monosodium glutamate and its overuse in the processed food industry.

Chinese ground bean sauce is produced similarly to Japanese miso, in that it is made from bacterially fermented soy beans, but to my tongue, it has a very different flavor profile. Most miso that I have tasted has a purer, less complex flavor, that has a very strong salty component, whereas the Chinese ground bean sauce has a deeper, more complex flavor profile, with a much more “meaty” taste. I have used miso to substitute it earlier in my experimentations with Chinese cooking, and have never been pleased with the results–the dishes just never tasted right to me, and I didn’t really understand why.

The reason is that one cannot simply exchange out a Chinese ingredient for a Japanese one and expect the dish to come out tasting authentically Chinese. It is just not going to happen. Just as I have learned to taste the difference between Japanese soy sauce and Chinese, so I can taste the difference between miso and Chinese fermented bean pastes.

These ingredients are analogues of each other; they perform similar functions in recipes in their respective cultures, but they do not taste the same, nor do they give the same results.

I have found a particularly good combination of ingredients to make a sauce for pork, gai lan and spiced dry tofu: marinate the meat in a bit of raw sugar, light soy sauce, shao hsing rice wine and cornstarch. Then, when cooking the aromatics, add a scant half teaspoon of chile garlic paste, and when you toss in the meat and tofu, add about a teaspoon and a half of the ground bean sauce. Do not add too much, or the dish will become overpoweringly salty. Sprinkle with a quarter teaspoon of the sugar. Add about a tablespoon of the wine and about another teaspoon of soy sauce to the wok after the meat browns on the bottom, and then when you add the gai lan to the wok, toss in a few tablespoons of chicken broth.

At the end, drizzle with a scant eighth teaspoon of toasted sesame oil.

The results are fantastic and subtle. The sauce is scant and glossy and clings to the meat, tofu and greens. The pork is incomparable in flavor–it is both sweet and savory, and salted perfectly. Something about the combination of ingredients makes it taste, if possible, “more porky,” as if the little slices are distillations of essential “porkness.”

If one does not eat pork, one can keep the tofu and substitute chicken. With chicken, I would use slightly less of the ground bean sauce, and a dash more of the wine. If one does not eat meat, keep the tofu and use instead of the meat either soaked dried shiitake mushrooms or fresh ones, marinated as for the pork. If you don’t want to add the chile garlic sauce because you want the flavor to be even more fundamental and simple, leave it out, but I think that the tiny bit I add gives the dish an amazing zing that is wonderful and should not be missed.

Other uses for Chinese ground bean sauce include adding a bit of it to ramen noodles to give them a lift, adding it to other sauces for stir fried or boiled noodle dishes, and using it in marinades for meat and fowl that is to be braised long and slow. The stuff lasts forever sealed up in its jar in the fridge and is inexpensive and well worth the trouble of seeking and and purchasing. I usually buy Koon Chun brand, with the yellow, blue and white label.

Pork, Tofu and Gai Lan with Ground Bean Sauce

Ingredients:

1/2 pound boneless pork loin, trimmed of most fat and cut into thin 1″X1/4″X1/8″ slices
1 teaspoon light soy sauce (I used Pearl River Bridge Brand)
1 1/2 tablespoons Shao Hsing wine
1/2 teaspoon raw or brown sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
3 tablespoons peanut oil
3 garlic cloves, sliced thinly
6 scallions, white and green parts only, sliced thinly on the bias
1 1/2″ cube fresh ginger, peeled and sliced thinly
1/4 teaspoon chile garlic paste
8 ounces spiced dry tofu, cut on the bias into slices similar to the pork slices
1 1/4-1 1/2 teaspoons ground bean sauce
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
2 tablespoons shao hsing wine
1 pound gai lan (Chinese broccoli), thick stems cut on the bias into bite sized pieces, and separated from the leaves
3 tablespoons chicken broth
leaves of the gai lan, cut into rough pieces
scant 1/8 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Method:

Toss the pork with the next four ingredients and allow to marinate for ten to twenty minutes.

Heat wok on very high heat until it is smoking. Add peanut oil and allow to heat for another thirty seconds. Add garlic, scallion and ginger in a small pile, then put chile garlic paste on top. Allow to cook ten seconds, then stir fry until quite fragrant–about forty-five seconds to a minute.

Add meat in one layer, then put the tofu on top. Put the bean sauce on top of the tofu, and leave the meat to brown on the bottom undisturbed–about a minute or so. When you can see it is browned and smell it, start stir frying. When the pork is showing only 1/3 pink, add the soy sauce and wine and keep stir frying.

Add gai lan stems, and stir fry rapidly until very little pink is seen on the pork.

Add the gai lan leaves, and pour over it the chicken broth. Bring the meat, tofu and stems to the top of the leaves by stir frying, and stir and fry until the leaves wilt and become velvety.

Remove from heat and drizzle with sesame oil. Serve with steamed rice while still extremely hot.

Chinese Yard Long Beans

The bounty that comes from my CSA box is continually astounding to me.

This past Saturday, we were treated to a bundle of one of my favorite Asian vegetables, Vigna sesquipedalis, also known as Chinese yard-long beans. (They are also known as asparagus beans, but I have no idea why–they do not taste a thing like asparagus to me.) These beans are the same thing as a dried pea that is known in the US as black-eyed-peas or crowder peas. I never much cared for black eyed peas when I was growing up–they had an odd sweet smell and flavor that I never grew to like.

What is particularly odd about that is the immature green pods, which are served as yard long beans, do not have a sweet flavor at all. In fact, they have a distinctive starchy flavor, and an interesting tender-crisp texture–almost like regular green beans that have been blanched.They are often likened to green beans, but I don’t think that they are much alike at all–green beans are much sweeter and have a “greener” more grassy flavor. Yard long beans seem to have a starchy, proteinous flavor more like a dried bean, but in a fresh bean form.

They are particularly full of vitamins and nutritients: they are an excellent source of vitamins A and C, folate, protein, complex carbohydrates and a small amount of iron. They are low in calories, and, because they lack the strings that green beans have, they are simpler to prepare: simply snip or cut off the ends, and then cut into 2″ lengths to prepare them to stir fry.

Morganna’s first day of school was today, so I told her I would make her whatever she liked for supper, as a celebration. She begged me to make a stir-fry, something that I haven’t done as much of recently, because as I slow down and my energy wanes, my ability to efficiently do so much kitchen prep is lowered. But, for my girl, of course, I will make a stir fry.

We had the long beans, so I knew I had to use those, and we had pressed tofu and tender boneless pork loin chops. I had fresh green chiles and a sweet bell pepper that I thought would add a note of sugar to the dish, as well as providing a contrasting color to the deep velvety green of the beans. For seasoning, Morganna asked for fermented black beans, so I added sweet onions, garlic and ginger, and I limited the condiments to light soy sauce, Shao hsing wine and sesame oil. The last flavor note I added were three rehydrated black mushrooms, whose umami fragrance really brought a strong element of the savory to the dish.

Stir Fried Yard-Long Beans with Pork and Pressed Tofu

Ingredients:

3/4 pound lean pork loin chop, trimmed of fat and cut into 1/4″ wide by 1″ long by 1/4″ thick slices
1 tablespoon Shao Hsing wine
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
2 tablespoons cornstarch
3-4 tablespoons peanut oil
1 small yellow onion, peeled and sliced thinly
1 tablespoon fermented black beans, lightly crushed
1 green jalapeno, cut into thin slivers
1/2″ chunk fresh ginger, peeled, and shredded into very thin slivers
3 large cloves garlic, cut into thin shreds
3 black mushrooms, rehydrated, stemmed and cut into 1/8″ thick slices
1/2 pound pressed tofu cut into similar sized slices as pork
1 tablespoon Shao hsing wine
1 tablespoon light soy sauce
3/4 pound Chinese yard-long beans, ends trimmed and cut on the bias into 2 1/2″ lengths
1/2 small red sweet bell pepper, cut into very thin, 2″ long slices
1/4 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

Method:

Mix meat and first amounts of wine and soy sauce together and toss with cornstarch until liquids thicken and are clinging to the meat. Set aside to marinate for twenty minutes, preferably while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Heat wok until it is smoking. Add peanut oil, and allow to heat for another thirty seconds, or until oil ripples and shimmers.

Add onion, black beans, jalapeno and ginger and stir fry for about a minute, or until very fragrant. Add garlic and mushrooms, and stir fry for another minute. Add meat, reserving any marinade that is not clinging to the meat. Spread meat into a single layer onto the bottom of the wok and allow to sit undisturbed to brown for about a minute or so. Add tofu to wok. Stir fry until most of the pink is gone from the meat.

Deglaze wok where marinade has clung to the sides and bottom and browned with wine and tofu, stir rapidly to scrape up marinade bits. Add beans, and stir fry for another minute to minute and a half, or until meat is done.

Add bell pepper, stir fry thirty seconds, then remove from heat and drizzle in sesame oil, stirring well to combine.

Turn out into a heated platter and serve with steamed jasmine rice.

The Queen of Thai Curries: Green Curry

And now we come to it: my favorite Thai curry of all time.

Green curry.

I tend to only make green curry in the summer, when the herbs and seasonings that go into it are fresh and readily available, because I am snobby about the curry paste. There is something about green curry paste that to my palate does not survive storage. Canned pastes, and even the ones packaged in resealable plastic tubs like Mae Ploy, which are generally quite good, lack the brilliant color and sparkling flavor that the freshly made paste brims with. It just plain doesn’t taste as good somehow.

I think it is because the flavor and fragrance of Green Curry relies so much upon fresh herbs and chiles that much of that goodness is lost when the paste is preserved in a can or plastic container.

The ingredients to the paste, once found and obtained, are simple to combine into a pungent, fragrant paste, particularly if one has a Sumeet grinder. If one does not have access to such a tool, a food processor combined with a mortar and pestle will make, if not quick work of the paste making, at least, easier work than it would be by doing it the traditional way, which is with a mortar and pestle alone. I used to use either a mortar and pestle alone or in combination with the food processor in order to make green curry paste in my pre-Sumeet days; I only once tried to make it with just the food processor. With only the food processor, the paste was too chunky and lumpy; it refused to smooth out into anything resembling a true paste. But, I found that if I used a food processor to puree the vegetal ingredients into bits, I could then use the mortar and pestle to finish the job and make the curry paste just as velvety smooth as I wanted it to be.

One other note about the curry paste.

You may be tempted to leave out the shrimp paste.

Unless you are allergic to shrimp, or are keeping kosher and do not eat shellfish, please do not leave out the shrimp paste.

I know it smells kind of strong, and doesn’t look good, but it really does give a great boost of umami flavor to the Thai curries. Without it, the curry paste tastes a bit flat, and seems to be missing something. That is because it is.

If you must substitute, you can use red miso–but I urge you that unless you must avoid shrimp for health or religious reasons, that you give the authentic ingredient a try.

What is best cooked in a green curry?

Well, pork is traditional, but as I am not easily eating red meats these days, I opted for chicken.

In truth, my favorite animal-based proteins cooked in green curry are crab and salmon; I like to make a thick curry sauce from the paste and coconut cream and slather it over salmon steaks or filets and then broil them to perfection, and then use the rest of the paste to make a vegetable based curry and serve the salmon on a bed of steamed jasmine rice with a circlet of the curried vegetables around it. THAT is my number one favorite version of that dish, but I don’t think I will be having it for a while–not until Kat is born and weaned from breastmilk, anyway. (I am concerned at the amount of methylmercury that is being found in large predatory fish like salmon and tuna–it is a contaminant that can cause serious nerve and brain damage in fetuses and developing children.)

Another favorite is green curry crab, but lacking crabmeat, that is hard to do.

So, I did a green curry chicken with mixed green vegetables.

You can glimpse the vegetables I used in the curry above; I don’t know why I like to match the colors of the veggies to the curry so much with this dish, but I do. Or, maybe it is because some of my favorite green veggies are in season when the Thai basil is up and happy–in the summer. Anyway, eggplant–green Asian or Thai eggplant if I can get it–is a necessity. The velvety richness of eggplant marries perfectly with the creamy curry sauce and the sharp herbal flavors and chile heat. Zucchini, especially if it is not overcooked, is also wonderful; its blandness is a perfect carrier for all of the flavors of green curry. Green beans add a verdant crunch, especially when not allowed to overcook, and sugar snap peas, again, barely cooked, add sweet sugary zing.

The onions that I use in this dish, however, are always purple.

Why?

Because green and purple look lovely together, that is why! I usually use regular large red onions, but at the farmer’s market last weekend I found these glorious royal purple scallions, and had to use them, and they not only were very pretty, they added a good amount of snappy flavor to the finished dish. I just floated them into the sauce near the end of cooking and then garnished with basil leaves and roughly chopped cilantro, stirring them in at the last moment so that they barely wilted by the time the curry was served.

Owing to the heat of this dish, I served it with plenty of steamed jasmine rice. Paired with a Thai tomato-cucumber marinated salad, this was a wonderful dinner, full of fresh, delightful flavors that really let the vegetables stand out, while still being highly seasoned. It is a dish that I only make a couple of times a year, but I always look forward to it, and it is always worth the extra time and trouble it takes to make it and make it well.

Green Curry Paste

Ingredients:

20 white peppercorns, ground finely (Obviously, I substituted grains of paradise here because of my allergy)
1 tbsp. coriander seeds, toasted to bring out flavor, and ground
½ tsp. cardamom seeds, removed from pods and ground
1 tsp. coarse sea salt
4 green jalapeno or serrano chilis, roughly chopped
1 green poblano or pasilla chili (optional, for color), roughly chopped
15-20 green thai bird chilis, chopped
2 tbsp. chopped lemongrass (about the bottom third of one stalk)
1 tbsp. chopped fresh or frozen galangal
1 tsp. grated lime zest
1 tbsp. finely chopped cilantro roots or stems
2 tbsp. finely chopped basil leaves
3 shallots, chopped
8 cloves garlic chopped
2 tsp. young ginger, chopped
2 tsp. shrimp paste

Hand method:

Grind seeds in a spice or coffee grinder. (If you use a coffee grinder, clean out before and after.)
Put ingredients into mortar and pestle in order of their appearance, grinding the first ones thoroughly first. When you get to the sea salt, use it in sprinkles to help grind the tougher herbs, such as lemongrass, galangal, lime zest, cilantro root and basil stems.

If you run out of room in your mortar and pestle, put paste into a bowl and grind in batches.

Food processor/Sumeet method:

Grind spices into a powder with spice grinder or mortar and pestle.

Put everything else into a food processor and process into a rough paste. (A regular food processor will not make a smooth paste. Before I discovered the Sumeet, I used to use the food processor to break everything down to small bits, then, I would turn it into a paste by working it with the mortar and pestle by hand. This was less time consuming than the hand method, but resulted in a similar texture, color and flavor.)

With the Sumeet, you just grind everything together into a smooth paste by putting ingredients into the jar in batches.

This recipe makes about a cup and a half of curry paste. When I am making curry, I use the entire batch to flavor the curry. You don’t have to use so much. If you want to keep it in the fridge, it keeps pretty well for a few days. For longer storage, put into a zioplock bag, push out all the air and freeze. It will keep, with a small loss of fragrance and fresh flavor, for months in this way.

Green Curry Chicken with Asian Eggplants And Green Vegetables

Ingredients:

1 1/2 19 ounce can Mae Ploy brand coconut milk
2-4 tbsp. fresh green curry paste
2 kaffir lime leaves, or the zest of two limes
fish sauce to taste
palm or raw cane sugar to taste (about 1 tbsp.)
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast, trimmed and cut into 1” chunks
1/2 pound Asian eggplants (round or long Thai green ones, or long purple ones….doesn’t matter) cut into slices on the diagonal about ½” thick
2 small zuchinni, cut in half longways, then cut into half-rounds about 1/2″ thick
1/2 pound green beans, trimmed, topped and tailed and snapped into 1″ pieces
1/4-1/2 pound sugar snap peas, topped and tailed
2 large fresh shiitake, stems removed and discarded, caps cut into 1/4″ slices
1small purple onion, cut into squares, or 4 purple scallions, cleaned and sliced on the diagonal into 1/4″ slices
lime juice to taste (about the juice of ½ to ¾ of a lime)
1 cup fresh Thai basil leaves
½ cup cilantro leaves, roughly chopped
½ cup mint leaves, roughly chopped (optional)

Method:

Take about a two tablespoons of cream off top of the coconut milk, and melt in a pan. Add curry paste in whatever amount you think you will want to use–as I said, I use the whole batch because I like my curry to be very full of flavor. You may think that is too intense. To be on the safe side, maybe you should use 2/3 of the batch to start with.

Fry curry paste in coconut cream until well-scented, then add lime zest (Don’t do this, if you are using lime leaves) and fry a few seconds longer. Add the rest of the coconut milk. If you are using lime leaves, add them to the curry at this point. Bring curry to a simmer on medium low heat.

Add fish sauce and sugar to taste and bring to a simmer. Simmer slowly for about fifteen minutes, stirring now and then.

Add eggplants, and cook until tender. When nearly done, add the rest of the vegetables except the onions, and the chicken. Cook until the chicken is nearly done, then add the onions, so that they cook only about two or three minutes, until just barely softened.

Add lime juice to taste, then add fresh herb leaves, remove from heat and let leaves wilt slightly, then serve with plenty of steamed jasmine rice.