Nuts in the Kitchen (19 page)
Makes 12 servings
This recipe comes from a woman I met whose first name is Malika, a lovely blue-eyed blond from the Kabil region of Algeria. Fragrant with fruit and nuts, and the ubiquitous orange flower water of North African pastries, it is always a welcome dessert. I made it one night for a dinner that I had catered by an Algerian friend, Cherifa Kalabi, and she begged for the recipe. Cherifa is from Algiers and had never tasted this Kabili confection!
1 recipe Sweet Pie Pastry (Chapter The Basics)
3 tablespoons (45 g) unsalted butter
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons (90 ml) un ltered honey
2
/
3
cup (100 g) raw almonds, skinned, lightly toasted, and coarsely chopped
2
/
3
cup (100 g) hazelnuts, lightly toasted, skinned, and coarsely chopped
½ cup dates (100 g), pitted and thinly sliced lengthwise
Scant ½ teaspoon fleur de sel
2 tablespoons orange flower water
Note:
These squares truly are better when made several hours in advance and left to ripen. They will also keep for several days in an airtight container. If you cannot find orange flower water locally, I highly recommend you order some from the Spice House, thespicehouse.com.
1.
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
2.
Roll out the pastry to a thickness of about ¼ inch (.6 cm) to make a rectangle about 7 × 13 inches (18 × 33 cm). Transfer the pastry to a jelly-roll pan by rolling it tightly around the rolling pin, then unrolling it onto the pan. Bake it in the center of the oven until the pastry is golden at the edges and nearly baked through, about 13 minutes. Remove from the oven and reserve.
3.
Reduce the oven temperature to 375°F (190°C).
4.
In a large, heavy saucepan, over medium heat, heat the butter with the honey. Add the chopped nuts and the dates and cook, stirring, just until the nuts are coated with the honey. Remove from the heat, add the fleur de
sel and orange flower water, and stir until mixed. Then spread the nuts atop the prebaked pastry, going as close to the edge as you can. Drizzle the nuts with any honey and butter left in the pan.
5.
Place the pan in the center of the oven and bake until the edges of the pastry and the nuts are deep golden, about 8 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool, then cut the pastry into 12 serving pieces.
Makes 6 servings
This very old-fashioned dessert is made by soaking almonds, then grinding them, then squeezing all the precious milk you can from them. Combine the almond milk with sugar, a touch of almond extract, and some gelatin and you’ve got a unique dessert. I serve this in a stemmed glass with a bit of homemade black or red currant jelly in the bottom for a spot of color and a little hit of tart-sweet right at the end. Try this with fresh, seasonal fruit such as thinly sliced strawberries or raspberries alongside. Good, too, are ripe persimmons, cherries, or peaches.
2 teaspoons powdered gelatin or 4 gelatin leaves
Scant 3 cups (about 700 ml) fresh Almond Milk (Chapter The Basics)
¾ cup (150 g) sugar
½ teaspoon almond extract
2 tablespoons red or black currant jelly
Fresh mint or basil leaves for garnish (optional)
Note:
Often the dessert version of blancmange has cream whipped into the almond gelatin. This version does not, and the flavor attests to its purity, which is what I love about it. If you feel the lack of cream, go ahead and use some as a garnish.
This recipe calls for homemade almond milk, but you can also buy it at food co-ops or health food stores.
1.
If using gelatin leaves, place them in a small bowl and cover with cold water.
2.
Place the almond milk and sugar in a medium saucepan over very low heat and stir until the milk is just hot. Do not boil the almond milk. Continue stirring until the sugar is dissolved, then remove from the heat. If using powdered gelatin, slowly sprinkle the powder into the sweetened almond milk as you whisk. If using gelatin leaves, squeeze the water from a leaf and whisk it slowly into the almond milk. Repeat with all the leaves of gelatin. Remove the mixture from the heat, stir in the almond extract, and let the mixture cool to room temperature.
3.
Evenly divide the jelly among six wineglasses. Pour the almond mixture atop the jelly and refrigerate until the mixture gels, 4 to 6 hours. You can also prepare this dessert the night before you plan to serve it.
4.
To serve, either top the blancmange with fruit, if using small berries, or serve the fruit alongside. If serving the fruit alongside, garnish each dessert with a mint or basil leaf.
Coconut Sticky Rice with Peanuts
Makes 6 to 8 servings
In Thailand sticky rice is the equivalent of bread at Western meals. It’s always on the table, from soup to dessert. This is a classic sticky rice dessert, with its topping of sweet and salty roasted peanuts, and such a treat that I find each time I serve it, eyes light up as spoons dip into it for that first sensuous, coconut-rich bite.
There are a few rules for making the Thai version of coconut sticky rice. It must always be pure white, so white sugar rather than palm sugar is used as a sweetener. Pandanus leaf, a vanilla-scented herb that is ubiquitous in Thai cooking, is the preferred flavoring; it can be found at Asian grocery stores.
The recipe calls for a garnish of bananas poached lightly in the coconut milk mixture, which is one of many possibilities. During mango season, try serving a mound of freshly sliced fruit, dripping with sweet juices, alongside the sticky rice, with a river of coconut milk poured over all. Sweet and salty roasted peanuts are one garnish; another is fried shallots (yes, for dessert); and another is coconut custard—your imagination is the only real limit.
2 cups (400 g) sticky rice
4½ cups (1.1 l) coconut milk
½ cup (100 g) granulated sugar, or to taste
½ teaspoon ne sea salt
1 pandanus leaf, cut into 2-inch (5-cm) lengths, or a 1-inch (2.5-cm) piece vanilla bean
FOR THE PEANUTS:
½ cup (80 g) peanuts, lightly toasted
1 tablespoon palm sugar
½ teaspoon fleur de sel
FOR THE BANANAS:
2 bananas, cut into ¼-inch thick (.6 cm) diagonal slices
Note:
The best coconut milk is fresh from a coconut. An excellent substitute, however, is UHT coconut milk, which comes in a rectangular carton. Barring that, try canned organic coconut milk. Coconut sticky rice is luscious for breakfast.
1.
Place the sticky rice in a sieve and wash it under cool running water until the water runs nearly clear. Place the rice in a bowl, cover it with water, and let soak overnight or for at least 8 hours.
2.
Bring 3 cups (750 ml) water to a boil in the bottom half of a steamer. Place the rice in a conical colander lined with cheesecloth and place over the steaming water.
Cover and steam until the rice is tender but not so soft it sticks together, 20 to 25 minutes. (If you don’t have a conical bamboo steamer—readily available at most Asian groceries—use a flat-bottomed steamer or improvise with a colander.)
3.
While the rice is cooking, place the coconut milk, granulated sugar, salt, and pandanus leaf or vanilla bean in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Heat just to simmer, stirring, until the sugar is dissolved. Be very careful not to boil the coconut cream. Remove from the heat and keep warm. Also remove the pandanus leaf or vanilla bean.
4.
When the rice is steamed, place it in a bowl the right size for it to fill the bowl three-quarters full. Carefully spoon enough coconut cream mixture over it to cover the rice by 1 inch (2.5 cm). Cover and let sit until the rice has absorbed all of the coconut cream, about 25 minutes. Reserve the remaining coconut cream mixture.
5.
While the rice is absorbing the coconut cream, prepare the peanuts. Place the peanuts and the palm sugar in a mortar and crush them together, using the pestle, until the peanuts are quite finely ground and thoroughly combined with the sugar. (You may do this in a food processor, making sure not to process the nuts and sugar into peanut butter.) Stir in the fleur de sel and transfer the mixture to a serving bowl.
6.
Return the remaining coconut cream to the pan over low heat. Add the sliced bananas and heat the bananas until they are hot through, about 8 minutes. Do not boil the coconut cream.
7.
To serve, fold the coconut sticky rice three or four times to thoroughly mix the coconut cream into it. Using a large spoon, spoon out the rice into shallow soup bowls. Top with equal amounts of the coconut banana mixture, then sprinkle with a generous amount of the peanuts and serve any remaining peanuts alongside as a garnish.
Ode to the Thai Countryside
As I rode around the village of Baan Mai, near the boisterous city of Chiang Mai, Thailand, with my friend Sunny Bovornat, a tour guide when he isn’t an information scientist at Chiang Mai University, I felt as if I were in an eighteenth-century painting. Of course, I had to mentally airbrush out the motorbikes attached to small tractors and the vivid gold temple built at the edge of the village on land where an ancient temple had once stood. I also had to ignore that I was in a car, but all of that was easy with the backdrop of rice paddies, blue-coated, bamboo-hatted workers, their backs bent over to pull weeds, water buffalo meandering about, and the mist-wreathed hills in the distance.
Sunny was showing me his village and its environs to help me understand Thai cuisine. His mother cooked for the king of Thailand a generation ago, and he was conscripted into the kitchen early as he helped her chop and whisk. That early start fired him with passion, and he has become an expert in northern Thai cuisine. He cooks it, teaches it, and writes about it when he isn’t eating it.
I had come to Thailand specifically to see the role that nuts played in its cuisine. Like most who enjoy Thai food, I was aware of the occasional cashew, but it wasn’t until I’d eaten at a rousing restaurant in, of all places, Portland, Oregon, that I realized there was more to nuts in Thai food.
At Pok Pok, owner Andrew Ricker, who was probably Thai in another life but couldn’t look more northern European with his bristle of red hair and generous sprinkling of freckles, has dedicated himself to re-creating Thai street food. Ricker, who spent years backpacking throughout Asia before settling on Chiang Mai as one of his favorite spots, as
serts that Thai street food is the gastronomic pinnacle of the country’s cuisine. After spending a week in and around Chiang Mai with him and Sunny eating everything we came across from dawn to well beyond dusk, I have to agree. And the nuts—oh, the nuts! If it wasn’t peanuts—and it usually was—then it was cashews, or an odd and buttery little specimen called
bua kela,
which were roasted in tiny little ovens on the street.
The Thai peanut, which is either a Valencia or a Virginia variety, is not an important commercial crop in Thailand, yet most rural families have a plot they grow for their own consumption. History shows peanut production in Thailand as long ago as 400 years, though commercial production began in earnest 150 years ago. While you won’t find peanut butter on a Thai menu or in a Thai grocery, you will find that the humble legume—for it isn’t a nut at all—is boiled in the shell and eaten as a snack, ground and mixed with salt and sugar and then sprinkled on desserts, tucked into pork dumplings, sautéed with poultry and vegetables, folded into custards and sticky rice, fried and seasoned with fresh herbs, pounded to a paste and blended with peppers and herbs to make a savory, piquant sauce. Peanuts are important enough in Thai cuisine that the 135,000 tons produced there annually don’t meet the demand. The country has to import almost double that amount each year.
While in Chiang Mai I lost count of how many times we would pass a cart on a side street or a main thoroughfare offering some delicacy, and Sunny would jam on the brakes and fly out of the car, leaving it running, to return with a handful of plastic bags, each containing something delicious. What emerged from those bags, each disarmingly twisted closed so that not even one drop of liquid escaped, were delicacies the like of which I’d never tasted—roasted coconut milk, blends of herbs and rice, drippy coconut confections, salty-sweet meat mixtures, chunks of roasted coconut, miniature fish stews. When I exclaimed over a dish—which I believe I always did—Sunny promised to teach it to me.
He had the perfect kitchen in mind for the job. We decided to take a break from cacophonous Chiang Mai and after a meandering trip out of the city and into the countryside, which included a stop for a hot and garlicky bowl of beef noodles at a house-cum-café Sunny knew about, we arrived at a guest house and carried groceries into its rudimentary, open-air kitchen.
It was a simple room with nothing more than a bit of counter space, a jumble of bowls and pans, two large wok burners, a sink, and a few cleavers and utensils. I, who work in the most up-to-date professional home kitchen, was enchanted.
Sunny’s first move was to pull out a large stone mortar and set it on the corner of a none-too-sturdy countertop. (“You always set a mortar and pestle over the leg of a counter,” Andy pointed out. “That way the leg supports the pounding and the counter won’t fall down.”) He poured roasted peanuts into the mortar and showed me how to hold the pestle just so, firmly at one end so I could use its weight and my own force to pound ingredients to a paste. He waved me to get going, and I did, pounding over and over in what I learned is a time-honored gesture in Thailand and the beginning of just about every northern Thai dish.
As I pounded, the three of us talked when we could over the “pok pok” of the mortar and pestle, the spitting and frying in the wok, the sounds of monkeys screeching in the nearby forest. It was a warm day, but cool air wafted in the windows as the scent of browning garlic combined with the sweetness of coconut milk.
We needed to skin peanuts for one of our dishes, and Andy took me outside to show me the best method. He poured a handful high into the air over a bowl he held in one hand, blowing on the peanuts as they fell to make the skins fly away. I must have looked incredulous at this primitive method, for Andy stopped and looked at me with a quizzical “What? You think this is stupid? Let me tell you, there’s no better way.”
Laughing but plenty humbled, I joined him, dropping and blowing as Sunny stayed inside, preparing his special curry paste. We returned to the kitchen to fry, fold, and stir our way to an array of dishes that not only dazzled with their colors and aromas but demonstrated the importance of nuts to Thai cuisine. Together we made peanut sauce, bamboo-steamed sticky rice and whole fish, cashew chicken, lemony-tart green papaya salad, and fried shallot-rich pomelo salad.
Some hours later, my arm well exercised, my palate well singed with the intensity of flavors from the dishes we’d created, the three of us sat, sated, at an open-air table, the only light against the pitch black of the jungle outside a candle amid our now-empty plates and the dying light from the fire Sunny had built to steam the fish in a huge bamboo stalk.
Sunny had carefully crafted our menu so that I would learn an array of techniques and taste a wide palette of flavors. Andy had been both cooking partner and teacher, giving me a wealth of tricks and tips he’s learned over the years in his quest to perfect the street food of his beloved Chiang Mai. I’d cooked and written furiously, tasted carefully, enjoyed immensely. Now, with the night mists falling amidst the squeaks and squawks of jungle creatures, our food-oriented conversation was falling to hushed comments as
we sipped a Quercy I’d brought from France. It was a surprisingly perfect accompaniment to a cuisine that is often accompanied by locally produced rice rum, Coca-Cola, or beer.
In not too many hours the morning mists would rise and we would return to the kitchen. On the breakfast menu? A sweet coconut and peanut sticky rice dish. I couldn’t imagine anything better with which to greet the day.
