Bob Tam creates breakfast with goat’s milk
Bob Tam is a chef who loves to think on his feet and work with wild, esoteric ingredients.
But in this case, Tam harnessed the gentle, mellow character of the simplest ingredient in the cooler and turned it into something special.
At Bitter & Twisted Cocktail Parlour in downtown Phoenix, the Hong Kong native melds Asian and American influences into a wildly creative bar menu that pairs late-night bites with Ross Simon’s cocktails.
But since this was a morning video shoot, Tam made us breakfast for “Dom’s Cooler Cuisine.”
In the video series, we filled a cooler with six ingredients that were farmed, foraged or produced in Arizona. We asked six local chefs to choose one and create an original dish on the spot. But they don’t know what’s in the cooler, and once an ingredient is chosen, it’s gone.
Tam was the fifth of six Arizona chefs featured on “Dom’s Cooler Cuisine,” which means he had two remaining Arizona ingredients to choose from.
Perhaps intimidated by the cactus’ spines, Tam picked the goat’s milk, sourced from Crow’s Dairy in Buckeye. At Crow’s Dairy, Wendell Crow raises Nubian dairy goats, selling their milk as well products like quark, chevre and feta that are highly prized by local restaurants.
Tasting goat’s milk
The milk, however, might not be what you’d expect — it’s almost indistinguishable from cow’s milk.
Tam detected perhaps a faint gaminess on the tail, but after a few shots of goat’s milk at the bar, he decided he could use it just as he would cow’s milk. So he did what anybody would do.
He made roti and goat’s milk curry.
Tam mixed up a quick bowl of simple dough, heavy with milk and almost sticky, rolling it out into a wide, thin circle. Carefully folding it into a diamond and basting it with clarified butter, he gently fried the dough in a pan, cracking an egg into the center.
Meanwhile, Tam blended oil, ginger, raw shallots, fried shallots and white shoyu into a paste, frying it along with curry powder before adding more goat’s milk and leaving it to reduce and intensify.
And that’s it. Tam’s goat’s milk egg roti with goat’s milk curry was exactly my kind of breakfast: a buttery, flaky piece of tender fried dough with an oozing egg inside, ready to be torn and dipped into a sweet, mellow, almost creamy curry.
Rather than doing something that would lose the milk’s gentle, creamy character, Tam rolled with it, making one of the most subtle and satisfying dishes.
‘Dom’s Cooler Cuisine’
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Danielle Leoni, the chef and co-owner of The Breadfruit & Rum Bar, gets to work with cactus, whether she likes it or not.