duck-shaped pain

Tonight's meal was an experiment. I kept thinking about the yummy pad siew [3] I had at the Thai restaurant last week. I could have gone back and had some more (which I probably will), but I was more interested in learning how to make it myself.

I couldn't find much in the way of help. I found quite a few Thai restaurants that had their menus on the net, and the only real agreement among them as to what pad siew involves comes down to rice noodles, bok choy or some other sort of green, and a dark soy-based sauce. Some describe it as a black bean sauce, others are silent on the whole black bean issue. No recipes, though.

So I went to the book store and thumbed through Thai (or, at last resort, pan-Asian) cookbooks. Many of them mentioned pad siew in the text, describing it as a popular, near-ubiquitous noodle dish, one so called because siew is a dialect word for the type of soy sauce used in the recipe. Unhelpfully, none of the books I consulted (not like there's a wide range of Thai cookbooks offered for sale here in town) bothered to give a recipe.

Finally, after trying different search strings and spellings, I found this recipe. I wasn't sure when reading it if it was too similar to what I had the other day (the one I ate definitely had a hint of the dreaded fermented black bean here and there), but without any other recourse, why not?

1. Marinade Decisions Need to be Made.

The recipe pretty much avoids the whole issue of how the marinade is supposed to be put together. It has lots of solid ingredients in it -- the ginger, scallions, garlic and shallots -- but doesn't say much other than that they should be minced or chopped. How finely, though? Are they supposed to be small enough to be suspended in the marinade liquid? Are they supposed to sink to the bottom, providing flavor but not much in the way of texture?

Because the marinade recipe calls for an egg, I decided to go for the former. The egg acts as a binder, so that the tiny pieces of solids won't separate from the liquids, or at least theoretically. I also decided to make the thing in the blender, because it would chop the solids into much smaller pieces than I could. It could also make a more sturdy emulsification between the egg and the sesame oil, so that the marinade wouldn't come apart while the meat was soaking in it.

Some substitutes had to be made -- I used tamari soy sauce instead of the sweet dark soy sauce called for, since the Asian grocery store was out. I got a hold of some good tamari a few months ago, so not a big loss. I also didn't have any tiny Thai bird chiles, so I substituted one serrano pepper. Still hot.

2. The Meat and its Waiting Period.

I went for chicken instead of beef. When it comes to things with sauces, I like chicken and/or vegetables better than anything else. I've had decent beef in sauce, but I prefer my beef to be beefy. I like its taste all on its own, preferably rare and dripping and accompanied by steak fries. Chicken has to have something done with it, though.

Boneless thigh meat, not nasy desiccated boneless breast meat, at least not in my world.

I cut the thighs up into little chunks and poured the brown fluid over it. With nearly all brown liquid ingredients in it (soy sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil), there's really no other color it could be. Sealed the bowl. Stuck it in the fridge next to the waiting bottle of Gewurztraminer. Poured myself a glass and sat down to wait.

Watched hockey. Watched some Simpsons episode I've seen a hundred times (Homer gives Grandpa his kidney).

45 minutes go by and now I need to get ready to take the chicken out of the fridge.

3. Chopping, Soaking, Cooking, Eating.

I take my big tall black enamelware pot and fill it with water. It heats, so I take it off the stove, place it in the sink, and drop the rice noodles in. I swirl them around in the water, and let them soak for about nine minutes. I have to keep checking and checking their doneness, partially because I am unsure of their soaking time and partially because I love rice noodles.

They tender up, so I drain them and then run cold water over them. More sampling ensues. They're even better cold.

I cut up the bok choy. I make the other sauce mentioned in the recipe -- a mixture of sugar, fish sauce, sesame oil, soy sauce and oyster sauce. Since I do not have any palm sugar, I reach for the turbinado sugar instead. Since the liquid ingredients are cold, it does not dissolve. So I add some honey, which sweetens it up and makes it pleasingly thicker.

I heat the oil in the wok. Since I'm starting with the chicken (meaning I have no test onions or garlic handy to test the oil temperature) I am mildly paranoid of having my oil either too hot or too cold. I get neither. It's hot when I put the chicken in, but the lingering marinade is cold enough to drag the oil temperature down in it, and it all needs a few minutes to recover. Finally, things bubble, and the marinade starts to reduce.

I add the bok choy, the noodles and the remaining sauce. There are a lot of noodles -- I used a whole package, but it wasn�t that big. It takes two utensils to maneuver it all around the wok, ensuring that everything has a chance to mingle and touch. I cook it for a few more minutes and it's done.

Was it good? Yes. It was. It wasn't quite like what I had at the restaurant the other day, but it was similar. The sauce seemed a lot thicker, which gave it a nice texture, but was unexpected. This is due to making the sauce in the blender and then, later, adding the honey to the secondary sauce. Still, I'd make it again. It looked like it had a bit too many ingredients, but since most of them end up in the marinade, it's not that big of a deal.

It won't keep me from going out to get some at the restaurant, though.

[1] I love the For Sale ads in the paper. Not like I ever buy anything out of them, but I like seeing what people have for sale and trying to decide why, exactly, this particular item is now for sale. Never-worn wedding dresses and the like are fairly self-explanatory. Things like "250 classic rock CDs in tightly-sealed case -- $1500 or best offer" are clearly not. There's a couple of ads that have been running ever since I moved back in 1999. One is for some oil painting of a "big green field" that has been appraised at $21,000 but the owners will "entertain any offer." Another is for some green woolen ski sweater, originally bought for $200 (ad placers are big on the original prices of things, as if that has any bearing to whether I would buy something or not). It started out at $90, then went to $45 and has been cruising along at $30 for six months now. These people have to have spent at least two or three times that on the ad alone. My favorites are the ads where people are giving things away for free, be they piglets or vinyl siding. Unfortunately, they're rare in our paper, but the Oregonian up in Portland ran a large contingent of free ads a couple of times a week. I never actually got anything out of them, but each item was good for a few moments' of relaxing contemplation. Some people meditate. I try and figure out how I can get nine boxes of free filmstrip projector parts [2]home in the car.

[2] I actually have a filmstrip projector. It's not one of those neat ones that plays a tape, so it makes the "ding" sound every time you need to advance the filmstrip one frame. But it does have a mighty powerful lamp, and was once featured in a "dead media" exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. However, I have no filmstrips. Woe is me.

[3] Yummy is always better than not yummy. Also, pad see ew, pad si iew, pad se yu -- I couldn't get one consistent spelling.

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