Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Bangkok’ a snapshot of the city
Author dives deep into its food, culture ‘Train’ fried rice
“Bangkok” is Leela Punyaratabandhu’s detailed portrait of the bustling metropolis she grew up in. Though she moved to Chicago for college, the food of her youth always remained important. She started writing the wildly popular blog She Simmers
about cooking Thai food and splits her time between Chicago and Bangkok.
As its name suggests, “Bangkok” (10 Speed Press, $35) doesn’t spend any time on other parts of Thailand. “It’s a snapshot of Bangkok,” says Punyaratabandhu. “There are dishes that are older than the city itself and dishes from my family.”
She also mostly avoids the cliched images of street food hawkers and characters milling about Khaosan Road. She focuses on the everyday experiences, from a turbulent boat ride on the Chao Phraya River to the many family meals at her grandparents’ house that is “big enough for the entire clan, should anyone need a place to stay in times of need.”
“This is the book I wanted to write before my first book,” she says. In the end, Punyaratabandhu and her publisher decided to release the relatively leaner “Simple Thai Food” first in 2014. “The goal was to ease people into traditional Thai food,” she says. “The book ended up being just as authentic, but the mission of the book was to pare down the recipes to ones that were easier to make.”
“Bangkok” makes no such concessions. The hefty book includes recipes with ingredients you’d be hard-pressed to track down at your local grocery store, unless you regularly can find fermented red tofu, pandan leaves or winged beans. Fortunately, you can order most ingredients online, and Chicagoans can find everything at Golden Pacific Market (5353 N. Broadway).
Even with the focus, Punyaratabandhu wasn’t able to include everything she wanted. “Paring down the list of foods was painful,” she says. “I actually cried when making the final decision.”
What finally made the cut differs from what most people might associate with Bangkok. There's no basic red curry or tom kha gai soup, but you will find recipes for 24-hour chicken matsaman curry and braised chicken in coconut-galangal cream sauce. Pad Thai pops up, albeit wrapped in an omelet and requiring 24 ingredients, including fresh shrimp tomalley. No matter what
mers.com) (shesim
Leela Punyaratabandhu's “Bangkok: Recipes and Stories From the Heart of Thailand” is her second book and the one she wanted to write first. your level of comprehension of Thai cuisine is, you’ll inevitably learn something new.
It also turns out that Bangkok is much more diverse and varied than you might imagine. As Punyaratabandhu writes, Bangkok cuisine can be described as an “indigenous Central cuisine” of Thailand, with “Chinese, Mon (a state in Burma), Persian, Portuguese, modern European, North American, and more …”
That means some dishes look surprisingly inauthentic. “Every race and cuisine and ethnic culture that has come through Bangkok, we retain that and come up with something unique,” Punyaratabandhu says. “A lot of recipes you can’t find anywhere else, even in Thailand.” For example, a recipe for train fried rice includes ketchup, not exactly authentically Thai. As she explains in the book, in the early 20th century, “rail dining was all about luxurious imported items that weren’t available to everyday people.” At that time, “butter, sausage, peas, and European seasoning sauces” were as prized as “foie gras, burrata, or lobster is today.”
Punyaratabandhu hopes the book corrects misconceptions about the food in Bangkok, specifically the idea that people only eat street food. “When people think of Bangkok, they think of street food, but Bangkok is a lot more than that,” she says. “The best food is not found on the street at all. There is destination street food, but those are rare. We have more to offer. Look deeper into the parts of the city that (tourists) don’t normally get to see. Especially the food cooked in homes.” Prep: 30 minutes Cook: 10 minutes 4 servings teaspoons Thai thin soy sauce or regular thin soy sauce teaspoon ground white pepper, plus more for dusting cup liquid from red fermented tofu cup ketchup tablespoons lard or vegetable oil tablespoon pork cracklings large cloves garlic, minced eggs, lightly beaten ounces yellow or white onions, cut lengthwise into wedges Roma tomato, cut lengthwise into wedges pound pork shoulder, sliced thin against the grain into bite-size pieces cups tightly packed cooked Thai jasmine rice, cold Sauce: or 3 fresh bird’s eye chiles, thinly sliced crosswise cup fish sauce Sides: small pickling cucumber, peeled and sliced crosswise thick green onions, trimmed limes, halved lengthwise around the core Put the lard, cracklings and garlic in a wok or large skillet; set it over high heat. Stir until the garlic is fragrant, 30 to 40 seconds. Add the eggs and scramble until partially set. Add the onions and cook without stirring too much, 2 to 3 minutes; you want them to brown a little and the moisture in the wok to evaporate. Add the tomato wedges and pork and cook them the same way you cooked the onion until the pork has firmed up, with some pink still remaining, about 3 minutes. Use a rubber spatula to scrape every bit of the prepared soy sauce mixture into the wok, then add the rice and stir-fry until well blended and heated through. Turn off the heat. To make the sauce, in a small serving bowl stir together the chiles and fish sauce and set it on the table for anyone who may want this Thai equivalent of salt and pepper shakers. Divide the warm fried rice evenly among four dinner plates. Arrange some cucumber slices, a green onion and a lime half on each plate. Invite diners to squeeze the lime over their rice and to eat bites of the cucumber and green onion, alternating with bites of the rice. 448 calories, 15 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 188 mg cholesterol, 52 g carbohydrates, 7 g sugar, 24 g protein, 1,875 mg sodium, 2 g fiber