Stranger still, it was this veganism, this shunning of everything delicious, that started me down a zealous side road into food and cooking.

I had strong reasons for my conversion—but they weren’t as strong as my disdain for typical vegan fare. I decided: if I were going to feed myself only plants, I would learn to make them taste as close as possible to my favourite foods.

I bought a book, Thai Food by David Thompson. I learned about wet curries and dry curries, about relishes and soups. I learned sticky rice in the North, jasmine in the South. I learned that there is no native Thai word for salad, but we call many dishes by that name anyway. I learned how to make my own coconut cream, how to fry curry paste, how to boil curry paste, how acid affects saltiness—sugar spiciness. I played around, using what I had read to make plant-based versions of traditional Thai dishes. I started an Instagram account and proffered my Frankensteins to a small brigade of vegan followers.

Looking back, even though I am sure most of what I made was insipid to anyone who did not subsist solely on vegetal matter, there was a sense of ingenuity about it all. Not many people, I guess, had looked at a Northern Thai jungle curry of minced guinea fowl and thought to replicate it with some tempeh-shiitake abomination. Still, it seemed to go down well.

But I am both impressionable and excruciatingly protean. And after three years, I threw out the case I had built for veganism and started to eat meat again.

I began by restoring my recipes with things as humdrum as chicken, beef, and pork, but also things for which there could never be a substitute, like fish sauce and shrimp paste and salted eggs and dried prawns and pickled crab—the bounty which had lain untouched for years. The food tasted as if it had been completed. But it occurred to me that I was now cooking a cuisine the same way it had been done for centuries. In ditching veganism, I had lost my distinguishing factor, my ingenuity. All of a sudden, I had little new to offer.

Nonetheless, I trailed my curiosity further and further into Thai cuisine. The truth is, I found the world it existed inside fascinating. But it is not the kind of world that goes very far in ordinary conversation.

So I read, I cooked, and I conversed—so to speak—with a few thousand followers online. To a subset of the Internet who did not know any better, I became—in the teeniest tiniest way—an expert.

Back then, my voice was dreadfully didactic and stiff, stiff as a starched white shirt. Authoritative when it had no business being so.

I say all of that because at one point or another, even though I had amassed quite a bit of knowledge about Thai food, I had some sense to realise most of my know-how was secondary and it wasn’t my prerogative to teach it. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The other week, I watched a clip of two guys with 300,000 Instagram followers criticise the fish and chips from Rick Stein’s restaurant in Cornwall. I recognised them as the same guys who’d copped a bit of heat for negatively reviewing the food of a neighbourhood Nigerian restaurant on their first time trying the cuisine. On one of their posts, the top comment read, “Genuine question: what qualifies you to judge?” I know that this is the Internet we are talking about, so the right response could well be, “Do I need to be qualified?” but it’s an interesting question nonetheless. At what point do you become authoritative?

Not long ago, a clip appeared on my Instagram. It was by a prominent UK-based home-cook-cum-influencer, teaching his audience of a quarter of a million people how to make the pommes purée of 3-Michelin-star chef Joël Robuchon. The top comment came from a chef with an Instagram profile reminiscent of people who don’t have the time to play social media, that is, few photos and fewer followers. She said: “That ain’t Robuchons because it wasn’t passed properly and looks grainy as fuck. I am so sick of fucking amateur food content.” I think that is nasty. But I would be lying if I said I did not understand the sentiment.

Years ago, when I was younger and knew less about the world, and much less about Thai food, a random person (now a close friend) DM’d me with a specific question about an obscure Thai dish. I wasn’t certain of the answer. So I Googled it and wrote back confidently. How shameful.

Between 2022 and 2025, I at least had the good sense to travel to Thailand to see the food for myself. I made four trips where I was fortunate to learn from people who have made entire lifetimes out of the cuisine, people like Hanuman Aspler, Ying from Somrom Space, Chef Aum, and Khun Yoi. I travelled to Libong, Trang, Yala, Pattani, Phatthalung, Songkhla, Mae Sa—places where there are few tourists and the people might giggle and murmur at the sight of you walking the markets, and the food is at times unrecognisable and unfathomable but no less delicious; places I would never have gotten to see had it not been for the friends and people I’d met cooking Thai food in London.

So much was packed into those trips. Even looking at the names of the places above, I feel the words on the page are flimsy against the memories in my mind that are anchored to those formations of letters. For a while after each trip, I couldn’t help but feel I had a grenade of experience ready to be dropped on the Internet and blasted across screens so everyone could see all of the cool, amazing things I saw and did. I wrestled with the idea of writing episodic Substack pieces, or making some damned video which covered the gamut of my experience. But in the end I shared a few desultory photographs and stories. I kept most of my memories hidden from the Internet. At the time I didn’t really know why.

A couple of years ago I read Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates. In the middle there’s a section where Socrates says of his society:

I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better.

He also offers, after a conversation with a politician regarded by many as one of the wisest men in the land:

Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is,— for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.

I find it revealing that in a book I found largely abstruse, these two snippets are ferociously underlined and scribbled with annotations.

Virtually everyone I’ve realised to be deeply knowledgeable is self-effacing. I’ve noticed that someone who knows a great deal is someone who is willing to hold uncertainty in what they say. I once read a 4,000-word “briefest introduction” to tea written by Jonathan Nunn (the founder of Vittles) in which he said:

The more I write about tea the more excited I become at the enormity of what I still have to learn. Which leads me to the first lesson: do not trust anyone who says anything about tea with any certainty.

After my fourth trip to Thailand, I thought back to a specific curry I had written about years ago: Gaeng Tumi. It was one of my Frankensteins. I had posted about it: what it was, how it was distinctly Southern Thai, what ingredients it was typically made with, and so on. Most of it I learned from a book. But in Thailand, over my last two trips, I had discovered the curry properly. I learned it was a dish with a murky past. According to who you spoke to, it had different spellings, different stories of its provenance. Some people called it Gaeng Dumi or Gaeng Tumis or Gaeng Dtomae. Some people said it hailed from Malaysia; others didn’t know where it came from. I had a version in Libong, a version in Phuket and a version in Samui—all of them different. I didn’t know why, nor could anyone tell me. I’m still not even sure if I am talking about a single dish. Now, every dish to me is a Gaeng Tumi.

I remember in high school English, we were taught never to use the first-person singular pronoun in our essays, that is, “I”, as in I believe, or I argue, or I think. We were told doing so would make our argument appear weaker. It would make us seem uncertain.

I imagine this is what it is all about then: there are people who are happy to appear uncertain and unbelievable and foolish and new, and there are those who are not. The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. In the Internet—in Instagram, in TikTok, in YouTube, in Twitter—it appears we’re now at a point where it has never been more lucrative to be the latter. I worry about what might come next.

Earlier in this piece I referred to the comments section of a food review post on Instagram. Those two blokes reviewing fish and chips in Cornwall. Someone, remember, asked, “What qualifies you to judge?” Perhaps the truest answer anyone can give to any such question is: nothing.

He plonked two pickled chillies on my wrap gratis before he looked up with a stern face and said:

“This is London, brother—you can do whatever you want.”

I arrived in London on a 6-degree morning on 26 January, 2018. Back home it was Australia Day. I remember being on London Bridge the day after with my girlfriend, who I’d moved over with. It was cold, and I was excited to be wearing the new winter clothes I had bought for the move. There’s a photo of us on the bridge; the sky is cloudy but bright. I am squinting through a smile.

My first flat was in Brixton. It was the famously hot summer of 2018, the summer England almost won the World Cup. One stifling hot Saturday in July, I watched—in slow motion—plastic pints of lager fly through the air a split second after hundreds of people watched the ripple of a goal net in England’s quarter-final clash against Sweden. They won that game 2-0, and for hours afterwards people sang the jubilant chorus of Football’s coming home on tables, on top of buses, in the street, and on TV screens across the country. I thought back to Sydney, where it is illegal to drink your pint on the footpath.

The carefree air of that summer bled into my first two years as a Londoner. Then COVID came and took all of the people and left only the buildings. Suddenly we were living in a city without any colour.

I was fortunate to live with someone—my girlfriend—through the lockdowns, someone to share the weight of those strange days with. Even so, I remember the particular craving for something we had all lost but hadn’t noticed—the uncomplicated presence of friendship. Eventually, me and my only three friends who lived south of the Thames would skirt the rules and meet weekly on the walkway beneath Tower Bridge. We wore thermals, layers, beanies and gloves as our defence against the bitingly cold January days. And beneath skyscrapers with thousands of rooms but no people, we’d shuffle our feet to stay warm, drink cans of beer we’d bought from the Sainsbury’s around the corner, and we’d talk about lockdown, about our girlfriends, about all the inane and quotidian things that are the fodder of conversations with friends you’ve known for too long.

Then COVID came to an end. So too did my most important relationship. For the first time in many years, I was alone, facing a foreign spring.

I developed an interest in Thai food and cooking. I learnt how to photograph food, and I wrote about dishes on Instagram in those days when people still read posts. At some point I outgrew that container and wanted to cook for people.

In other parts of the world, I suppose it might be difficult for a corporate technology sales rep to run a restaurant service on a whim. But this is London we are talking about. Before long, it turned out that a friend of a friend of a friend had a pub near Arsenal Stadium. It no longer ran a food service, and the owner was happy for us to use the kitchen on any Sunday the Gunners weren’t playing.

I ran my first supper club with a close friend in February of 2023 at the Bedford Tavern in Finsbury Park. We had 18 guests (almost all of them my beautiful, caring friends) and we offered a 7-course regional Thai menu. The kitchen was so small it was hard to fit two people inside. The pub staff poured us Guinness throughout the day, so we drank pints during service. Every dish came out on time, and the guests (read: my friends) said they loved the food; really loved it.

That first pop-up catalysed a period where I straddled the line between my corporate career and a potential future of food and cooking. We did a few more pop-ups at the Bedford Tavern — all of which were successful according to the diners (who gradually came to include faces I had never seen before). I did have a meltdown at one of them, though, because my coconuts were not blending properly.

At some point throughout all of this, I found myself on a research trip in the back alleys of Southern Thailand with a bunch of chefs from a London restaurant, unsure exactly how I got there. Some time after that, I fumbled through and somehow made a success of a collaboration with a Michelin-star chef at his restaurant. I had met him a couple of years ago around a kitchen table at 4 am. And not too long ago, my friend (the one I ran the very first pop-up with) and I took over his Greek restaurant on a Sunday and dished out a 7-course menu of Southern Thai food for about 45 guests, who seemed to find the food as delicious as I do. Looking back now, I’m not sure how it all happened, but I know London played an important part.

As I crept toward my mid-30s, people began to start families. In Sydney, this happens much earlier than it does in London. Nevertheless, I can still trace the moment when weekend beers with friends were no longer a given, but something that had to be organised far in advance.

After the split with my long-term girlfriend, my mum told me it would do me good to spend time with myself; to learn how to know myself. It was now a couple of years on from that point, and I hadn’t eschewed her advice, but I hadn’t really heeded it either.

So I began to turn to myself properly. I travelled a lot alone. Thailand a few times, Cadiz, Seville, Greece twice. If I wanted to eat somewhere, do something, go somewhere, I would do it with or without a friend in tow. I bought my first house—a two-bedroom ground-floor flat in a scroungy part of Hackney down by the marshes.

At first I was worried I might get lonely living by myself. But I kept thinking back to something once said to me by a much older friend whose opinion I always valued: you never need to be lonely in London - all you have to do is listen around you. I never needed to listen for most of my years in this city, but during those first weeks in my barren flat without furniture, I put an ear out, and yes I could hear the drone of the city around me; could hear the distant ambulance sirens from Homerton hospital; echoes of a music festival at Victoria Park; the Cockney lilt of Dolly, my 85-year-old East Ender neighbour—the songs of 9 million people living on top of each other.

I never felt lonely in that flat. London is too busy for that. When I think back on my time here, what stands out is movement. That might say more about me than the city, but at the very least London is a city where people move—they do things. We do things. We go to the pub; we see a West End show; we picnic in the park in summer; we go to Europe; we go to the pub again; we support some arcane side project of a friend. Come to think of it, to live in London is to renounce a lot of things that people love about Sydney: cafes at sunrise, workouts on the beach; early nights; exercise as a religion; staying in; a slower life, really.

Earlier this year I escaped London for a 3-week trip to Greece alone. And it was there I realised I had started to view a lot of those Sydney-esque things with disdain, as though they were emblems of a boring city. It also dawned on me that those things might actually be what I need most.

On a barren little island in the middle of the Cyclades, I tried my best to seek out solitude. I traded my iPhone for an old Nokia, brought a bunch of books and set out to read, write, take photos and enjoy my own company.

I came to a juncture during that trip. I had just moved from my first accommodation to a more remote spot on a winding cliffside road with little around me. It was shoulder season, and I had spent the previous 5 or so days almost exclusively to myself. On my first night at my new place, I walked back from town in darkness. There were no streetlights. I knew no one on the island, and everything had shut at around 11 pm. I felt the solitude around me, and I hated it. I hated that there was no late-night off-license to pop into; no revellers on the street in the middle of the night; no one I knew to call upon; and no chance of leaving the island until the following day. I was lonely, and I was listening, but all I could hear was silence.

The next couple of days were coloured by that anxiety which is particular to aloneness. But I was old enough to know the way forward was through. So I bore it. And it dissolved, bit by bit, until soon enough I found myself riding through empty roads at dawn on my little 50cc Peugeot scooter, unable to stop smiling, wishing I never had to leave.

When I finally did return to London, the city looked different. Its charm was suddenly lost on me. Sure, there was always something to do, but I started to wonder whether doing is always what’s needed. There is a joke amongst the expat community that London is a Peter Pan city - a Neverland where no one needs to grow up. It’s as Joan Didion said of New York: nothing is irrevocable; everything is in reach. Yes, almost anything in London is possible, and maybe you can do whatever you want. But I am ready to try a slower life. I go home to Sydney tomorrow. I am not sure what awaits me, but I know myself more these days. And it’s not the city so much I am excited for, but I am excited nonetheless.

I first travelled to Sifnos, the little rocky island in the shadow of Mykonos and Santorini, in 2022 and spent a week there. Back then, it seemed elusive; foreign almost. I felt, in a good way, a bit of an outsider on the island. This summer I returned for a longer visit, and it seemed something had shifted.

During that recent trip, I bumped into old friends from Sydney; met two different couples who lived within 10 minutes of me in Hackney; and found myself at a cooking class with a husband and wife I knew from high school days. Outside the island too, more and more people seem to recognise the name, and just about every other week there seems to be a new Instagram post or Substack article about it.

I suspect part of the reason for Sifnos’ rising popularity is that its longstanding reputation as the culinary capital of the Cyclades has slithered into our social media zeitgeist. These days, it’s nearly impossible to see Sifnos mentioned on a screen without some sort of food-related appendage hanging off of it.

I find it is sometimes difficult to disentangle lived experience from what’s touted online. Hype in insidious ways can shape reality. So when I found myself back in Sifnos this June, one of my favourite places in the world, I figured I’d do my best to see if the food really was something to write home about. Over three weeks I ate at as many places as my appetite would allow and tried to get a good sense of the food culture. What follows are insights from a couple of trips to this beguiling island.

Any missive on the food of Sifnos must surely begin with mastelo — the dish plastered on menus at virtually every taverna across the island. I first had mastelo at O Simos, an old taverna in the port of Kamares. Fresh off an evening seajet ferry, watching jet-black water clamber up the side of the dining platform, a waiter plonked a terracotta bowl with a big hunk of goat and a mountain of golden fries in front of me.

It was sublime: meat falling off the bone, cooked in an inordinately large quantity of local white wine and an amount of dill anyone uninitiated would think was far too much for a single dish. Savoury, piquant, herbaceous, and salty; individually and all at once; which is to say: utterly delicious.

On my most recent trip, I visited the Narlis Farm. George Narlis, the vivacious owner, gave us a little background on mastelo and how to cook it. George, who would be pushing 70, explained that mastelo was a speciality dish that was once cooked only at Easter. On the eve of Holy Sunday, families would slaughter a whole goat and pack large bone-in pieces into big clay pots, or mastelos.

They would then cover the meat with wine and dill (the island’s abundant herb) before taking the whole thing to their local wood-fired oven, where it would cook overnight in the residual heat from the day’s baking alongside a host of other families’ clay pots containing identical ingredients.

George was flippant when describing how long it takes to make mastelo. Sometimes four hours, sometimes six, sometimes all night and all day. As is the hallmark of real cooks, rules are underlings to intuition.

The mastelo I tried at George’s came out of the wood-fired oven built into one of the walls of his stone farmhouse - its charred bricks forming an opening that betrayed a cavernous interior disproportionately larger than everything around it. It had been in there for a good 12 hours, he said.

I’m not sure if it was my own bias to home cooking, or the gaiety of eating with a bunch of strangers clad in the warm cloak of old-school Greek hospitality, but George’s mastelo was the best I’ve ever had: lamb and dill from his farm and a gallon of local wine, made the same way George’s mother used to make for him two generations ago. At the end of this piece, I’ve copied down his exact recipe.

I was a little dumbfounded when I first tried revithada — arguably Sifnos’ second most popular dish. I was at Chrisopigi Taverna, a little waterside restaurant situated in the sightline of Sifnos’ most famous tourist attraction, Panagia Chrysopigi - the 17th-century Greek Orthodox monastery perched on a promontory at the very edge of the island. Staring into a beige bowl of oily chickpeas, I couldn’t understand how something so austere could be so delicious.

Revithada is like mastelo’s vegetarian little sister. It’s made in the same clay pot, is also tied to the Greek Easter holiday, and follows the same local tradition of being baked in communal ovens overnight. The only difference is what’s in it: chickpeas, onion, olive oil and the odd bay leaf or two.

After my first trip to Sifnos, I tried to make revithada at home. I could never quite get it right. Mine were always thin and soup-like, whereas the ones I had on the island were thick and viscous with a flavour so concentrated I twice had to ask whether there wasn’t some additional secret ingredient in the mix, like a meat stock or sneaky hand of sugar.

But back at the Narlis farm, not long after we had finished preparing the mastelo I heard George say ‘Most revithada you see is like soup, but true revithada from Sifnos has no water’. It turns out that the trick is to leave the revithada in the oven for so long that most, if not all, of the water evaporates, until what you’re left with is sweet caramelised onions, tender chickpeas and a lot of starch—the combination of which makes for that viscosity I was searching for.

Revithada has become somewhat of a culinary icon on Sifnos. You’ll find it at almost every taverna on the island, served in little terracotta pots, themselves a signature of the island’s pottery-making history dating back to antiquity.

So where’s good to eat in Sifnos? Too many places. Scattered throughout the barren hills and whitewashed towns of the island is a discordant mix of eateries, ranging from the plentiful, time-weathered tavernas that have become an emblem of the Greek holiday experience to the shiny nouveau restaurants defining Sifnos’ burgeoning new guard.

Below is my attempt to whittle down the twenty-five-odd places1 I ate at into a more digestible top 5, using a simple guiding question: what did I find most memorable?

So, in no particular order, here are my top 5 favourite places to eat in Sifnos.

Captain George

At the bottom of Sifnos’ ancient old town, Kastro, lies Seralia Cove — a little bay with a tiny rocky beach and a couple of small tavernas that watch over the languid undulations of the Aegean Sea. One of those places — perched right above the water is Captain George taverna, a family restaurant run by a fisherman, serving up the morning’s catch.

The food, in some senses, is unremarkable. Grilled fish is often grilled fish. But that’s part of the beauty of this place. The typical array of groper, parrot fish and big gilt-head breams on offer don’t need much other than hot coals, a keen enough eye and a little salt and lemon.

Aside from the fish, the surrounding cast of the menu, the likes of tarama, fritters, calamari, Greek salad, fried anchovies, tzatziki and so on, were as good as any of the tavernas I visited. I remember their melitzanosalata (eggplant ‘dip’) was particularly delicious - more a relish than a dip, and with a smack of vinegar so fierce it roused me from my slumber amidst the lapping water beneath.

Food aside, Captain George is one of those special places where time seems to have fallen asleep. Somehow, in the three times I’ve been, it never seems to be busy. There are always a few punters there and maybe the odd large group table, but for the most part it is a sleepy institution, all too befitting of its sublime surroundings.

Kafenes

If you’re greedy like me, and manage to sample all of the classic dishes of the island in a couple of days, it might be time to look toward Kafenes, a small family-run bistro situated in the courtyard of Hotel Bouris in Kamares. At Kafenes, they proudly make everything in-house, with much of the produce originating from their garden.

They also offer daily specials featuring local dishes that differ noticeably from what is on offer across much of the rest of the island, like Sifnian braised rabbit, scorpion fish soup, or grilled goat livers; basically whatever is abundant and available at the time.

They’re also one of the few places to serve retsina, the 2,000-year-old resinated wine from antiquity - which, if you have a penchant for novelty, is itself a good enough reason to visit.

When I was there, I had the braised rabbit dish, a sort of Sifnian stifado; boiled courgettes with house-made skorladia (a type of garlic and walnut puree); and revithokefetedes, the island’s beloved chickpea fritters. I don’t think I had better quality food elsewhere on the island.

The rabbit was particularly memorable; it was as soft as I have ever had rabbit, with a moreish braising sauce laced with the marjoram and oregano that grow wild across Sifnos’ rocky hills and cobbled paths.

O Felos

O Felos feels like the cavalier offspring of a union between East London small plate mania and the timeless cafes that speckle much of the Mediterranean. Officially the oldest cafe in Sifnos, O Felos has recently had a revamp, with the interior seeing little of the overhaul and the innovation focused mostly on food and drink.

Here you’ll find dainty portions of Greek classics (fava, marinated octopus, tarama, etc.) alongside more innovative dishes like ox-cheek orzo, white beans with cuttlefish, and pork-and-squid-stuffed zucchini flowers. Everything is cooked exceptionally well — the young chef has some serious chops, and I’m not entirely unconvinced he hasn’t been transplanted from Quality Wines, Brawn, Planque or some other swanky London institution.

And whilst the food really shines at O Felos, it’s the ambience that will stay with you. If you were to head to Cantina or Bostani — two modern, uber-popular restaurants on the island, you might think that you’re part of the clique - that you’re lucky to snag a spot at one of the island’s exclusive hangouts. But to go to O Felos is to realise you’ve found a realer deal. A place where the walls are coated in conversations from the last 100 years; where the cognoscenti, both local and from abroad, chatter over coffee and wine amidst the cobbled lane below; a place that time seems to have forgotten, at least momentarily.

Lempesis

I think many people like Greek food for its evocation of homeliness: pastoral images of yiayias cooking or family-run tavernas making the same dish for decades—unchanged but never needing to be changed. And those yearnings, like strange pangs of a nostalgia for a time we’ve never known, are what can elevate a meal to something truly memorable - even if the food isn’t exceptional. That’s what Lempesis is to me. It is all the things I love about Greek food encapsulated into a little vine-covered courtyard with white-clothed tables set in the hilltop town of Artemonas.

The food is very good — let me be clear on that. But it’s not remarkable in the sense that it is decidedly unrefined. It is home cooking in the purest sense, but anything else would lessen its charm, that I am certain of.

At Lempesis you’re bound to see the epithet ‘family-run’ well and truly in practice. Two kids, barely teenagers, who I presume to be brother and sister, run much of the floor — taking orders and bringing out food. Stamades - their father - takes on the responsibility of telling you what on the menu is available for that day. He also takes it upon himself to tell you, unequivocally, what you should eat — a habit I am only too welcoming of.

I had such lovely meals at Lempesis. I can barely remember the food, but I know it was good. Yemista (rice-stuffed peppers), courgettes with avgolemono, and a tasty goat mastelo - but the food is secondary. What I remember is the adorable shyness of the two kids who were doing a great job waiting on me, the tranquillity of the courtyard, and my hilarious chats with Stamades: him laughing at my inexplicable moving from Sydney to London; me chuckling at his refusal to take my plates away until I had one more attempt at finishing the last morsels of the large meal before me.

In fact, what stands out most to me about my time at Lempesis was my final interaction with Stamades on my third visit. I was paying my bill, and he was squinting at his handwriting, tallying up the dishes.

“34 euros,” he said, before quickly adding, “make it €30”. I opened my wallet, plucked out two 20 euro bills and said: “let’s make it €40”. He looked taken aback for a quick moment before he gestured with sincerity and patted me on the shoulder. I know the money didn’t mean anything - to either of us. A swing of 10 euros gets lost in the wind. But in that interaction was this sort of strange clash of appreciation each of us was holding back, proffering up through money, a safer medium than words. Chuckling as we were — what I think we both really meant was: thank you for making me smile.

Omega3

Omega3, a restaurant in Platos Gialos specialising in the island’s bountiful fruits de mer, is unlike any of the above places. It’s modern; the dishes are innovative and often don’t reflect the temperament of Greek cuisine; there are a lot of foreign influences on the menu - the odd beurre blanc, snapshots of saffron, a lot of Japanese elements. All of this works fantastically because it is bound by the freshest, highest-quality seafood available and a clearly adept chef.

Here you will find dishes such as squid cacio pepe — lightly blanched squid ‘noodles’ mixed through a sauce made from local Sifnos cheese and lashings of black pepper; or local Greek lobster in a bouillabaisse sauce with orzo. There is also a whole section of raw dishes that seems to feature classics from all corners of the world—aguachile, ceviche, crudo, sashimi—all prepared meticulously with the chef’s sublime touch.

At Omega3, it’s the food that will take your breath away. You might not get the homely, pastoral vibe of a cosy taverna, but instead you’ll be eating some of the best seafood you’re bound to find anywhere on an open-air deck beachside; the cobalt Aegean, with its infinite glimmering eyes, stretching out in front of you. It’s not too bad a trade, I don’t think.

My parting gift, as promised: George’s recipe for mastelo.

So, with that prelude, here’s a photo essay* of some time spent in Greece.

*It’s probably more accurate to say a photo dump but it’s de rigueur here to make everything an essay so please, oblige me.

Thanking you / ευχαριστώ
Dan

Not long ago, I became very preoccupied with trying to recreate the perfect plate of crab-fried rice, or khao pad bpu as it's called in Thai. It's a dish I've always loved but have, for one reason or another, mentally partitioned it as something rooted firmly in the back alleys of Bangkok — a dish that could never be conjured up as somewhere as cold and urban as London. Then, one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me that all of this dish's component parts exist right here in the UK 16,000 km afar. On this verdant island, crabs are plentiful, rice is never far away, and a little patience and technique are easy enough to muster up.

So began an iterative process, eventually leading to plates of near-perfect crab-fried rice — almost indistinguishable from what you might find in Thailand. So, I figured I'd share some notes for anyone interested in trying to whip this up at home. Perhaps they spur some inspiration.

Khao pad bpu or Crab Fried Rice

Like most, if not all, of the world's fried rice dishes, khao pad bpu is descended from the Chinese tradition of frying rice and other ingredients together over high heat. On the surface, it is a simple dish - just fresh crab meat, rice and egg tossed with a bit of seasoning. Yet behind the scant ingredient list lies a dish far greater than the sum of its parts. I remember watching an interview with Marco Pierre White years ago in which he commented, "the more you do to food, the more you take away from it". Five hundred years prior, Da Vinci declared simplicity to be the ultimate form of sophistication. Fried rice is kinda like that, I think. If you try to do too much with it, it always falls flat.

Making This Dish in London

I am somewhat of an outlier in that a large part of the enjoyment I get from cooking is enveloped in the long slog - the arduous process of creating things from scratch. That's why I like making curries with handmade coconut milk, orextruding my own pasta, or making my own stocks etc, etc. I like it. And, to my detriment, I can be a little stringent with my rules (which is probably a post for another time). But it works. I make things slowly, and they taste good because of it, not despite it.

All of this is basically a warning that making khao pad bpu in London is a bit of a fuck around. You need to source a live crab1, dispatch it, cook it, pick it and then turn it into fried rice. But — the good news is that if you do as I say (not as I do), you might enjoy the process, and you will have a tasty, tasty, tasty dish at the end of it.

Sourcing A Crab

Here's the mad thing. I'd been thinking (/dreaming) about cooking crab-fried rice for a long time. But I've always been put off by the logistical malaise of sourcing and preparing a live crab. A few times, I went out to the usual local spots to see if I could get my hands on one - Fin and Flounder and Jonathon Norris - two high-quality fish mongers nearby. But neither stocked live crustaceans. Ultimately, I gave up and figured I'd have to get up early one morning to grab one from Billingsgate or pay a premium at Borough Market.

Then, one day I walked past Man Ka Fook in Hackney — a tiny Chinese grocer 10 minutes from my house that I have walked by hundreds of times. I never really go in because I always go to the much larger Starnight grocer down the road. But on this day, I figured I'd have a sticky beak - a poke around, if you will. Anyway, as I'm lurking around the aisles of Maan Ka Fook , I notice a nook in the back with refrigerators.... and as I get closer, I see live crabs — (British, Dungeness, Blue crabs) live crawfish, cockles, turbot. A proper bounty of the sea. I left, my head swimming with possibilities — crab fried rice at the front and centre.

The very next day, I was in Stratford. Spurred by my previous day's escapades, I ducked into the relic that is the Stratford centre to properly check out the massive Chinese supermarket Loong Fung (I had been once before but ducked in and ducked out in quick time). Again, slow meandering gave way to the realisation that this place is equipped with a huge seafood section at the back - with lots of live crab on offer, clams, lobster and all the rest of it.

So I guess this is to say that sometimes it pays to go slow and be open to the world, or something like that. It's funny; I'm part of a little book club with my mates here in London (big up ASBC), and one of the books we read was Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The part I remembered most in the book was when Siddhartha says: "What should I possibly have to tell you, oh venerable one? Perhaps that you're searching too much? That in all that searching, you don't find time for finding?" In my own little way, this whole crab-finding thing made me think of that passage with a chuckle. And now that I have a mundane lived experience of Siddhartha's lesson - I see it showing up in grander, more important areas of life. The power of crabs, hey.

Preparing the Crab

I would be remiss in writing an article on cooking crab-fried rice without acknowledging the most challenging part - preparing and cooking live crab. But I don't want to spend too much time here because I am a relative novice myself, and a slew of things on the Internet go through this process much better than I could.

But, let me summarise what I think is important: chill the crab in the fridge (wrapped in a tea towel) for half an hour to reduce its senses, dispatch it quickly by severing each ganglion with a sharp spike, boil it in heavily seasoned water but don't shock it in ice afterwards*, pick the meat diligently and be prepared for the first time to be laborious and painful. This video from Rick Stein is a great walkthrough of picking crab meat from a British Crab.

For those actually interested in cooking this dish, don't worry in the recipe below I've provided more exacting steps.

Fried Rice Technique

I don't want to get into a whole rabbit hole on how to cook fried rice, whether one should use a wok, whether induction is OK etc, etc. I'm sure that whatever set up you have you can make it werk. But I do think it's worth saying that I have found a few core principles that seem to govern the making of fried rice. I really think if you stick to the below you'll be in good stead.

1. Use dry rice (more on this below).

2. Don't crowd the wok or your frying pan, or whatever vessel you are cooking with

3. Go easy on the sauce - fried rice is delicate and moisture can be its greatest enemy - a pinch of salt and a dash of soy sauce or fish sauce is more than enough

4. Understand the battle between your heat source and the weight of food in the wok; less food = higher heat; more food = less heat. Basically - don't crowd the wok and let surface area do its thang.

A Final Note on Rice

This might be a little controversial but here goes. The best rice for fried rice is not day old rice. Yes, you heard me! Better than day old rice is par-boiled + steamed rice. This is the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and I won't hear anything otherwise.

Seriously though — if you do the below:

Boil rice for 4 mins; drain; steam for 10 minutes; let sit for 5 mins - you will have the perfect rice for fried rice. Cooked without being too gluggy and with just enough moisture. And the best thing - you can make it on demand. No preparing fried rice 24 hours out. I learnt this many moons ago via Red House Spice (🙏) and it’s done me ever so well since.

Crab Fried Rice (Khao pad bpu) a recipe from London, with love

This serves 1x.

• 110g uncooked jasmine rice

• 1 egg

• 2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

• 60g-100g picked white crab meat2

• 1 tbs sliced spring onion (or roughly chopped onion)

• 2 tbs vegetable oil

• 1 tbs soy sauce

• 0.5 tsp salt

• 0.5 tsp white sugar

• 0.25 tsp white pepper

Prepare rice. Boil rice for 4 minutes, then drain.

Steam rice for 10 minutes in any steaming vessel - e.g bamboo steamer, Western steamer, or even a sieve with a lid on it set atop a saucepan.

After 10 minutes, turn off the heat and let the rice sit for 5 minutes.

Remove the rice onto a plate and spread it out in as thin layer as possible, then set aside.

Despatch the crab. Chill the tea-towel-wrapped crab in the freezer for 30 minutes to t it into a state or torpor/insensibility.

Lift the tail flap and place a spike (metal skewer, screwdriver, knife) lightly atop the hole underneath the tail flap.

Tap the spike hard with something heavy like a rolling pin so it drives through the hole.

Remove the spike and then drive it through the depression behind the eyes. Again, a Youtube search for "double spiking crab method" will provide a better visual description.

Cook the crab. In heavily seasoned water (30g salt per litre of water) at a rolling boil, put the crab in and cook for 12 minutes for a 1kg. As a rough rule of thumb you can add 3 minutes additional per 500g of crab. E.g. a 1.5kg crab = 15 minutes cooking time.

Remove the crab and when cool enough to handle, break it down and pick the white and brown meat. Reserve the brown meat for another time and set aside the white meat for this dish. Again - this video shows this process much better than I am writing it.

Cook the fried rice. Place a wok on high heat and wait until it smokes. Turn the heat off, add the vegetable oil then turn the heat back to max. Add in the egg and let it set for 10 seconds before roughly scrambling it with a spatula — then push the egg to the side offthe wok.

Turn the heat down to low and add the roughly chopped garlic. Stir it around vigourously so it doesn't burn.

Add the cooked rice and turn the heat back up to max. Stir fry for a minute or two.

Drizzle the soy sauce around the sides of the wok. If your wok is hot enough the soy sauce should evaporate almost instantly. Add a pinch of sugar, the crab meat and the spring onions. Stir fry everything together for another minute.

Remove to a serving plate and serve with sliced cucumber, fish sauce and chillies (prik nam pla).

The other week, I had lunch with my friend at a new Thai restaurant in London. The food was decent, but what was surprisingly good was the 'root vegetable som tam' — a simple 'pounded' salad of random vegetables.

Whilst som tam is commonly used to describe the famous Thai dish 'papaya salad', the words themselves translate to 'sour' and 'pounded', a reference to the preparation method of this dish whereby ingredients are lightly pounded in a large clay mortar with a big wooden pestle.

Numerous variations of som tam exist. There are versions with green mango, salted crab, preserved duck eggs, and a whole array of diverse ingredients. By its namesake, the dish offers a license for adaptability where one can take a variety of core ingredients, pound and mix them with chillies, garlic, and typical seasonings to make a delicious dish.

The root vegetable som tam I had the other day got me thinking about how simple it would be to make som tam at home with whatever vegetables I have on hand as a quick, simple, delicious and nutritious dish to serve with rice and fried eggs (or left over cooked meat) as a meal in and of itself.

So, I broke out the old clay mortar from its decorative resting place on my living room shelf and started making some pounded salads, eventually arriving at some very rough guidelines for making delicious som tam with what was on hand in the fridge in about 10 minutes.

Everyday som tam

My rudimentary guidelines for making ‘everyday’ som tam rest on the following rules:

• 150g of core/on-hand vegetables are enough for a single meal, served with rice

• For every 150g of core/on-hand vegetables use 1 garlic/2chillies/2 tbs lime/1tbs fish sauce/1tbs palm sugar to dress the salad

That's it, really. The measurements scale proportionally, so if I'm making two servings, it becomes 300g vegetables and then 1 garlic/4 chillies/4 tbs lime/2 tbs fish sauce/2 tbs palm sugar.

For the core vegetables, I find it's best to use things that have an adequate level of crunch and sturdiness, like cabbage, radish, green beans, snow peas, cucumber (deseeded), etc., so they can bruise when pounded lightly in a mortar. The vegetables I used in the image at the start of this article were cabbage, watermelon radish, snow peas, and cherry tomatoes.

Finally, I know pounding a salad in a mortar might seem strange. I'm not sure how it emerged as a preparation technique, but I am not surprised it has endured.

Pounded salads have something other salads do not. I am going to do a shoddy job at explaining what, but in simple terms, I think the act of pounding first ensures the dressing (e.g. garlic, chillies, palm sugar, fish sauce, tamarind, lime juice) is as unified as possible. There are no uneven concentrates of sugar or chillies or garlic; everything has literally been smashed together to make the perfect melding of spicy, sour, salty, funky, and sweet.

Secondly, pounding the main ingredients together means they bruise slightly, which releases their flavour and makes the dish more delicious. Finally, mixing everything in a giant clay mortar - dressing and main parts - means the dish is dressed to the nines. Full coverage. No green bean is left unturned. No parts of the salad are unflavoured. Every single bite is an explosion of flavour.

And with that said, I hope I've impressed upon some of you the value of a mortar when making som tam. I know most people who read this won't have a large clay mortar, but that's fine. You can make this dish in a typical granite mortar if you work in batches. I’ve done it many a time.

Equally, if you're adventurous and open to it, a som tam mortar and pestle can be picked up for as little as 20 quid. Not only do they make the preparation of this dish easy, they're also beautiful as a decorative item. And they're easy to clean too.

Finally, sans mortar and pestle you can make this dish by just mixing everything together. It won’t be quite the same but not far off and you’ll still have a delicious plate of food no doubt.

Everyday som tam recipe

Ingredients

• 150g core/on-hand vegetables (e.g. cabbage, green beans, cherry tomatoes, radish)

• 2 birdseye or Thai chillies

• 1 clove of garlic (I roast mine but that’s personal preference)

• 2 tbs lime juice

• 1 tbs fish sauce

• 1 tbs palm sugar

• 1-2 tbs of roasted peanuts (optional)

Method

1. In a mortar and pestle, add chillies, garlic and palm sugar and pound until a the chillies and garlic have mashed into the sugar and everything is one melded paste

2. Add lime juice, fish sauce and your 150g core/on-hand vegetables to the mortar and begin lightly pounding everything with the pestle. Whilst you are pounding, use a spoon to every now and then ‘lift’ the ingredients that are on the very bottom of the mortar to the top so that everything gets pounded and mixed together.

3. When everything is incorporated serve on a plate and eat with rice and maybe some fried eggs.

For the uninitiated, Filipino adobo might be the most delicious dish you've never tried. Typically, it consists of meat seared in fat and then braised in vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, garlic, black pepper and bay leaves. It is a humble dish, requiring simple ingredients and little preparation.

It is also astonishingly tasty, the type of dish that will leave you gobsmacked at how good a single mouthful of food can be. It shouldn’t be hard to see why; good things happen when you take forceful expressions of saltiness, sourness, and sweetness and blend them together with a boatload of garlic and seared meat.

I always think about adobo more around this time of year. It reminds me of Christmas at home in Sydney, where my mum’s delicious adobo has been a yearly centrepiece.

Whilst I grew up eating mostly chicken adobo, the other year, when I was back at home, my mum made a version with pork belly, where she cut the meat into elongated, thickish strips. It was amazing, and it has since become my favourite way to cook the dish. The recipe I’ve provided below is my own take on it.

Adobo — a short history and overview

Adobo is less a dish and more broadly a cooking technique that encompasses the cooking of foodstuffs in vinegar.

The name adobo is linked to the Spanish words adobar (to pickle), adobo (a pickling sauce of vinegar, olive oil, garlic, majoram amongst other things) and adobado (a dish of pork preserved in adobo pickling sauce).

Despite the etymological links to Spain, adobo, or the practice of stewing and preserving foods in vinegar, is a native Filipino dish that predates Western colonialism. Local inhabitants of the region would stew a great diversity of proteins in vinegar to ensure preservation in the hot and humid climate.

Then, in 1613, amidst the Spanish colonization of the region, a friar named Pedro de San Buenaventura tasted a local adobo-like dish and dubbed it 'adobo de los naturales' (adobo of the natives) due to its similarities to Spanish adobo foods— henceforth its local name was lost in history, and a new moniker emerged.

Whilst the most popular and recognisable adobo is likely that of chicken or pork, stewed in soy sauce, vinegar, and garlic - a great degree of variation exists within this dish.

There are versions made with coconut milk, annatto oil, with just salt in lieu of soy sauce; I have even read about versions made from monitor lizard and snake, and there exist primitive vegetarian variations made from morning glory and eggplant.

But such variations are beyond my knowledge or experience, so until I return to the Philippines with a keener eye and a more adventurous tongue, I'm sticking to what I know best! So, without further ado, please find my recipe for pork adobo below.

Pork Adobo Recipe (serves 3)

Ingredients

• Pork belly, 500g

• Light soy sauce, 80 ml

• Water, 100 ml

• White vinegar1, 100 ml

• Brown sugar, 1 tbs

• Garlic, 6 cloves (roughly chopped)

• Black peppercorn, 1 tbs roughly grinded

• 2 bay leaves

• Water to cover

Method - Long Version

Remove the skin of the pork belly and cut away the rib bones (if there are any). You can use the skin to make chicharrón.

Trim the pork belly and portion it into pieces with a nice equal layering of lean meat and fat (like in the image below). It helps to eye out the pork belly at the butcher and select a section of it which has good proportions of meat and fat.

Cut the pork belly into strips that are about 6cm long by 1.5cm wide.

Place the pork belly into a Tupperware, bowl or ziplock bag and add the 80ml soy sauce and 100ml of water. Then leave for a minimum of four hours and a maximum of 24 hours.

When you’re ready to cook the adobo, take the pork belly strips out of the soy sauce water solution and dry each one individually so that it is as dry as possible.

In a hot wide pan (I used a saute pan), hold a piece of pork belly fat side down and smear the fat around the pan for about 30 seconds until the whole surface of the pan has a little rendered prok fat covering it. Then, place pork belly strips into the pan, ensuring none are touching another. Sear on one side, then flip and remove once the other side is seared. Remove all the pork into a bowl and set aside.

You should now have a lot of rendered fat in the pan. Remove most of it, but leave a little in there to saute the garlic. Add the garlic and saute for a few minutes until fragrant.

Into the pan, add the soy sauce-water brining solution, sugar, bay leaves, black pepper, and pork. Then, add enough water so the pork is just covered (or at least 90% covered).

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and cover the pan and cook for 1 hour.

Remove the cover on the pan, then add the vinegar and let the adobo simmer uncovered until your desired consistency. This adobo suits a more dry style so I judge that it is done when there is a small bit of fatty sauce coating the bottom of the pan.

Serve with jasmine rice! I also always have mine with cucumber, tomato, red onion salad dressed in a little fish sauce and lemon juice.

Method - Long Version

1. Remove skin of pork belly

2. Cut pork belly into strips that are around 6.5cm long by 1.5cm wide

3. Brine pork belly in soy sauce and water for 4 hours or overnight

4. Pat pork belly dry

5. Sear pork belly on either side, remove and set aside

6. Remove most of the rendered fat in the pan, save for a little, then saute garlic for a few minutes

7. Add pork belly, soy sauce-water brining solution, bay leaves, sugar and pepper and just enough water to cover and bring to a boil before reducing heat to low, covering with a lid and cooking for 1 hour

8. Remove lid, add vinegar and cook for a further 10 minutes.

9. Finish cooking when there is a thick sauce that just coats the bottom of the pan

Two weeks ago, I visited Istanbul with some friends to explore the city's renowned food culture. Over the last few years, I've primarily written about Thai, Filipino and Southeast Asian food. Having taken a break from the content salt mine the past few months, I found myself growing playfully curious about Turkish food.

This newfound curiosity hasn't come as too much of a surprise. Having lived in Hackney, East London for the better part of three years, I've come to appreciate the area's concentration of quality Turkish eateries. One of the downsides of being so keenly interested in good food and cooking is that the vast majority of everyday food options (in a city like London) can become uninspiring. It can be hard to find a modest meal that is delicious, balanced with protein and vegetables, and relatively healthy. Places like Anatolia, (and many of London's other oçakbasi restaurants) are the solution to such dilemmas. There, for £13, I can get a meal featuring some of the most delicious meat one is bound to find in the city, a salad that has substance (i.e. not just three slices of cucumber or a palmful of rocket), a side of wholegrain bulgur, and some relatively unprocessed bread and dips to boot. Not only is the food substantive, it's made with care — an attribute that is so often lost in London's highly commercialised metropolis.

Thus begun my affection for Turkish food. Luckily, my good friend Conor, who I’ve done a number of Thai pop-ups with and who, with his partner Evi, owns and runs Evi’s in London and who perhaps knows more about food than anyone I know, is also a keen fan of Turkish cuisine - having lived in Istanbul back in the day. When he suggested we deviate from our pattern of going to Thailand for immersive food trips and travel to Istanbul for a weekend, I jumped at the idea. A few months later, I’d convinced my good friend Willy Saunds to hop aboard, and off we went.

Drawing upon Conor’s memory of some of the cities best food spots, supplemented with the infallible Istanbul Eats - the course was set for a memorable trip. Below is a recount of some of the highlights. I’ve provided links to most of the spots we visited.

Day 1 - Kebabs, pilav, and a late-night snack

We got into the city at 6:30 pm on Thursday evening, making a beeline for a taxi that would take us to our accommodation in Beyoğlu.

Dinner at Dürümzade

The first stop of the trip was the Dürümzade — the famed grill spot Anthony Bourdain visited specialising in dürüm — Turkish wraps typically filled with kebab meat. Alongside dürüm, Dürümzade offers standard kebab meals like tavuk şiş (chicken shish), çöp şiş (lamb shish) and the famed Adana kepab (kofte kebab).

The dürüms at Dürümzade are incredibly simple, which is what makes them so good. The incredibly thin lavaş style flatbread they are made from is lightly grilled over the coals and spiced with a seasoning blend by the Usta or grill master. The deliciously seasoned bread is then topped with a parsley, onion, tomato salad, and grilled meat before being rolled into a sauceless wrap. We opted for Adana dürüms, and they were as good as I imagined - bread light and thin, meat juicy and delicately but perfectly seasoned. They are nothing like exceptionally filling, aggressively packed kebab wraps that are commonplace throughout the UK and Australia. 

Eating a dürüm from Dürümzade made me reflect on a realisation I have had many times when travelling to eat the best food at its source - (e.g. finding a choice pad see ew in Thailand or grilled lamb chops with chips in Athens) and that is: food, at its source, is almost always smaller in size, less seasoned, and lighter - both in terms of taste and feeling in the body. These attributes are to its benefit, not detriment - they make the food more itself and less shielded by fat, spices, and other masking agents. Perhaps this says something about our food and eating preferences in the West.

Tavluku Pilav / Chicken Pilaf

Even though each of us had a whole dürüm and shared a portion of liver kebab with salad and bread, the lightness of the food allowed us to it fit in two more dishes that evening. The first, an insistence from my friend Conor, was tavluki pilav - a typical Turkish street food pilaf dish of rice and chickpeas cooked in butter and chicken fat/stock, topped with chicken meat and Turkish ketchup. Not far from Dürümzade, we found one of the many street vendors serving this type of dish out of a small cart resembling a popcorn machine filled with an evening's worth of rice and chicken. 

Tactically, we shared one portion of tavluki pilav. Even though I'm sure it wasn't the best the city has to offer (the chicken meat was a little dry, and the vendor was a little meagre on the chickpeas) — it was an incredibly tasty dish I wanted to eat over and over. Pure comfort food at its best - soft, flavourful, buttery, and utterly moreish. 

Çiğ köfte

As the night wrapped up, Will and Conor, like moths to light, were drawn to a small food joint near our accommodation, purchasing a serving of çiğ köfte— a Turkish snack consisting of a small kofte served with fresh raw vegetables, lavaş style bread and a couple of sauces. Originally, çiğ köfte was made with raw beef, hence its namesake (cig meaning raw, kofte a derivative of the Persian root kop meaning pound ground, beaten). However, in 2008, the Turkish government banned public sales of the dish due to widespread cases of taeniasis. For the Londoners out there, if you have ever had the delicious 'beef ezme' dish at Mangal II, that dish is inspired by çiğ köfte. Nowadays, çiğ köfte is often made just with bulgur, red pepper paste, parsley and spices - a vegetarian version of the more primitive classic. 

It was Conor who suggested çiğ köfte in some ways a Turkish resemblance of the Thai miang kham (a streetfod snack made by encasing local ingredients in a betel leaf), and I have to say I agree. I'm sure there aren't any historical linkages between the two dishes, but I think their similarity is reflective of how many snacks used to be produced before industrialisation — locally available, humble ingredients put together with little processing and with little effort. 

Day 2 - Turkish Breakfast, Workers Food, Büryan Kebap, and the Meyhane

One of the often overlooked considerations when going on a good trip is the inelasticity of appetite. Unfortunately, eating can only feasibly be done a handful of times per day, so one must be decisive about what to eat and when! 

Breakfast at Van Kahvalti Evi

Day 2 started with such a frame of mind. Not wanting to fill ourselves (/myself) too much with the whole day ahead of us, we went to one of my friend Conor's favourite breakfast spots,  Van Kahvalti Evi - a place bringing Kurdish breakfasts to the capital. They have an amazing menu at Van Kahvalti Evi filled with different Turkish breads, cheeses, olives, tahini and molasses spreads, fresh vegetables, and classics like gözleme and menemen. Protecting our appetite, we opted to share the sucuk (a spicy, fermented Turkish sausage made from lamb, not dissimilar to chorizo) and eggs - dipping various pieces of bread into the mixture. It was a delicious meal, but I regret not sampling more of the menu—next time. 

Workers Food at Şahin Lokantası

Following breakfast, we ventured to Şahin Lokantası, one of the cities' highly regarded lokantasi resutaurants, to sample various home-cooked style Turkish dishes. Lokantasis (the name translated to 'tradesman restaurant') have historically been the choice eatery for workers. Accordingly, the food they serve is more of a home-cooked style with stews, casserole-type dishes, soups, and stuffed vegetables, which are featured heavily in the day's offerings.

Upon entering Şahin Lokantası, one of the chefs behind the counter, Ali, excited at registering our foreignness, proceeded to welcome us energetically, inviting us into the kitchen to explain everything on offer for the day.

We opted for the staple mercimek çorbası (lentil soup), stuffed courgette (lamb mince) with yoghurt, a dish of roasted/baked bonito and a clear soup with beef and lamb meatballs.

With the exception of the fish, which had a few minor issues, the food was excellent, and the quality of ingredients and cooking shone through the meal. The clear soup with meatballs was perhaps the most delicious thing I tried on the whole trip. I don’t know the Turkish name for it but it looks to be similar to the Greek yuvarlakia.

Late lunch at Uğur Büryan Kebab Salonu

Following our early lunch, we walked a couple of hours across the city to kadinlar pizari, a district in Fatih that is renowned for its many restaurants serving Büryan kebaps - a type of kebab from Eastern Turkey made by slow-cooking whole lamb or mutton in a tandir, serving atop freshly made pide bread. 

We opted for Uğur Büryan Kebab Salonu and ordered a round of Büryan kebaps and a type of pie made from rice, lamb and raisins (or something similar) encased in filo pasty. The Büryan kebap is a standout dish. Its crispy yet fatty succulent meat is a novelty compared to the more ubiquitous döner and adana style kebabs. Unfortunately, we suffered the effects of poor timing, arriving at the restaurant at about 4 pm, which meant we got the last of the meat, so it wasn't as juicy and fresh out of the oven as we had hoped, but it was tasty nonetheless, and I'm sure at peak times (/normal times) it would be 10/10.

Dinner at Çukur Meyhane

Having spent the first 24 hours in Istanbul sampling a wide variety of types of food, from classic kebabs at Dürümzade, to streetfood snacks like chicken pilaf and çiğ köfte, to workers' food at the lokantasi, to regional kebabs in Fatir, we decided to continue the trend of diversification opting to visit a meyhane for dinner — a type of Turkish taverna characterised by the serving of alcohol and mezze or small dishes.

Our meyhane of choice was Çukur Meyhane, a longstanding establishment in our neighbourhood. What a choice it was. Not only was the food the best we had on the trip, but the restaurant was a relic of times gone by - the type of establishment where not much has changed in 30 years, a below-ground place where local patrons smoke ciggies inside, where raki and wine flow amidst an array of fresh, exciting and perfectly cooked mezze dishes.

We ordered well at Çukur Meyhane, opting for yoghurt with celeriac and purslane; grilled red peppers; parsley, onion and pomegranate salad; grilled anchovies; köftecisi with bulgur and sumac onions, fish manti, and halva. Everything was immaculate: simple food but unique and incredibly tasty. The grilled red pepper mezze is a dish I will remember for a long time. It was the most incredible tasting thing I’ve had in a while - smoky, redolent with pepper, sour with some sort ofvinegar - just truly delicious. The anchovies also were a standout. They were fatty, laden with smoke from the grill and incredibly fresh tasting with no hint of the overt fishiness unfresh sardines or anchovies can often have. 

Day 3 - Regional dishes, Beyran Soup, Döner Kebab

Lunch at Çiya Sofrası

On our third day, we caught the ferry to the Kadikoy on the Asian side and stayed there until the evening.

Our first stop was Çiya Sofrası, a traditional Turkish restaurant by Musa Daðdeviren (author of ‘The Turkish Cookbook’ and star of Netflix’s Chef’s Table) highlighting lesser-known dishes from Turkey’s various regions.

The fare at Ciya was delightful, with interesting and tasty dishes like stuffed celeriac, chestnut, orange and lamb stew, stuffed cabbages, stuffed eggplants and tomatoes, and the most delectable, smoke-laden meatball soup.

Beyran Soup at Ayık Çorba Kebap

After lunch, my friend Conor mentioned the district we were in was famous for a type of dish from Gazantiep called ‘Beyran soup’ - a breakfast dish of slow-cooked lamb neck in a rich meat broth loaded with butter and some spices and seasonings.

Soon after, we found ourselves at Ayık Çorba Kebap, a place specialising in soups and kebabs fronted by a seasoned usta who attentively attended to the large vats of soups in front of her like a maestro, loading them with butter, portioning out individual bowls to a line of high-powered butane burners behind her that would heat single servings of soup until molten.

The soup was the favourite thing I ate in the three days that we were there. Buttery, meaty, savoury, served with freshly baked bread on the side; one of those dishes that forces a smile from your lips. I’ve since recreated it at home and it was oustanding, an surprisingly easy. Stay tuned for a recipe.

Döner Kebab at Tatar Salim

Finally, it was time to face the inevitable: the mythical döner. We heard from good authority that kadikoy had one of the best döner spots in Istanbul: Tatar Salim. When we arrived there, we were not disappointed. 

Behind the main counter were an assembly of chefs attending to perfectly square hunks of meat rotating around a raging inferno powered by charcoal. Unlike the emulsified, trans-fatty, additive-laden döners that are common in the UK, US, Australia and much of Europe, Tatar Salim's döner is made the old way with real strips of lamb and beef layered with suet, then roasted for hours. The cooks at Tatar Salim expertly carve the meat with long swords, delicately slicing it from top to bottom whilst they catch the meat with a trailing wooden paddle. Nearby, a separate brigade of chefs is hard at work rolling out fresh dough to make the lavaş bread that accompanies each meal. 

The döner was served with bread, pickles, a basic salad and chips. No sauce. It was fantastic. The meat was succulent and tasted like itself. Paired simply with the freshly made, ultra-thin bread, it was superb; the simplicity of it was something to behold.

Day 4 - Manti and the Ocakbaşı

Dumpling for breakfast at 1932 Cihangir Doyum Mantı

I began our final day by venturing out on my lonesome to try a plate of manti, or Turkish dumplings - an ancient Central Asian dish now a stalwart of Turkey and the Caucasus. I was fortunate that a couple of mins' walk from our accommodation was a restaurant specialising in this dish - 1932 Cihangir Doyum Mantı.

I ordered lamb manti and it was delicious. A sort of Turkish version of tortellini served with yoghurt and Aleppo chilli flakes. Comforting, savoury and moreish.

The last supper at Zübeyir Ocakbaşı

After my dumplings jaunt, we went to our final food destination of the trip - the well renowned Zübeyir Ocakbaşı — one of Istanbul’s most highly regarded grill restaurants.

At Zübeyir Ocakbaşı they know what they’re doing. The grill master sits behind the mangal in a computer chair, tending to skewers of lamb chops, ribs, koftes, tomatoes, peppers and liver - swivelling left and right to fetch seasonings, which he sprinkles deftly atop bread and the roasting kebabs.

We opted for Adana kebab, lamb şiş, lamb chops, lamb ribs, parsely and onion salad, grilled onions and ezme. The food was an exercise in simplicity and restraint - most of the kebab having been seasoned only with salt during cooking. Everything we tried was outstanding, but the highlights were the adana kebab (the best I have ever tried), the grilled onions which were smoky but sweet from partial caramelisation and the ezme - the perfect foil to the plates of rich, grilled meats.

All in all, it was an 11/10 meal - not only for the food but equally for the theatre of the mangal for which we had front-row seats.

Well, that’s a wrap. Such great times. I hope you enjoyed this recount - thanks as always for reading. Until next time.

The other month, I wrote a piece (and recipe) on the dish known in Thai as pad krapow, anglicised as ‘chilli basil stir-fry’ — a dish of holy basil stir-fried with garlic, chillies and meat. As I mentioned in that article, pad krapow and its more accessible cousin, pad horapa (Thai basil stir-fry), are world-renowned. For a good reason, too — they’re easy to make, contain mostly accessible ingredients and are irrefutably delicious.

Perhaps the most common preparation for this dish calls for minced meat - often pork or chicken. But another version, lying just outside the cusp of Western mainstream attention, exists; a dish known as pad krapow muu krob or simply crispy pork belly stir-fried with holy basil. It is an insanely delicious dish, combining the flavour-packed elements of pad krapow with one of the world’s most loved ingredients - fatty, crispy, succulent pork belly.

Muu krob

Muu krob is unfathomably tasty. A cross-cultural evolution of the Cantonese siu yuk brought to Bangkok my Chinese immigrants, muu krob is onerous to make requiring extended time for marination, par-cooking, drying, more-marination/curing, and frying or roasting. In the realm of Thai cuisine it appears in dishes like pad kana muu krob (Chinese broccoli stir-fried w/ crispy pork belly), guay jap (a soup of rolled rice noodles and crispy pork), pad krapow muu krob (duh), but is also often enjoyed by itself with jasmine rice.

The aversion to making pad krapow muu krob at home

I think this dish is so seldomly attempted by home cooks or featured on social media over here in the West because its preparation is incongruent with the ebbs and flows of home cooking. That is to say, it’s a process to make a muu krob in and of itself; if one is going to make a big slab of muu krob, it follows that he or she will make a large batch; crispy pork belly doesn’t keep well beyond serving; stir-frying at home is hard to do in large quantities; pad krapow by its very nature is a ‘one-plate’ meal - i.e. it is most commonly served as an individual meal as opposed to a sharing dish among a main meal.

For these reasons, I imagine that few people can be bothered to go through the time-consuming, intricate process of making muu krob just to use it in a stir-fry. In fact, if I think about the way I’ve seen/experienced muu krob in Thailand, it's often at vendors who specialise in the making of it, who make significant quantities and thus offer a variety of ways to eat it - i.e. by itself with rice, stir-fried with gai lan or holy basil, as part of a soup dish etc.

A simple(r) alternative

The other day, I had myself a hankering for pad krapow muu krob. But alas, it was just me for whom I was cooking. I had a small portion of pork belly in the fridge (left over from a slab I bought for cooking a different dish), so the stars were aligning for an experimental attempt at cooking it more simply.

Usually, the process of making muu krob can involve hours of curing in salt and spices, boiling it in water for an extended period, treating the skin with a vinegar solution, drying the pork belly out for a long time before finally deep frying it in lots of oil it until perfectly crispy.

I figured that because I was cooking for just myself, I could probably get away with simply boiling it in a salt solution, then drying it in the oven (whilst prepping other things) before simply shallow frying (when I say shallow, I mean really shallow) the pork belly in a pan to crisp it up. The result was that I had a dish that was beyond passable; it was tasty - a delight to eat, and the process — whilst needing time (almost everything good takes time) —was incredibly simple.

A recipe (serves 1!)

• 300g skin on, pork belly (ask your butcher for the thinnest part of the belly)

• Water/White vinegar/Salt

• 3 cloves of garlic + 4 birdseye chillies pounded into a paste in a mortar, or processed in a food processor

• 1 cup holy basil leaves1

• 1.5 tbs oil

• 1 tsp dark soy

• 1 tbs light soy

• 1 tsp oyster

• Water or stock on hand (for moistening the stir-fry)

Method - the long version

Prep pork belly and boil it

Score the skin of the pork belly, then cut into 2.5cm wide strips.

In a sauce pan make a 10% brine by dissolving the the appropriate amount of salt into water. E.g for 500ml of water, dissolve 50grams of salt. Bring this to the boil, then add the pork belly and cook for 1.5 hours. Remove pork belly and pat dry. Turn oven on and set to 130c.

Bathe it in a vinegar/salt solution

Dissolve 1 tbs of salt in 1/4 cup of white vinegar. Then, pour the vinegar into a sheet tray (or something similar) and place the cooked pork belly skin side down so the skin is submerged. Note, only the skin should be submerged in the vinegar solution. Leave for 15-20 mins.

Remove the pork belly from the vinegar solution and pat dry. Trim the strips so they are a rectangular shape. Note - you might notice my strips in the above photo are jagged at the bottom. Those irregular grooves are from where I removed the rib bones. Before cutting the pork belly into cubes, I trimmed off those irregular bits (and saved them for a future fried rice) to ensure the bottom had a more regular straight edge to it.

Dry it in the oven

Put pork belly on a wire rack in an oven at 130c (fan forced) to dry for as long as it takes you to prep other things - i.e. making the chilli/garlic paste, washing/picking holy basil leaves, measuring out sauce ingredients, setting the table etc.

Shallow fry the pork belly

In a skillet, add 2-3 tbs of oil - or just enough so the whole skillet has a thin layer of oil covering it. Heat the pan until the oil is just beginning to start to smoke, then press the pork belly strips skin side down into the skillet. Note - if you have heated the oil to smoking point, i.e. above 210c (presuming you are using an oil suitable for frying like rapeseed, refined olive, and not virgin oils) the skin should puff and crisp up almost immediately. If the oil is not hot enough you run the risk of having chewy skin. Once the skin has crisped up, lower the temperature to med-high and turn each strip over and sear each of the other three sides.

Once done, cut the pork belly into bite size cubes.

Making the stir fry

In a wok on medium heat, add 2 tbs oil. Stir-fry chilli garlic paste for 30sec-1 minute until fragrant. Add sauces and about 2 tbs of water or stock and turn heat to high. Add pork belly cubes and mix them into the sauce. If the consistency is too dry, add some more water/stock. If too loose/thin, keep the heat on until the sauce has reduced to your desired consistency.

Take the wok off the heat and throw in holy basil leaves. Mix everything together until holy basil leaves have wilted.

Serve with jasmine rice and a fried egg.

Method - the short version

1. Cut pork belly into 2.5cm strips, score the skin.

2. Make a 10% salt brine in a sauce pan and boil the pork belly for 1.5 hours

3. Dissolve 1 tbs salt into 1/4 cup vinegar, pour solution into sheet try then place pork belly strips skin side down in vinegar/salt solution and leave for 20 mins.

4. Pat dry pork belly then place in the oven at 130c to dry whilst you prep other things.

5. Heat oil in a skillet until almost smoking, then place pork belly skin side down until skin crisps up. Turn heat down and sear other 3 sides of pork belly.

6. Cut cooked pork belly into bite sized cubes.

7. In a wok, add oil, stir fry chilli-garlic paste for 1 min, add 2 tbs water/stock and sauces (soy, oyster, dark soy) and turn heat to high.

8. Add pork belly and stir-fry for 1 min.

9. Turn off heat, add holy basil and mix through.

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As sure as night follows day, as certain as the sun rises, as inevitable as death and taxes, is pancit bihon at my family home on Christmas day. As far as my memory goes, pancit follows, for it has been a stalwart of every family celebration year after year. Essentially, it is little more than a basic Filipino noodle dish — rice vermicelli cooked in chicken stock with vegetables and an assortment of proteins. But it is more than that, too - it is nostalgia, family, and celebration; it is leftovers on Boxing Day; it is the delicious taste of mum's cooking.

I realise that most people who read this newsletter are not Filipino. And so I write it with you in mind. Why? My guess is that pancit is unfamiliar to you compared to the pad Thais, mee gorengs, chow funs, or drunken noodles of this world. My second guess is that if you were to try making pancit you'd like it. My third guess is that unlike so many of the dishes I make and write publicly about, pancit is relatively accessible and easy to make.

To add one more thing, pancit is nutritious and diverse; it isn't heavy and contains a liberal serving of vegetables with a bit of meat thrown in for good measure. And suppose I haven't sold it already. In that case, it's a dish that makes perfect leftovers - hanging out in the fridge for days, slowly depleting whilst — if you're anything like me — you continually heat up small amounts, snacking on it at odd times of the day, whilst gorging on it for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

So, through this lens, I want to share a recipe with everyone. Unlike most of the recipes I share, which are adaptations of foundational recipes I usually glean from reputable texts, this one here is based on my mum's recipe—the same one she's been using for years and years and years—it's a good'un, trust me.

But as is customary, a little background on pancit bihon and the wider class of dishes known as pancit.

Pancit

Pancit is a general term referring to a class of noodle dishes within Filipino cuisine. Etymologically speaking, pancit is Chinese, a derivative of the Hokkian phrase for 'convenient food'—reflecting the accessibility of the Chinese cooking methodology known as stir-frying. Historically, it is suggested that Indigenous Filipino ethnic groups were already accustomed to making noodles from local ingredients like mung beans and rice. Then, as Chinese settlers brought the tradition of stir-frying with them, pancit and its variations became a staple dish within the broader cuisine.

Pancit Bihon

Pancit bihon is a dish of thin rice vermicelli noodles cooked in chicken stock. An array of stir-fried vegetables and proteins are tossed through the noodles—typical choices include cabbage, carrots, bell peppers, snake beans, and snow peas for vegetables and prawns, chicken, pork, and lap cheong (Chinese sausage) for proteins. The dish is often garnished with hard-boiled eggs, spring onions, and calamansi halves.

My mum always makes a 'pancit sauce' to mix through the final dish after it's cooked—a delicious concoction of fish sauce, lime juice and sugar, weighted to the sour side, providing a piquancy to the savoury noodles.

Recipe

This recipe will serve 5-6 people as part of a main meal or 3-4 people as a meal unto itself.

Ingredients

• 100g dried vermicelli rice noodles

• 1.5 tbs soy sauce

• 1/2 cup of thinly sliced green cabbage

• 1 carrot, julienned

• 6 snap peas, cut diagonally into elongated pieces

• 3 spring onions, cut into 2cm lengths

• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

• 1/2 brown onion, sliced

• 150g chicken thigh, sliced into thin strips

• 1 lap cheong sausage, cut diagonally (Optional)

• 150g prawns, vein removed

• 500ml chicken stock*

• 3 tbs of fat: e.g vegetable oil/lard/chicken fat etc

Pancit Sauce

• 1.5 tbs fish sauce

• 1.5 tbs lime juice

• 1 tsp soy sauce

• 0.5 tbs water

• 1/4 tsp of sugar

Methodology - Long Version

Prep prawns by removing vein, then cutting down the middle lengthways almost in half but making sure to not go through the underbelly.

Soak noodles in room temperature water for approximately 20 minutes.

Heat a wok, add your 3 tbs of fat. The add garlic and onion. Stir fry for a couple of minutes.

Add chicken and prawns and stir fry for a minute or two until prawns have turned orange.

Remove the chicken and prawns and set aside. Then, to the empty wok add the vegetables (cabbage, carrot, snow peas) and stir fry for a couple of minutes, before adding the 500ml of chicken stock. Let the vegetables cook in the boiling chicken stock for about a minute before removing them with a spider and setting them aside alongside the prawns and chicken.

Then to the chicken stock in the wok, add the soaked noodles and cook on high heat, stirring continuously until the noodles have absorbed most of the stock.

Add the chicken prawns and vegetables, along with the spring onions and soy sauce and mix everything together until well incorporated.

Serve noodles on a serving platter, alongside the pancit sauce which can either be poured over the whole noodles if eating family style, or can be used as a condiment/seasoning sauce to be added as needed to individual bowls of pancit.

Methodology - Short Version

1. Prep prawns

2. Soak noodles in room temp water for 20 mins

3. In a wok/pan, add oil and stir fry onion/garlic until fragrant

4. Add prawns and chicken and stir fry for 1-2 min, then remove and set aside

5. Add cabbage, carrot, snow peas to empty wok and stir fry for 1-2 mins

6. Add chicken stock and simmer cabbage, carrot, snow peas for 1 minute, remove and set aside

7. Add soaked noodles to stock and cook until stock is almost all absorbed

8. Add chicken/prawn mixture, vegetables, spring onions and soy sauce and mix everything together until well incorporated

9. Serve on a serving platter with pancit sauce on the side

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Jungle curries are tantalising. They excite, tease, hurt, and impress. They are also simple dishes, both in terms of their ingredients and their preparation, which is why I am surprised that they haven’t gained much popularity among home cooks and food enthusiasts. 

Perhaps they are still perceived as relatively obscure due to strange-sounding ingredients like fingerroot or green peppercorns or onerous because of unusual instructions like making a secondary curry paste. Or maybe it’s because a lot of online recipes for this dish tend to underrepresent it, offering mediocre versions of something that can be truly great and impressive. 

Whatever the case, I hope this post may encourage some people to make this type of dish. In it, I’ll cover some information about the class of dishes recognised as jungle curries before walking through a straightforward but delicious recipe I’ve come up with for a simple jungle curry featuring pan-fried chicken thigh. 

Jungle curries - the dish

Jungle curry, or gaeng pa in Thai, originates from the forested areas of Thailand. Whilst there is a high degree of variation amongst jungle curries from different regions (and cooks), it is safe to say that there are a few common characteristics. Consistently, these curries employ a very spicy curry paste made from a liberal amount of fresh (as opposed to dry) hot chillies and other aromatics like galangal, lemongrass, shallot and garlic.

They use water or stock as the moistening liquid (as opposed to coconut cream or milk). Because of their forested origins, they tend to be abundant in local vegetables and herbs and make use of a local protein at hand, be it fish, frog, river snails, wild boar, pork, chicken or something else. Preparing and cooking the protein is often simple, requiring little more than dropping the raw ingredients into the bubbling curry to be boiled until done. 

To add to the above, jungle curries tend to be ‘thin’ and have a soup-like consistency. And again, harking back to their rural, primitive origins, they don’t contain the foreign dried spices (e.g cumin, coriander seed, etc) that are found in the aristocratic and or foreign curries popular within the broader cuisine (such as yellow curry/gaeng garee, red curry/gaengped, mussaman etc.), 

My experience

Whilst, per the above, jungle curries are often thin and soup-like, contain lots of assorted vegetables, and employ simple protein preparations, in my travels/life, I have found a few jungle curries that deviate slightly from the norm in that they are a little thicker, less soup-like, a little less rustic, and contain more deliberate vegetable inclusions (rather than the customary assortment of whatever is on hand) or no vegetables at all. 

The first of these jungle curries is one from the northern Thai city of Lampang. It features a fiery hot paste, freshwater fish, a single herb (pak chee farang), and nutty fried shallots. Admittedly, I’ve never tried it at the source, but its recipe appears in David Thompson’s Thai Food, and I have made it many times to good effect. 

The second of these curries, gaeng pa yaay yai, hails from Petchaburi province in central Thailand. It similarly features an incendiary hot curry paste imbued with two types of local peppercorn; the protein is beef and grilled over charcoal, and unusually, the curry is thickened with the starchy water left over from washing rice. I was taught this curry by Ying, a local of Koh Samui who, along with her partner, Daniel, run Somrom space - a fantastic culinary program highlighting Thai food, traditional cooking techniques and the cultural forces that shape the cuisine.

I liked this curry so much that I featured it as the final dish at my last pop up with my friend Andy Beynon. It was a hit amongst the diners that day, almost everyone I spoke to lauded it which was nice.

Today’s dish - jungle curry of chicken thigh

Not long ago, I was, as you do, thinking about these small variances in jungle curry preparations and it struck me that my preferences - i.e. less rustic, less soup-like, less vegetables1, and a more refined approach to the cooking of the protein, are probably a product of my context (i.e Westerner living in London; frequently dining out; accustomed to a certain style of cooking) and are therefore potentially shared by a lot of people that read this newsletter.

Through that lens, I wanted to create a simple recipe for a jungle curry that incorporates these elements whilst being relatively straightforward - something one could whip up without too much hassle.

The dish, the recipe of which I’ve shared below, is the end result. It features a fairly standard jungle curry paste, brined and therefore very, very juicy pan-fried chicken thigh, fried shallots and coriander. It is, really, really tasty. And extremely spicy2. So without further ado, have a geez below.

Recipe

The below recipe is for 2 ppl. As I did in my last post, I’ve provided two methodology walk throughs - a detailed one with photos and an abbreviated one.

Brine for chicken

• 300ml water

• 30g salt

• 2 tbs soy sauce

Curry paste

• 0.5 tsp salt

• 10 green Thai chillies or birdseye chillies (about 20 grams)3

• 2.5 tbs chopped lemongrass

• 1 tbs chopped galangal

• 1 tsp chopped lime peel

• 2 coriander roots4

• 4 cloves of chopped garlic

• 6 tbs chopped shallot

• 1 tsp shrimp paste

Fried shallot

• 5 tbs chopped shallot5

• A little oil for frying

Rest of the curry

• 2 boneless chicken thighs, skin on

• All of the curry paste (which should be about 4 tbs)

• 1/4 cup loosely chopped coriander6

• 250ml chicken stock

• 1 tbs fish sauce

• 1 tsp sugar

• A little oil or lard to fry the paste in, about 2-3 tbs

Methodology - the long version

Brine the chicken

Dissolve 30g of salt into 300ml of water, then add the two tablespoons of soy sauce. In a container, place the chicken thighs and cover with the brine. Make sure the brine covers the chicken. If it doesn’t, try a different container. If you don’t have a different container, make more brine using the ratio above (i.e 1:10:2 salt/water/soy) until you have enough to cover the thighs. Leave for a minimum of 1 hour. Four hours or overnight also works well.

Make the curry paste

Pound your ingredients into a fine paste in a mortar and pestle. Do this by chopping your curry paste ingredients finely (except for shrimp paste) then adding them all to the mortar (except again for the shrimp paste) and pounding them until a coarse paste is achieved. Then add the shrimp paste and pound further until the paste is finer. Alternatively you can use a food processor.

Fry shallots

In a pan add some oil and heat and add your shallots and stir until golden. Remove, then set aside. Note - you do not need to deep fry your shallots. In the images below I have as I made a big batch but simply sautéing them in a little oil until golden brown will do just fine.

Pan fry chicken thighs

Remove the chicken thighs from the brine and pat dry with paper towel. Add some oil to a skillet and add the chicken thighs skin down and cook for a couple of minutes. I find adding a weight helps crisp up the skin7. Flip to the skinless side and cook until chicken is cooked through. Remove, and set aside to rest while you make the curry.

Make the curry

In a wok, or pan, add some oil and add about 3 tbs of oil or lard. Add the curry paste and stir fry for about 1-2 minutes. If the curry paste starts to burn add a tiny splash of stock or water. Season with sugar and fish sauce. Add chicken stock, mix everything together.

Assemble the curry

Cut the chicken thigh on a 45 degree angle into slices (a sharp knife helps). In a serving bowl add your curry broth. Add the chicken slices on top of the broth, then add the fried shallots and coriander as garnish.

Methodology - the short version

1. Make brine, add chicken thighs and leave to cure for 1-4 hours

2. Make curry paste by pounding ingredients together in a mortar and pestle, alternatively use a food processor

3. Fry shallots in a little oil until golden brown, set aside

4. Pat chicken thighs dry then pan fry skin side down until skin crispy, flip and cook until done. Remove and set aside

5. Add 3 tbs oil to a wok/pan, fry curry paste for a couple of minutes

6. Season with fish sauce and sugar, before adding chicken stock and stirring everything together

7. Add curry broth to a serving bowl. Cut chicken thigh into slices. Place chicken on top of broth. Garnish with fried shallots and coriander

Over the last couple months I’ve developed a keen interest in stir-frying - the history of it; the art of it and most importantly the delicious dishes that are borne from it. Part of this interest is down to my rather strange proclivity for rabbit hole niches, but part of it is also down to the simple fact that I’ve come to identify the simple stir-fry as the perfect reprieve to the relatively onerous dishes that I tend to magnetise toward.

The other day I stumbled across a recipe for a dish that I haven’t had for a long time: Beef in Oyster Sauce or nuea pad nam mun hoi — a dish of Chinese origin that, like many similar dishes, has found itself a staple within Thai cuisine. It is merely beef, stir fried with a choice of vegetables and oyster sauce amongst other basic seasonings - but it is undeniably tasty and moreish. Having built up a little more knowledge of late when it comes to some of the finer points of getting a stir-fry right I tweaked a few things in the recipe per personal preference and the result was so incredibly delicious (and simple) that I thought I should share it.

Recipe (for 2 ppl)

I am slowly realising that not all recipes are created equal. I’m also realising that many authors skim over things that they assume are implicit (I have been guilty of this). I’ve never fancied myself as a productive recipe writer because I tend to cook fairly traditional foods (as opposed to personal creative inventions) so I never saw there much point in trying to fix what isn’t broke. However, I seem to have come far enough now that I find myself often wanting to put my own imprint on dishes - not to change their essence but to refine them slightly according to what I know. The below recipe is an example of this in action - albeit an extremely simple one.

A note on cooking methodology walk throughs

I realise that the detail of a recipe is dependant on its audience. If you are giving a recipe to a chef you don’t have to explain everything in minute detail. Though if you’re writing a recipe to a novice, it’s probably helpful to be more comprehensive. In this light, I’ve provided a long version of the cooking method and an abbreviated method below. Do let me know if this is helpful (or useless) as it’s just a thought/experiment for now.

Ingredients

Beef Marinade

• 2 tbs soy sauce

• 2 tbs Shaoxing wine

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 2 tsp corn starch

• 1/2 tsp salt

• 1/4 tsp sugar

• 1/2 tsp sesame oil

Primary Stir-Fry Ingredients

• 300g of rump

• 5 cloves garlic, roughly chopped

• 1 long red chilli

• 1/3 cup of spring onions, firm parts (see below for more info)

• 2 tbs of oyster sauce

• Pinch of salt (about 1/4 tsp if you want to measure it)

• ~ 150ml of chicken stock (+ more on hand if you need it)

• 3 tbs oil

Potato starch or Cornstarch slurry1

• 1 tbs corn or potato starch mixed together with 2 tbs of water

Method - The Long Version

Preparing the Beef

Cut the beef into thin strips of about 1/4 of a centimetre. Cover the beef in water, then repreteadly agitate it by squeezing it, massaging it roughly with your fingers and or kneading it with your knuckles for about 1-2 minutes.

After you’ve sufficiently agitated the beef, get as much moisture out of it as possible by squeezing it through a sieve until it’s exuding barely any juice.

Once the beef is relatively dry make the marinade by adding all marinade ingredients in a separate bowl and stirring it together so that the sugar, salt, starch and baking soda is dissolved and/or evenly distributed. Then, add the marinade to the beef and again massage it in with your hands. Note - this process of agitating the meat is a component part of the broader Chinese technique of ‘meat velveting’. For more on meat velveting see this post. For a clip of it watch this video.

Preparing the Veg and Aromatics

Chop the garlic very coarsely. I find finely minced garlic burns too easily in the wok.

Cut your red chilli into nice uniform segments. Cut your spring onions into 2cm lengths. I find the firm parts of a spring onion work better for a stir fry so find the firmest green part (not white) and use that. The parts where the spring onion stalks fork are often quite firm.

Blanching the Beef

In a pot of boiling hot water, blanch the beef for 1 minute. Remove with a strainer and set aside on a plate or tray.

Making The Stir Fry

Heat a wok on medium, add garlic and stir fry for a minute until fragrant. Add spring onion and chilli and stir fry for a further 30 seconds.

Add blanched beef, oyster sauce, salt and sugar, turn heat to high and stir fry for about 30 seconds.

Add 150ml of chicken stock, turn the heat off. Give the slurry a good stir to ensure the starch isn’t sitting at the bottom of the water, then add two teaspoons of slurry to the wok, directly on top of the chicken stock liquid.

Mix everything together for about 10 seconds and a sauce should form. Taste and adjust as necessary. If it needs more salt, add some salt; if the sauce is too gloopy add a little more chicken stock (and likely salt).

Method - The Short Version

1. Cut beef into uniform strips

2. Massage/agitate in water for 1-2 mins; then squeeze dry

3. Make marinade with marinade ingredients, add to beef and mix well

4. Cut chilli and spring onion into uniform pieces

5. Blanch beef in boiling water for 1 min, remove set aside onto a plate

6. In a wok, add oil, stir fry garlic for 1 min, add spring onion + chillies, beef, oyster sauce, sugar, and stir fry for a a minute or so

7. Turn off heat, add chicken stock then add 1 tsp starch slurry

8. Mix well until a sauce forms.

It's taken me many years to learn how to make a good Chinese stir fry. It seems strange, but if I deem 'good' as comparable to, or better than, an average Chinese restaurant (in the UK or Australia), then it is undoubtedly true.

Within the Western lexicon, 'stir-fry' has become a catch-all phrase encompassing virtually any dish where ingredients are thrown into any which pan and mixed together. And whilst the term has become a little fast and loose, I'm here for it because I feel that the humble stir-fry, be it reflective of a 'proper' stir-fry or not, has become a beloved emblem of culinary ease and convenience all across the Western world.

At the same time, I am more interested in stir-fry stir-fries, the sort that resembles the method of cooking borne out of Chinese food traditions—ones made with high heat and a wok. So, it is through this lens that I write this article.

Yet, even through this lens, a stir-fry is ostensibly simple. The preparation time is minimal, and on the surface, the cooking technique is fairly rudimentary. However, the dish is a little harder to master than it appears. I would bet that most average punters following a decent recipe would fail to produce a great dish.

Whilst even in the Chinese tradition, stir-frying encapsulates a variety of dishes, from simple vegetable dishes to twice-cooked meat dishes, noodle stir-fries, and the ever-popular fried rice dishes, in the context of this article, I am focusing on a common type of stir-fry—the velvet stir-fry, wherein incredibly tender meat is stir-fried with typically one or two vegetables.

I've always marvelled at the sublimity of these types of stir fries. Growing up, going to the local Chinese restaurant with my family or friends was common. This was a while back, I'm talking 20-odd years ago - well before the interest in cooking truly began. Even back then, though, I distinctly remember noticing and appreciating how tender the meat was compared to virtually any other cuisine I had ever tried and how delicious (both in taste and mouthfeel/texture) the sauces that coated my go-to dishes.

Years later, these two features of a stir-fry continue to impress on me. I've since learned the mechanics of both features - i.e. the tender meat and the delicious sauce. For the meat, the Chinese employ a technique called velveting (more on this later), a preparation which makes proteins incredibly tender and juicy. As for the sauce, I'm sure many of you know it's very simply thickened with starch (often corn or potato). But what might surprise many people is that the sauce is often so simple in nature. I remember eating at a Chinese restaurant as a teenager, and as I was lapping up a simple stir fry with a thick, savoury sauce, I asked the chef how the sauce was made - expecting to get told of a variety of intensely flavoured ingredients and an inordinate amount of unhealthy oil. He said, "just chicken stock, soy sauce and cornstarch". It turns out that is all one needs to make an undeniably tasty stir-fry sauce.

So, against this personal backdrop, I wanted to share a dish I've been making frequently—one that harks back to the simple stir fries I marvelled at as a kid and, in many ways, pays homage to the simplicity inherent in this ancient cooking style. But before I do, as is customary in this Substack, a little background on the history of the dish in question—or better still, the cooking style in question.

Stir-fry origins

The stir-fry is a dish that has emerged from the food traditions of ancient China. Paraphrasing Grace Young in her book Stir-frying to the Sky's Edge, there is some debate as to when stir-frying originated. Some historians have it being invented during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 220). In contrast, others suggest it did not appear until the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Most agree, though, that it wasn't until somewhere between the 14th and 17th centuries during the Ming dynasty that stir-frying became widespread and popular. Interestingly, historians cite ancient Chinese manuscripts that emphasized slicing foods thinly and evenly as evidence for the presence of stir-frying.

Origins aside, a stir-fry is generally considered a dish wherein small, uniformly cut ingredients are mixed or tossed together in the presence of shallow oil or fat so that they are cooked quickly and evenly.

Home stir-fry technique vs restaurant stir-fry technique

The term stir-fry is a little bit of a misnomer. As I understand, in Chinese the term for stir-frying chau/chao is said to translate to more of a scooping/tossing action (as opposed to a stirring action) as seen when chefs toss ingredients in the wok back and forth with the intense flames from the high-powered burner leaping up and catching some of the food in the air as it is tossed.

This action affects the taste of the resultant dish. Paraphrasing Kenji Lopez-Alt in The Wok: Recipes and Techniques, as food is thrown into the air, microscopic beads of fat/oil will vaporise when they make contact with the searing heat of the burner - giving the food a quintessential charred or smoky flavour, sometimes referred to as wok hei.

This motion and the resulting taste are tough to achieve with a home set-up. Home stoves (which typically have a BTU rating of ~ 10,000 BTUs per hour) aren't powerful enough to generate a flame that can leap over the wok as one tosses ingredients back and forth. A commercial burner with up to 20X BTU output than a home stove does.

At home, it is often better to control the inputs into the wok and cook ingredients one-by-one, setting them aside on a plate after they are cooked and then throwing everything back in the wok to toss through once done. This is generally what I do, and it works well.

The dish in focus: pork and snap pea stir-fry

Unlike many of my posts, there is little cultural or historical background to the dish I am spotlighting today. It is a mere velvet stir fry of lean pork with snap peas. In my Chinese cookbooks and across reputable blogs and experts I follow online, I have seen many dishes that have pork stir-fried with cucumber or pork stir-fried with chives or chillies. The technique in these dishes is simple - it requires a velveting of the meat, one vegetable to accompany the pork, and basic seasonings. That is what I am reflecting when I make this dish. I chose snap peas because I like them and they're easy to find.

Velveting the meat

Velveting is a technique employed by the Chinese which involves treating the meat (through both marination and handling) so that it is extremely tender once cooked. I have learnt that there are two key elements at play when tenderising meat effectively. The first is agitation of the meat through squeezing, massaging, and generally roughly handling it. This helps break down fibres within the muscle in the same way that beating a chicken breast with a mallet does when making a schnitzel.

The second element is treating the meat with an alkaline component—most commonly baking soda or egg white. The science here is a little dense, but all I understand is that alkalinity has a multifold effect on the meat—it denatures proteins, aids in water retention, inhibits proteins from tightening up during cooking, and helps convert collagen to gelatin—all things that help produce extremely tender pieces of meat in a cooked dish.

Other elements are also at play in the marination; additions like soy sauce (or salt), cornstarch, and liquids (like Shaoxing wine) have subtle effects on the tenderness, but much less so than the two factors above.

Finally, to velvet meat, the meat is often blanched in oil or water before added to the stir fry to par-cook it. I'm unclear about the exact reasons for this, but I imagine it achieves a few things. One is that it ensures that things like egg white, excess cornstarch, etc., don't dilute the main stir fry. It also enables the meat to be evenly cooked. I prefer water velveting because it's healthier, less onerous to clean up, and the taste is similar to oil velveting.

To summarise velveting through the lens of the dish in the spotlight - i.e. the pork and snap peas stir fry, the meat is first trimmed of any fat or connective tissue (lean mean is best for velveting). It's then frozen for 30 minutes, making it easier to slice. It's then cut into uniform, thin strips. It's then agitated in water - i.e. squeezed, pressed, vigorously massaged. It's then squeezed and drained of any moisture so it is as dry as possible (excess water will dilute the marinade and inhibit its ability to cling to the meat). The meat is then marinated for about 30 minutes using baking soda, soy sauce, Shaoxingwine, cornstarch, and sesame oil. Finally, during cooking the meat is blanched in water for about 45 seconds then set aside - ready to be thrown into the stir fry.

The sauce

The sauce in this dish is simple - just soy sauce, chicken stock, and a potato starch slurry. A potato starch slurry is simply a mixture of potato starch and water. It's necessary to mix the starch in water to evenly disperse it. If it's thrown in the wok dry, large concentrations will be cooked, and you will get gloopy, lumpy sauce spots. Cornstarch also works (and is probably more commonly used) if you can't find potato.

In the making of this dish the process is straight forward. Toward the end of cooking, I add some soy sauce and chicken stock to the wok. I then turn off the heat. Before adding the potato starch slurry I give it a good mix around to make sure the starch is not just sat at the bottom of the slurry and then drizzle it into the wok making sure that it does not hit the hot metal, only the liquid/chicken stock for if it hits a hot metal surface it can clump. I stir everything together off the heat and wait until it thickens.

The recipe (serves 2)

• 250g pork (either leg, loin, or shoulder)

• 1/4 tsp baking soda

• 1 tsp cornstarch

• 2 tbs soy sauce

• 1 tbs Shaoxing wine

• 1/4 tsp sesame oil

• 100ml chicken stock (preferably homemade but good quality store bought works too1)

• 3/4 cup snap peas, sliced in half on the diagonal

• 2 cloves of garlic, chopped very coursely

• 1 tbs potato or cornstarch mixed with 2 tbs of water

Trim pork of any fat and connective tissue. Place into the freezer for 30 mins. Slice against the grain into uniform pieces.

Add sliced pork to a bowl, cover with water. Vigoursly sqeeuze and massage the pork for 1-2 minutes. Be rough with it and don't worry too much about tearing it.

Drain pork over a sieve, scrunching it with your hands and pressing it into the sieve to get as much water out of it as possible.

Add the drained pork to a clean bowl and add baking soda, cornstarch, soy sauce, Shaoxing wine, and sesame oil to it. Mix the marinade ingredients into the pork, again massaging them so the marinade penetrates the meat as much as possible. Let the pork sit for at least 20 minutes.

Boil water in a pan, add pork and cook for about 1 minute. Remove, then set aside.

Heat a dry wok until smoking. Turn off the heat and add a couple of tablespoons of oil. Turn the heat back on to high and add the snap peas. Stir fry on high heat for about a minute—or until you see the snap peas starting to char. Remove the snap peas from the wok and set aside on a plate.

Add a little more oil to the wok, and on medium heat, stir-fry the garlic for about 20-30 seconds. Add snap peas and pork to the wok. Add 2 tablespoons of soy sauce around the mid-rim of the wok. Add around 100ml of chicken stock (or about 6 tbs) to the wok.

Give the potato starch slurry a good swirl, then add it directly on top of the liquid chicken stock. Turn the heat off and mix everything together until a slightly thickened sauce forms. Taste and adjust if necessary—i.e., if it's underseasoned, add some salt; if the sauce is too minimal, add some more chicken stock, slurry2, and salt.

Khua kling is an iconic dish of Southern Thailand. It's also one of those dishes that seems to be on the cusp of Western mainstream attention. With a keen enough eye, you'll see it on menus across London. It's sometimes called 'dry curry' or simply identified by its cooking technique, e.g., 'chicken stir-fried with turmeric curry paste'. I have had very good versions at Kolae, Kiln, Plaza Khao Gaeng, and Singburi—all of which rival the ones I have had across Southern Thailand.

Khua kling is a dry-curry featuring meat or fish (often minced) stir-fried with fiery Southern Thai curry paste. It is often garnished with thinly sliced kaffir lime leaves and served alongside cooling vegetables and herbs, which temper the heat of the dish.

Southern Thai curry paste

Khua kling employs a curry paste common to a host of Southern Thai dishes, such as gaeng som, gaeng kua sikrong muu, and gaeng gati.

This curry paste is characterised by spicy dried chillies (birdseye and/or jinda), black peppercorns, and fresh turmeric. These distinct additions to the usual curry paste constituents (like lemongrass, galangal, garlic, shrimp paste, etc.) give the paste and the dishes that are born from it classic Southern Thai attributes like fiery heat, pepperiness, and the beautiful orange hue that has become a quintessential feature of the cuisine.

Khua kling is an incredibly spicy dish. There are few Thai dishes that I have tried that are hotter (the version pictured above almost killed me). The heat comes primarily from the type and quantities of chillies used. Whereas a lot of more commonly known Thai curries (e.g. gaeng ped/red curry, panang, mussaman) use non-spicy large dried red chillies as the base, khua kling is made with Southern Thai paste which typically features a substantial quantity of incendiary little Thai chillies sometimes called prik kee nuu or birdseye chillies. To add to that, because the dish contains no coconut cream or milk, and very little sweetness, there is nothing to temper the heat of the chillies.

When I make khua kling, I reduce the heat of the curry paste by mixing dried Mexican arbol chillies (which have a medium spice level) with hot Thai birdseye chilllies because making it the Southern Thai way produces a dish that is unpalatably hot for virtually anyone I am cooking for. I’ve found that a 50/50 mix is near the limit of what I find enjoyable, and a 75% arbol to 25% birdseye is a safer option when cooking for other people.

Protein

Khua kling is so versatile because many different proteins can be used to good effect. In my travels across Thailand, I have found minced pork and minced chicken to be the most common meats used in the dish and certainly this matches with most of the recipes you see online. However, fish is a viable and tasty option and I have had a particularly good version made from swordfish.

My favourite rendition of this dish though is a version I once had that was made with mutton. Since having it I have recreated it many times with good results. If you get a cut that has a little bit of fat on it and cook the meat so that it caramelises slightly, good things happen. The subtle gameness of the mutton, combined with the roasted undertones of browned meat, merges with punchiness of the herbacous, spicy paste. It is a pleasure to eat.

Cooling vegetables

In the same way that some European restaurants provide bread and butter as a starting point for a meal, many restaurants across Thailand provide a platter of fresh herbs and vegetables to accompany the main parts of a meal. As a Westerner, I am only partially used to this way of eating. I always eat the vegetables diligently, trying to get a feel for the custom, but it seems a bit odd with some dishes. Khua kling is not one of those dishes. If there's a plate of food which benefits from completely unseasoned, raw, naked vegetables, it's khua kling.

When you're three-quarters of the way through this dish, your mouth is on fire and beads of sweat are popping on your forehead; a cooling piece of cucumber or a crispy shard of cabbage is a welcoming accompaniment. Because we are limited with the variety of herbs and vegetables available in the UK (and even Europe) compared to South East Asia, I have found that cucumber, cabbage, and durable lettuce varieties are great veggies to serve alongside this dish.

A recipe

The below recipe is one that I have come up with, which I think results in a dish which is true to the source in that it's hot hot and peppery but also suitable for Western palates. I have used finely chopped mutton but lamb or beef mince works just as well. And to reiterate, the protein in this dish is perhaps the most interchangeable item, so if you've only got pork mince, use that; if you have some fish in the fridge that needs to be used, try hand mincing it and throwing it in this dish; the world is our collective oyster.

Serves 2

Paste

• 7 grams dried arbol chillies

• 3 grams dried birdseye chillies

• 10 grams (about 2.5 stalks) of lemongrass (white parts only)

• 5 grams (about a 1-inch piece) galangal

• 1/4 tsp lime peel

• 7g (about a 1 inch piece) fresh turmeric

• 10g (about 3 cloves) garlic

• 5g shallot (French or Thai is fine)

• 1/2 tbs shrimp paste

• 1.2 tsp black peppercorn

Other Ingredients

• 250g mutton or lamb mince

• 2-3 kaffir lime leaves

• a tablespoon or so of oil or lard

• 2 tbs fish sauce

• 1/2 teaspoon sugar

I make this paste by pulverising the dried ingredients (chillies and peppercorns) in a spice grinder first. I then pound the other ingredients in a mortar and pestle, adding the chilli/pepper powder mix about halfway through when there is enough moisture in the mortar. If you don’t have a spice grinder you can just grind them to a fine powder in a mortar and pestle.

Once the paste is done, I julienne lime leaves by folding them and then using a very sharp knife to slice them into hair-like slivers. If I am not cooking the dish straight away, I put a piece of kitchen roll on top of the lime leaf hairs with a few drops of moisture to prevent them from drying out.

To make the dish, I add about a tablespoon or two of lard or oil to a wok on medium heat followed by 2 tablespoons of curry paste. I fry the paste for a few minutes before seasoning it with fish sauce and sugar. I then add the meat, turn the heat to high and stir fry until the meat is slightly caramelized and cooked through.

Serve with cooling veggies and rice. A cold beer is a nice idea also.

Pork chops are underrated. Frequently overlooked by beef, wings, thighs, pork belly, ribs, you name it, the humble pork chop gets a bad rap not because it is not as tasty as more common cuts but because it is harder to make tasty than other cuts. With proper attention and care, pork chops can be delectable. When lean, adequately seasoned meat is combined with a smoky, crispy crust and perfectly rendered, incredibly flavourful fat - there are few things better. But getting to this point takes a little work.

The recipe I'm sharing below was almost accidental. When I inadvertently came up with it, I had been cooking and smoking a lot of pork in my kamado, recipe-testing many variations for an upcoming pop-up. Repetitively cooking lots of pork (mostly belly and jowl) in the kamado taught me/reinforced a few things. First, seasoning/brining/marinating need not be complex. Out of all the marinades/brines/cures, I experimented with the simplest (salt, sugar, dark soy) turned out to be the most delicious. The second thing I learnt, or better still got a better sense of, was the relationship between time and temperature and fat rendering. Most of my belly and jowl experiments in the kamado involved cooking the pork for hours over low heat, doing as such, I got a better feel for how and when fat renders.

So, back to this pork chop here. When it came time to cook it, I figured the simplest marinade of fish sauce (a preparation common in Thailand) would be sufficient. I also figured that instead of searing the chop on either side for a few minutes- as a lot of recipes advise- (and relying on that small amount of time to render out the fat), I would throw it in the oven a little above the minimum temperature required to render non-saturated fat (which is around 60c) and let it sit there for a while whilst I prepped other things. This low and slow time in the oven not only renders out the fat but also aids in drying the surfaces of the chop (which is an essential step in getting a crispy crust later on). Once I pulled the pork out of the oven, I decided to probe it and saw that it was 50 Celsius - which was perfect in that it gave me room to sear the pork in a pan to finish the cooking. After a quick sear in a hot stainless steel pan over a few minutes I had an immaculate pork chop.

Overall, the recipe is very simple. It involves marinating the chop in fish sauce for a few hours, patting it dry, and throwing it in the oven for a while before pan-frying it until cooked. I've provided more detailed instructions below, but before I get onto that, below are some thoughts on why I think this recipe works so well.

Why it works

1. Marinating the pork in fish sauce for a few hours achieves a few things. The high levels of salt and umami-rich compounds like inosinate and glutamate season the meat, making it more flavourful. Also, the fact fish sauce is largely made up of salt and water means in this instance, it acts as a sort of wet-brine aiding moisture retention firstly via the pork absorbing some of the water and secondly (and relatedly) the salt denaturing proteins, which help them better retain water molecules during cooking.

2. Letting the pork slowly cook in the oven at 70c similarly achieves a few things. Firstly, it dries out some of the surface moisture left by the fish sauce, which is important when trying to get a crispy crust during the pan-frying stage. Secondly, it renders out a lot of the fat in the chop, even before it gets into a hot pan.

3. The final searing over high heat in a pan renders out more fat (which results in delicious, buttery textures when eating), and also catalyses the Maillard reaction (aka 'browining' aka 'caremalisation') whereby amino acids react with reducing sugars to form delicious new smoky/charred flavour compounds.

The recipe

• One thick pork loin chop (aka centre loin or centre cut chop), skin removed

• 1.5 tbs fish sauce

• 1.5 tbs fat - either veg oil, lard, another animal fat, or ghee (optional)1

Rub the fish sauce into the pork chop in a tray or a container with a flat bottom, coating it on all sides. Let it sit for a couple of hours, turning it occasionally

Get your oven to 70c. Pat the pork dry with a paper towel. Place it in the oven on a wire rack for 40 minutes.

After 40 minutes, remove the chop and pat dry with a paper towel, again removing as much moisture as possible.

Set a pan to medium-high heat, add your 1.5 tbs of fat, and swirl it around so the whole surface is coated. Using tongs, hold the chop fat side down to sear the fatty exterior, constantly adjusting the positioning of the chop (i.e., tilting it forward or backwards) so that all of the fat cap is seared and an even brown colour.

Finally, sear either side of the pork chop until a crust develops. I do this by using a weight and flipping it every thirty seconds (flipping encourages more even cooking), probing the thickest part with a thermometer until it reads 60c. Let it rest for 5 minutes then carve it into pieces by first cutting the L-shaped bone loose, then slicing the fillet into 1cm thick slices.

Pad Thai, like fried rice, is much more difficult to cook than it appears. A lot of the recipes out there, I have found, are flat-out bad. Another issue is that Pad Thai is one of those dishes that requires a little cooking experience; intuition if you like - both of which are hard things to glean out of a book or a recipe. For example, one of the tricky things about cooking Pad Thai (at least for me) is cooking the noodles correctly. Because the noodles are cooked in a sauce, you must first soak them to a level of pliability that will allow them to be finished in the sauce. Some recipes suggest you steep noodles in boiling water for five minutes, others advise soaking the noodles in lukewarm water for half an hour, and some tell you to boil the hell out of the noodles (which is always a bad idea).

Compounding the issue is that each recipe will have a different type of noodle. Some will use thick noodles, others thin; some might even call for forms of vermicelli. And, of course, the size and shape of your noodles affect how much they will be cooked if they are steeped, soaked or boiled. So, whilst plonking wider rice noodles in boiling water for 5 minutes might work, doing the same with thinner noodles might cause them to turn into a soggy mess during the cooking process.

My point here is that it can be hard to distill the right approach into a simple instruction. I think the correct instruction is to soak your noodles to the point at which you are satisfied, and it is up to you as the cook to determine this. The only real way to do this is to practice this dish until you develop an intuition for it. But you have to start somewhere, I guess, and hopefully, this article, a reflection of my many trials and tribulations with this dish, serves as an honest starting point.

The Dish

As is customary, before I get into the workings of this dish, it's first important to take a look at its cultural context and history. Pad Thai is said to have been created (or, at the very least, promoted) by Thai Prime Minister Plaek Phibunsongkhram in the 1930s. Its promotion was partly a response to national rice shortages and partly an effort to spur nationalism and unification of the country. It certainly worked, and to this day, the dish is renowned the world over as an enduring emblem of Thai cuisine.

Core Features

The key constituent parts of Pad Thai are rice noodles, egg, garlic chives, beansprouts, dried shrimp, tofu, and a sauce mix containing fish sauce, palm sugar, and tamarind. Shrimp is a common protein, as is chicken and pork. It is customary to serve the dish with condiments that the eater can use to self-season, such as lime wedges, additional roasted peanuts, roasted chilli powder, fish sauce, and granulated sugar.

Problems & Solutions

Below are some problems and solutions I’ve realised when making this dish over the years.

Soggy noodles

As I waxed lyrical about before if you pre-cook your noodles too much, they'll overcook in your sauce mix, and you'll either end up with soggy, unappealing noodles or worse - they'll disintegrate in the pan. The most straightforward remedy to this is practice. Cook this dish a few times, and you'll get a feel for (a) how pliable your noodles should be before you add them to the wok and (b) how long they need to cook in the wok to be done. As a general guide, though, if you use the typical pad thai noodles (dried rice noodles of 3mm-5mm in width), soaking them in lukewarm water for 20 minutes is a good starting point.

Serving size & sauce-to-noodle ratio

I've found that a lot of published recipes completely over-index on the quantity of noodles called for. As just one example, one recipe I've used in the past (from a reputable chef) calls for 125 grams of dried noodles to go with just a few mere tablespoons of sauce mix (for a 1x serving size). Not only is this way too many noodles for the average person to eat in one sitting, but it also results in a dish where the noodles aren't adequately seasoned and where the pan doesn't get hot enough to char the noodles or caramelise the sauce mix (and I say this using a high-powered Iwatani portable burner that outputs 15,000BTUs or around double the amount of a standard home gas stove). I've found that 45 grams of dried noodles with a sauce mix that equates to around 4 tablespoons of liquid results in the perfect serving size for one person1 and results in a dish where the noodles are fully enveloped and seasoned by the sauce.

Portion control in the wok/pan

This is closely linked to the above point. I see a lot of recipes advising one to throw in 3-4+ portions into the one pan. For the same reasons espoused in this post, this is generally a bad idea and will result in a more steamed dish than fried. I have a 14-inch wok, which is a common size available to home cooks. As a rule of thumb, if I am cooking for 2 people, I'll get everything set up - i.e. 2X quantity of noodles, 2X sauce mix, etc. etc. and cook one portion at a time - eyeballing how much noodles/sauce/beansprouts to throw in for each portion.

Because this dish takes 4-5 mins to cook, it really doesn't extend the cooking process too much. If I'm cooking for 4X people, I'll do two portions at a time, which takes a little more concentration to get right but is still very doable. I'll never try to cook more than two portions in one pan. I think if you do, you lose the subtle extravagances of this dish, like the slight caramelisation of the sugar in the sauce mix and the wok hei that you can impart (providing you have a decently used and seasoned wok).

A recipe

The below recipe is one I've arrived at, and there are a few things to call out. I don't use a main protein because I like the dish just as much with simply egg and dried prawns. Though prawns, chicken or pork would make great additions. I also use gung siep dried prawns, a dried shrimp product from Phuket, which is exceptionally tasty. I don't think you can get them here, so normal dried prawns would work in a pinch. Finally, whilst I use regular firm tofu - the fancy pressed, marinated tofus marketed at veggies and vegans (like this one) would be excellent in this dish.

• 45g dried flat rice noodles, 3mm-5mm width

• 1/2 tbsp dried prawns

• Around 2 tbsp firm tofu, cut into approx 4cm x 2cm rectangles (about 1cm thick)

• 1 tbsp chopped preserved radish (sometimes called preserved turnip)

• 1 egg

• 1/2 cup bean sprouts

• 3 tbsp garlic chives, cut into 3cm lengths

• 1 tbsp chopped roasted peanuts

• 2 tbsp tamarind water2

• 1.25 tbsp fish sauce

• 1 tbsp palm sugar

• 0.5 tsp dark soy sauce

• 2 tbsp of lard or vegetable oil

• A cup of water on hand

Cover noodles in lukewarm water for 20 minutes, then set aside. They should be pliable but still a little stiff.

Make a sauce mix by mixing tamarind water, fish sauce, palm sugar and dark soy until the sugar is fully dissolved.

Heat a wok on high heat. Add lard or vegetable oil. Add the egg to the oil, then add the radish, dried prawns, and tofu on the outer sides of the egg (for a visual, see the full video of the process above).

As the egg cooks, mix the radish, dried prawns, and tofu around the oil, allowing them to cook in the fat. When the egg is 80% cooked, flip it, then scramble it into large, rough pieces. Quickly add the noodles, sprouts, chives, sauce mix and peanuts and begin to stir everything together vigorously.

The noodles should cook in the sauce as you stir. If you have a gas hob, you can adjust the heat accordingly. If it seems too hot and the sauce mix evaporates too quickly, turn the heat down slightly. But try to maintain a high heat, which will eventually caramelise the sugar in the sauce mix whilst also slightly charring the noodles. If you have an electric or induction hob, reduce the heat by taking the pan off the stovetop and mixing things off the heat.

In any instance, if the sauce mix evaporates too quickly and you feel the noodles haven't cooked through, add some water to the pan, which will help to moisten the noodles. Finish up when the noodles are cooked through and coated evenly in a sauce mix that has mostly evaporated but remains a sticky, tart envelope that covers the whole dish.

Enjoy.

Pad see ew may be the greatest noodle dish the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, here in the UK, it has not achieved the same cultural status as in Australia and the US, where it is a stalwart of many restaurants.

Many people ask me why Thai food. I'm not really sure of the answer. Pad see ew might be the reason. That's not entirely true, but it's not entirely false either. When people ask me why I like Thai food so much, I often say it's a combination of growing up in Sydney, which has great Thai food, and already being accustomed to the flavours and ingredients of SE Asian cuisines via my mum's Filipino cooking. That seems about right, more or less. Though if it were possible to examine the first part of that rationale, rather than finding a young me exploring the diversity of Thai food in my youth, you’d more likely find me gouging on pad see ew at every opportunity. Perhaps pad see ew really was the acorn that grew into the oak tree.

Pad see ew - the dish

Pad see ew is a Thai noodle dish of fresh wide rice noodles (sen yai in Thai) stir-fried with light and dark soy sauce, sugar, kai lan (Chinese broccoli), egg, and a protein, usually pork, chicken, or beef.

Like many noodle dishes in Southeast Asia, pad see ew has its roots in Chinese cuisine. It is said that migrants from Guangdong in southern China brought it to Bangkok in the early 20th century. In many ways, it is similar to chow fun, a Chinese dish that typically includes fresh rice noodles stir-fried with beef and soy sauces.

How to get this dish right at home

I have a chequered history with this dish. I have made it many times and failed many times. Wok cooking at home is difficult—it requires skill and repetition (and a well-seasoned wok).

There are two critical components, I have found, to making a good plate of pad see ew at home, and by good, I mean one which is on the road to being on par with something you’d find in Thailand and which is distinctly unlike most versions you will get here in the UK. The first is the quality of rice noodles. Every place I’ve had pad see ew in the UK has used dried rice noodles1 - i.e. the ones that you can find at your local Asian grocer, the type that keeps in your pantry indefinitely. Again, there’s a good reason for this. Fresh rice noodles are laborious to make, and they keep poorly. In my experience, they lose their vitality after a day. So for most restaurants - dried is the way to go. And make no mistake, you can make a tasty dish using dried noodles, but if you’re not hindered by the economics of running a restaurant, you’re willing to go out of the way to find ingredients, and you want to taste something similar to the real deal - fresh rice noodles are the way to go.

For my London people, lucky for you, you can find fresh rice noodles at Lo’s Noodle factory in Chinatown. It’s an institution that has been selling hor fun and cheung fun noodles (and Chinese buns) for god knows how long. Lo’s is situated in a grimy back alley near Gerrard Street. The factory itself is a little hole-in-the-wall operation with a couple of blokes hard at work manufacturing portion upon portion of freshly made rice noodles.

If and when you go, make sure to get the cheung fun noodles, which are sheets of rice noodles essentially (as they are meant for the Cantonese dish of the same name). You can then cut these into the appropriate sen yai size - around 6-7cm works.

The second component of making a good pad see ew is good technique. Wok cooking at home is hard (at least for me). After a lot of trial and error with this dish, I have found that the most important thing to making it home is having a well-seasoned wok2. Even though my wok has seen a lot action in its 7-year existence, I haven’t, until recently, been good at maintaining the seasoning. The thing is, if you cook anything with water in it (for longer than a few minutes), the seasoning can come off. And if any acid goes in there you’re kind of screwed. So extra care has to be made to re-season your wok if any of these things happen. Consideirng I make a lot of Thai stuff in the wok (water based curries, things with tamarind in them) I am constantly stripping the seasoning of it. When it came to making pad see ew (or similar noodle dishes), the noodles would often stick. A spatula would be needed to move them around (i.e. you couldn't swirl them around using the motion of the wok), and inevitably, I would end up with a dish of broken fragments of noodles. Not very luscious. Not very good. Anyway, now that I know, I always quickly re-season the old boy before giving it any noodle treatment. It takes a couple of mins3 and is well worth it.

The second most important thing - in regard to wok technique - is not overcrowding the wok. Just cook one serving at a time. Trust me on this. Who knows, you might be able to cook two portions, but it’s definitely harder, and you lose a lot of control. Picture this. Imagine trying to make 15 servings of pad see ew in one wok. What would that look like? The noodles would be so heavy, they would break everywhere. It would be difficult to incorporate the sauce so that the noodles are coated and seasoned. You’d have an extremely hard time trying to mix everything together. The heat of the wok would dissipate under the volume of contents, and you no doubt would end up with a gluggy, broken, bland and unseasoned mess. Now imagine cooking just half a serving. All of the noodles would be in contact with the blazing hot surface of the wok, you’d have oodles of surface area and space to toss them around using either a spatula or flicking the wok to make them jump. The sauce would cover all the noodles, coating them and ensuring they’re seasoned appropriately. This is why doing a small portion at a time is important.

A recipe

The recipe I have arrived at is simple. It is based on the recipe in David Thompson’s book Thai Food (a foundational book on Thai cuisine and cooking - see here for an article I wrote featuring it) - except I often use spring greens instead of kai lan because they’re tasty and similarly hardy/durable and I can get damn good ones from Wild Country Organics at Broadway market on a Sunday morning (whereas kai lan - depending on where you get it can be old and tired). I also marinate my protein in a little meat tenderiser (see this Instagram post if you’re not picking up what I’m putting down) and some oyster sauce.

Serves 14

• 200g - 250g cheung fun noodles cut into 7cm widths by 20-30cm lengths

• 1 cup loosely packed spring greens (or Chinese broccoli or choy sum)

• 1 egg

• 1 skinless chicken thigh, sliced into stir fry pieces and marinated in 1 tbs oyster sauce and a 1/4 tsp meat tenderiser (the meat tenderiser is completely optional)

• 1 tbs light soy

• 1 tbs dark soy

• 3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

• 1 tsp sugar

• A little water on hand

• Lard or vegetable oil

• Sprinkle of white pepper (optional)

Make your sauce mix by combining the soy sauces with sugar and stirring until the sugar has dissolved.

Heat a wok on medium, add about 1 tbs of lard or neutral vegetable oil then add your garlic and chicken and stir-fry on medium-high until the chicken is around 80% done. Remove everything from chicken and garlic from the wok and set aside in a small bowl. Wipe the wok clean with a paper towel.

Get everything on hand and ready nearby (see the image below).

Heat a wok without oil until you start to see rising from the surface. Turn off the heat and add 2 tbs of lard or vegetable oil. Twirl the wok to make sure the fat covers as much surface area as possible.

Turn the heat back on to high and add the beaten egg. Swirl it to scramble it slightly, then add noodles, greens, cooked chicken/garlic and your sauce mix. Stir-fry the mixture on high heat continuously for about 2 minutes. If the heat of the wok is evaporating the sauce mix too much (i.e. you see it burning on the bottom or you notice there’s no moisture left in the wok), add a little of your water on hand to moisten the mixture. Finally, if possible, try flicking the wok to toss the noodles (rather than using a spatula to mix everything together), as the noodles are delicate and can break easily if the spatula is used too aggressively. If you have a well-seasoned wok (per the above), then you can use a spatula, but be gentle to avoid breaking the noodles.

For a video of the process end to end, see the below Instagram clip.

Enjoy.

If you were to ask my very personal opinion on what makes a good chef or cook, I would say—probably after much protracted daydreaming—that knowledge of the culture and science of food is as important as anything. 

While we might not be aware of it, much of food culture and tradition is, in fact, shaped by science. Better put, much of what we eat was born out of humans' ingenious responses to the behaviour of the physical and natural world. Take salami, for example, or any of the myriad cured pork products that exist across cultures. These foods were created as a response to the degradation that transforms meat into bacteria-infested spoilage. 

Humans, likely through happenchance, learnt that salt prevents rancidity, and hence delicious things like prosciutto, saucisson sec, lap cheong, naem, and nem chua were born. Back when foods like these were created, I doubt the civilisations that made them understood the scientific mechanisms at play. And whilst it might be easy to argue that learning that salt keeps harmful bacteria at bay isn't an advanced revelation - there are countless other examples of ancient cultures creating more ingenious food products in response to their specific environment. In his book In Defence of Food, Michael Pollan explains this with the example of corn. 

In Latin America, corn is traditionally eaten with beans; each plant is deficient in an essential amino acid that tends to be abundant in the other, so together corn and beans form a balanced diet in the absence of meat. Similarly, corn in these countries is traditionally ground or soaked with limestone, which makes available a B vitamin in the corn, the absence of which would otherwise lead to the deficiency disease called pellagra. 

As I said, examples like this abound throughout history. Soy is another such one. The soybean, by itself, is a terrible thing to eat. It contains an assortment of antinutrients that are detrimental to human health. It took the ancient cultures of Asia to figure out the complex ways it can be transformed into highly nutritious and digestible foods like tofu, tempeh, miso and soy sauce. Pre-industrial Mediterranean cultures practised cooking tomatoes with olive oil. Unbeknownst to them, combining olive oil with tomatoes and heat makes lycopene – a potent antioxidant – more readily available to us during the digestive process. 

I find it remarkable that humans could arrive at such decisions and methods. If you think about these things long enough, metaphysical questions arise. For example, have corn and beans always represented a complete amino acid profile that is nutritious for humans, and somehow, primitive civilisations figured this out? Or, did the invisible hand of evolution somehow guide humans' nutritional requirements in response to the fact that corn and beans were once the only available foodstuffs?

Whatever the answer, it is clear that whereas once upon a time, our knowledge of the behaviours of the natural world was minimal, as time marches on and human civilisations get more advanced, our ability to understand these processes grows.

When it comes to cooking and making delicious food, understanding the cultural elements that shape food and the scientific processes at play when food is made is necessary. It's one thing to know that ceviche was a dish created to preserve fresh seafood in ancient times. It's another thing to understand that the acid in citrus juices denatures protein structures in the same way heat does. Having a working understanding of both is where creativity and mastery begin.

So having said all of this, I wanted to wrap up this piece with three of my all-time favourite cookery books—all of which somehow speak to this interrelationship between culture, science, and cooking. 

The Art of Fermentation: An in-depth exploration of essential concepts and processes from around the world by Sandor Ellix Katz

This book was a revelatory for me. It highlighted the magical alchemy of food preservation and showed me that food can be an artist's canvas. In many ways, this book spurred my broader enthusiasm for cooking, explaining in simple terms why food was fermented in the first place, what biological forces are at play when we ferment food, and how we can create delicious ferments at home. It is a beautiful blend of scientific and cultural writing.

 I remember reading a passage on mead (honey wine) with Katz recounting different variations he had encountered in his time, like the Polish pultorak or the Mayan (and Mexican) balché and offering a simple recipe one could make at home. I remember being astounded that an actual alcoholic beverage could be made at home by simply mixing honey with water and letting it sit for a while. When I attempted to make it myself, finally tasting the finished product that was effervescent, sweet, subtly sour and delicious I remember a feeling of pure joy came over me; joy at the mere process of creating something so simple but complex at the same time. Michael Pollan, in his foreword to the book captures its essence perfectly:

The Art of Fermentation is much more than a cookbook. Or rather, it is a cookbook in the same way the Zen and the Art of Archery is a how-to book aviout bows and arrows. Sure, it tells you how to do it, but much more important, it tells you what it means, and why an act as quotidian and practical as making your own sauerkraut repersents nothing less than engaging with the world.

McGee on Food & Cooking: An encyclopedia of kitchen science, history and culture by Harold McGee

I'm sure this book will go down in history as one of the canonical texts on cookery. It is incredibly dense, at a hefty 884 pages with ultra-small print. It covers everything related to food, eating, and cooking in the utmost depth—heavily weighted toward the scientific factors at play when we cook but also imbued with cultural and historical perspectives. 

Many times, I have found myself referring to its index to find answers to obscure questions I've had that weren't easily answered by trawling the internet. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this book is a much more reliable and easy-to-use resource than the Interwebz. Few things related to food and cooking aren't in here. And unlike the web, it's reliable. So many things I've picked up from this book, from learning about how collagen breaks down during the cooking process, to the optimal weight proportions for vegetable stocks, to the history and mechanisms behind dryageing, to how the calcium and magnesium in unrefined sea salt aids crispness in pickling. So many things; some foundational, some minute - all valuable. It is truly a fantastic fountain of knowledge. 

Thai Food by David Thompson

No other book has had more of an impact on my journey as a cook than this one. It is a sprawling work that traverses the history of Thai food, the cultures that shaped and continue to shape it, and the traditions inherent to the cuisine. It contains 300-odd recipes ranging from classics like pad Thai, to more obscure regional dishes like pla meuk pad (stir-fried squid in its ink). It offers an exhaustive and descriptive list of classic Thai ingredients (again ranging from common things like lemongrass to the more mysterious condiments like pla raa). Above all, it beautifully addresses how and why Thai food came to be, whilst offering clear, tactical and practical explanations of how to cook dishes.

There are so many important things I've learnt from this book; it would be hard to list them all out here. A few that stood out are: learning that formal Thai meals are served with a clear categorisation of dishes into soups, curries, salads, relishes, and accompaniments or side dishes; or learning the technique and importance of 'cracking' (i.e. splitting coconut cream) when making coconut-based curries; or learning about the variances in regional cuisines of the nation - from the rustic North and North East, to the intricacies of the historical cuisines of the aristocracy, to the intensely spicy foods of the South. I also recall one particular passage in which Thompson lays out an exercise where one builds a typical salad dessing layer by layer (e.g. fish sauce, sugar, fish sauce, lime juice) tasting each layer before moving onto the next. Reading that excerpt and doing the exercise highlighted to me the subtlety of the melding of Thai flavours and how salt (fish sauce), acid (lime juice) and sugar interact with each other.

And harking back to my original argument on the interrelationship between culture and science - whilst this book is mainly weighted toward an articulation of the cultural elements at play in Thai cooking, as a masterful and talented chef, Thompson frequently explains why different cooking processes are employed and the mechanisms at play when they are - like why acidulated water helps with deep frying battered leaves, or how papaya contains enzymes that aid in the tenderisation of meat, or how freezing prawns denatures collagen structures and inhibits their ability to bind to one another when making classic Thai prawn cakes. 

More than any other cookbook I've read this one contains the perfect balance of history, science, tradition, culture and cooking technique.

"Chilli basil stir-fry" has become synonymous with the rise of Thai food in the West over the last fifty-odd years. Most diners are blissfully unaware of its proper form. Some people, typically those who are into their food (I am loath to use the word 'foodies'), will know this dish as the romanization of pad kaprow. Fewer people will know that pad kaprow in the West often uses anise-scented Thai sweet basil instead of the dish's namesake, holy basil. 

Pad kaprow, in its truest sense, is a Thai dish that features meat stir-fried with chilli, garlic, and holy basil, seasoned with soy sauce, fish sauce, or oyster sauce (or some combination of these.) It's typically served with steamed rice and a fried egg. The key ingredient, holy basil (kaprow in Thai) or ocimum tenuiflorum, is an aromatic herb from the mint family with a distinct peppery taste - by and large dissimilar to the anise flavour of Thai basil. Holy basil, though, is hard to come by in the West, so restaurants often use Thai basil in lieu - because even though it has a completely different taste profile, it still makes a delicious meal. 

However, this distinction between basils is not the focal point of this article. Whether you use the more readily accessible sweet basil or hunt around to find holy basil (tips below), you'll end up with a banging meal if you cook it right. I wanted to write a few words about this iconic dish because, of late, I've been messing it up. Sounds strange for such a simple dish, but it's been something that I've tended to eyeball recently because, at face value, it's such a straightforward thing to cook. But gradually, I've found myself producing lacklustre plates of food until one particularly bad result prompted me to go back to basics, look through a trusted recipe and come up with a solid course correction that makes a pretty good plate of pad krapow.

Pad krapow - core parts 

Pad kra pao often features minced pork, chicken or beef. However, versions that use chunks of chicken or even crispy roast pork are not uncommon. 

Chillies and garlic are used in large quantities, sometimes mashed into a paste in a mortar or sometimes finely minced. 

The seasoning usually combines soy sauces, fish sauce, oyster sauce, and white sugar. The version below uses light and dark soy in similar quantities. 

In addition to the above stalwarts, many recipes call for long beans cut into short 1-2cm lengths. I use French green beans here in the UK. 

Finally, pad krapow is typically served with kai dao or crispy fried egg, which is made by frying an egg in a lot of hot oil. 

Common errors

Below is a collection of errors that can be made when making this dish. Some I've found myself guilty of, and others I see prevalent in the many versions of this dish doing the rounds on the Interwebz. 

Crowding the wok/pan with too much meat

If you, as I have done, try to make more than a couple of servings in one go, you might find that you crowd your wok so much that, one, there is too little surface area to adequately fry your meat and two, your meat is packed so close together that it ends up steaming rather than frying. I have a 14-inch wok (which is on the larger side for a home kitchen), and I still find that best results are achieved when cooking one portion (150g of meat) at a time. I can stretch it two, but diligence is needed to ensure a decent end product. 

Being stingy on the chilli

This dish is supposed to be spicy. When making it slap-dash style, I'd often use 2-3 small birdseye chillies alongside a few cloves of garlic, finding that the final dish was too meaty and lacked the kick it's renowned for. For a single plate of pad krapow, I've found that a combination of birdseye chillies (around 3) and long red chillies (approximately 2) works very well.

Omitting the dark soy

This is really just my opinion, but omitting dark soy makes the dish look a little anaemic. More like a laab as opposed to pad krapow. Sure, a seasoning of fish sauce and light soy works well, but equal parts dark and light soy produce a great-looking and great-tasting dish. 

A recipe

Below is a recipe that I arrived at after a little fine tuning. It works nicely.

• 150g pork mince

• 3 cloves of garlic 

• 4 birdseye chillies

• 2 long red chillies 

• 4 green beans, cut into 1.5cm lengths

• 1 tablespoon light soy sauce

• 3/4 tablespoon dark soy sauce

• 3/4 teaspoon white sugar 

• 1 egg

• Lard or oil

• A little cup of water on hand

• 1/3 cup holy basil leaves

Pound chillies and garlic into a coarse paste using a mortar and pestle. Alternatively, use a food processor. 

Fry your egg. I use a small wok here because its curved shape allows me to shallow fry the egg without needing to load too much oil. To explain, if I were using a wide saucepan, I'd have to use a lot of oil before it reached a reasonable height. Anything small with curved sides works well. Crack your egg into a small bowl to make adding to the wok/pan easier. Add oil to your wok/pan, heat to medium-high and drop your egg in. Cook for about 3 minutes or until cooked to your liking (e.g. runny, jammy, etc). Remove and let sit on a paper towel. Note - I find that adding enough oil so that the egg is half submerged when dropped in ensures the fried egg maintains a nice, compact circular shape. 

Heat a wok to medium, add about a tablespoon of lard or oil, add chilli and garlic paste, and beans and stir fry for about a minute. Add the pork mince, turn the heat to high and stir fry for a minute or two. Note - depending on how fatty your pork mince is, you might have too much fat in the pan. If that's the case, feel free to spoon a little out, taking care to not take any chillies/garlic with you to ensure the final dish isn't too oily. 

Add soy sauces and sugar and stir fry everything for another minute or two over high heat. If/when the soy sauces dry up over the heat, moisten the pan with a little splash of water—not enough to make a full-blown sauce, but just enough to give the mixture a little moisture and reduce the saltiness—a couple of tablespoons is usually fine. 

Turn off the heat and add holy basil. Stir fry for a minute until leaves are wilted. 

Serve on one plate with steamed jasmine rice and your fried egg. And maybe an ice cold beer.

Enjoy.

One of the maladies of modern life is the insidious shrinking of the passage of time. I don't mean this in a chronophobic way; I, for one, am relatively undisturbed by the passing of the years or the prospect of getting older. What I am getting at, though, is the very contemporary affliction of feeling we do not have enough time in the day/week/month to do the things we truly enjoy.

Much of it, I think, comes down to the economic and political system we live in. An inevitable consequence of a capitalist society, whose very nature is predicated on the imperative of profit at all costs, is that idle time, as we once knew it, gradually becomes eclipsed by the unbridled pursuit of continual growth. Think about it this way: once upon a time, pre-industrial revolution, the vast majority of economic trade was characterised by the purchasing of material goods - food, furniture, clothing etc. But as time marches on, and the economic system we live in requires perpetual multiplication to sustain itself, the finitude of the material world has meant that competing players in the game (like modern-day limited companies) have needed to find novel ways to keep the juggernaut growing outwardly. 

As consumers, we are at the epicentre of the system; in a sinister way, we live in symbiosis with it. Without us, it dies; without it, we die - or so we are led to believe. Constantly, we are bombarded by assaults on our time, attention and money. During the course of a day, we are tempted by the allure of media subscription services like Netflix, beckoned by social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, called by even the basic communication vehicles we use, like WhatsApp and Facebook, and most pervasive of all - confined by the lengthening days we are spending working for companies who are doing their best to keep their heads above the proverbial water.  

What does that mean for us? Many things, but the focus of this essay is the impact this has on our orientation toward food and eating. Eating is, or at least was, an important custom of human nature. As Carolyn Steel puts it in her terrific book Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World,

"Ever since culture has existed, food has been central to [human] rituals... As the rhythym of our daily lives and the embodiment of life and death, food epitomises the dual meaning of 'mundane': a word that we use to mean 'boring, humdrum, everyday', yet whose deeper root is 'worldly, cosmic, of the universe' (from the Latin mundus)." 

Yet, as consumerism fastens its vice-like grip on contemporary civilisation, the sanctity of food is becoming increasingly diminished. As Michael Pollan writes in The Omnivore's Dilemma, capitalism has a tendency to

"erode the various cultural underpinnings that steady a society but often impede the march of commercialization. The family dinner and more generally a cultural consensus on the subject of eating, appears to be the latest such casualty of capitalism."

This erosion of the importance attached to food is present in my own life. Constantly, I feel like I'm waging war against time, balancing the gnawing compulsion to produce—to be productive—with the natural desire for idle time—time spent doing human things like cooking deliberately and eating slowly.

Meanwhile, my attention is becoming increasingly fractured by the multitude of technologies that demand it. Time spent at my day job is justifiably demanding, and I have a nagging desire to make something of myself, which manifests itself in constant activity. All of this means that I, too, am at the mercy of the inexorable shrinking of time.

So, what the f*&k does this have to do with noodle soup, you may ask. Well, let me tell you. Tom yam noodle soup, or guay tiew tom yam, is a traditional Thai street food. It is delicious, comforting, fresh, healthy and something I often crave as a weeknight meal. The problem I have is that making dishes like this (and many others) is at odds with the frenetic pace of modern life. 

Good food, I believe, has its roots in culture and tradition. So many dishes we know and love across all cuisines were born hundreds of years ago when food was unadulterated by the industrial forces that shape it today. Back then, there were no stock cubes, refrigerators, ready-meals, or chemical preservatives - just raw ingredients, attention and care. But as these dishes have stood the test of time and remain popular today, and as the institution of the family meal is becoming a distant dream, fewer people are willing to put in the time it takes to make good food, favouring instead fast food, takeaways, frozen dinner or worse still, abominations like Huel.

Whilst I am no food saint and often find myself on the receiving end of a weeknight Uber Eats, I also long for good food made with care and attention. It's just that the zillion other things that are competing for my time often win out. Recently, I've found myself almost unintentionally configuring ways that I can make good, classic dishes in a timely manner so that on a weeknight, rather than succumbing to the convenience of a quick (but unhealthy and undynamic meal), I can whip up something like a bowl of noodle soup, or a curry, or a host of other dishes in 20 odd minutes without having to cut too many corners or make too many compromises. Tom yam noodle soup is the first dish I found a reliable way to do as such.

My methods are not groundbreaking—they are, at best, mere simple applications of meal preparation. But in some ways, I consider them subconscious acts of defiance to the modern malaise, a rightful objection to the whittling away of time or the persistent compulsion to order just one more Deliveroo.

Guay tiew tom yam

Let me first debunk any confusion about the tom yam soup I'm talking about. Many people may associate tom yam with the traditional Thai soup tom yum goong - the sour, spicy soup of prawns. Tom yam noodle soup or guay tiew tom yum is different.

Dotted across Thailand are noodle soup vendors that offer a handful of dishes, such as boat noodles, duck noodle soups, yen ta fo, wonton soups, and pork noodle soups. Some of these dishes can be made 'tom yam' style, whereby lime juice, roasted chilli powder, peanuts, and fish sauce are added to make a spicy, sour style of soup.

Guay tiew tom yam - core elements 

I've grown fond of guay tiew tom yam. It's vibrant, savoury, and hearty—with a good kick of sourness and heat.

In my personal experience, guay tiew tom yam typically consists of a pork broth base, with the eater's choice of noodles, some greens or bean sprouts, various fillings like meatballs, pork mince, fish cakes, and crispy wonton skins, and garnishes like fried shallots/garlic and coriander. I'm sure there is nuance and complexity that I am missing as a Westerner living in London, but the above is what I know from experience about this dish (i.e. eating it in Thailand), and what I have learnt about it.

The quick-fire version I make at home is different from the real thing because I'm going for something that balances time with deliciousness, so there are some compromises. But the end result is pretty damn tasty. 

In order to best explain my approach to systemising the making of my expedited version of guay tiew tom yam, I'll break down the core elements of my dish and how I prepare them in advance. 

The broth

The broth, or soup base, is the most crucial element of this dish. It needs to be hearty, densely flavoured and clear. A week ago, I wrote an article about how I make an adaptation of a high-end Chinese consommé known as shang tang. When I make a large batch of it (around 3 litres), I freeze individual portions using these soup trays I bought from Amazon, which gives me around 270ml (because I overfill) of stock per portion - 2x blocks is perfect for a bowl of noodle soup.

The blocks sit in freezer bags in the freezer so that whenever I want a bowl of guay tiew tom yam, I simply take a couple out and throw them into a little pan to come to temp while I assemble the other ingredients.

The protein

My quick version of guay tiew tom yam relies on seasoned pork mince as the primary protein because it's damn tasty and is the easiest to prepare in advance and store. To make it, I get a big batch of minced pork (or mince it myself) and season it with fish sauce and sugar (1 tbs of fish sauce + 1 tsp of sugar per 500g of meat). Then, I'll portion 150g of seasoned meat into little containers and freeze for long-term storage. 

When I'm cooking guay tiew tom yam, in a saucepan next to my blocks of stock, I'll have another saucepan of boiling water going to which I add a portion of seasoned pork mince to cook through in a couple of minutes, setting it aside once I'm done. 

The noodles

This one is easy. I almost always have varying shapes of rice noodles in my pantry, or at the very least, some instant noodle packets floating around. Whenever I make guay tiew tom yam, I add whatever I have on hand to the pot of boiling water I previously cooked the pork. 

The vegetables

I’m not exactly sure what vegetables are customary with guay tiew tom yam in Thailand. The times I have had it have either been without vegetables or with bean sprouts. I rarely have bean sprouts in the fridge because they perish so quickly. But I tend to keep spring greens in my fridge because they're hardy, keep for a long time in the fridge, and are great to stir fry, have in soups (like this one), or even in salads. 

When I make guay tiew tom yam, I put a sieve above the boiling water and put a few spring green leaves in and cover it while the noodles cook - setting them aside after a minute or two.

Garnishes: fried shallots and garlic + coriander

I make guay tiew tom yam with a simple garnish of coriander and fried shallots and garlic because those garnishes are both customary and easy for me to have on hand.

I make big batches of fried shallots and garlic to have them on hand for various dishes - salads, curries, and soups. The benefit of making them myself is I can use healthier oil (i.e. refined olive oil vs GM soybean, corn, canola oil, etc), and I reserve the cooked oil, which is imbued with a delicious onion and garlic fragrance and is a tasty ingredient in many different SE Asian dishes. It's also just a tasty alternative to neutral oil. Once I've made a big batch, it stores for a very long time, so when making guay tiew tom yam, it's a simple manner of grabbing some from whatever container I've stored them in and adding them to the top of my steaming bowl of noodles.

Seasoning: roasted chilli powder, lime juice, peanuts, fish sauce

All these seasonings (except for limes, which I usually have or can get by walking the 1 minute to my local off-license) keep for a long time. I make batches of roasted chilli powder by dry roasting big dried red chillies in a pan until 70% (surface area) blackened, then blitzing them in a spice grinder. Equally, store-bought chilli powder dry-toasted in a pan until smoky would also work. 

As for the peanuts, I buy these from my local SE Asian grocer (Starnight, Hackney), which means I can just add a tablespoon as a topping without needing to roast whole nuts or chop/blitz them. They last a very long time in the pantry, so I always have them on hand.

The assembly

In case you got lost in the above medley, I’ve jotted down the recipe and process below.

Recipe (for 1 serving)

• 2x cups of chicken stock

• 150g seasoned minced pork

• 80g of dried noodles of choice

• 3 or so large spring green leaves (or something similar like pak choi, chard, etc)

• 1 tsp fried shallots + 1 tsp fried garlic

• 1 tsp roasted peanuts

• A palmful of coriander leaves

• Fish sauce, lime juice, roasted chilli powder to taste (I use about 1 tbs fs, 1.5 tbs lime, 1 tsp chilli powder)

Set a saucepan on medium heat and put 2x frozen blocks of stock in there to reheat.

Meanwhile, in another saucepan of boiling water, add one portion (about 150g) of seasoned pork mince, cook until done, then set aside. Cook dried noodles in the same pan until done. At the same time, blanch or steam (like I do) greens using the same pot. Set both noodles and greens aside.

Add cooked noodles, pork mince and greens to a bowl. Pour in hot stock. Top coriander, fried shallots and garlic. Season with fish sauce, lime juice, and chilli powder.

As I reach the end of this piece, something tells me that the philosophy behind this approach to home cooking is not all that it seems. Surely, any cooking methodology where convenience is the paramount consideration betrays the very essence of what food is all about. Sure, I kind of stumbled on this fairly basic approach to making noodle soup and the process gives me some time back in the evening to focus on other things. But what other things? 

As I was pondering this question, I was reminded of a fable I read in Carolyn Steele's book Sitopia—an old-time story told by locals of the Aegean islands. I will leave it with you as a parting note.

“Much of it comes down to the story of an encounter between some wealthy Americans and an old Greek man sitting under a tree in an olive grove, sipping ouzo and staring out to sea. The Americans enquire from the Greek whether he owns the olive grove, and when he says that he does, they ask him why he doesn't hire people to harvest his olives and export the oil. 'And why would I do that?' asks the man, to which the Americans reply that he could get rich and do anything he likes. 'You mean,' says the man, 'that I could sit under this tree and sip ouzo at sunset?'“