Be your own chef at home
Ready-to-cook meals prepared by top Bangkok eateries can make anyone feel like a professional chef
It might not be a total bluff to say that this week’s review subject is a kitchen adventure by my 16-year-old son and I. All photos you see in the article were of the actual dishes we cooked and plated. Five minutes to half-an-hour was all the time needed to have each dish ready to serve.
Over the past weekend, six gourmet creations successfully made their way from our kitchen to the dining table. Despite our cooking naivete, the experiences were elegant and faultless.
Our meals were actually the final results of ready-to-cook products by some of Bangkok’s well-established dine-in establishments owned and operated by Impact Exhibition Management company.
Namely, they are Hong Kong Fisherman restaurant, Breeze Café and Bar, Uwajima sushi restaurant and Tsubohachi izakaya-style Japanese restaurant.
Their new takeaway concept, dubbed “cook at home”, provides a no-fuss culinary kick for people who might feel eating simply from takeout containers is too boring and unproductive.
With the meal kits, diners can have fun preparing their own food while growing their kitchen intelligence during the dawdling stayat-home ordeal.
The kits from different restaurants require different levels of cooking effort. They may involve simmering, wok-tossing and deep-frying, or just heating in the microwave. Each package, with a shelf life ranging from 24 to 72 hours, includes all the ingredients, which may be raw, partially-cooked or fully-cooked, and step-by-step cooking instructions. A link to a cooking video is provided with some dishes for extra demonstration.
Those wishing to impress Chinese food connoissuers in the family with an exquisite Cantonese menu are guaranteed great success through Hong Kong Fisherman’s kit for braised whole sea cucumber and goose web in brown sauce (846 baht).
You only need a pot, or a pan, and stovetop heat to accomplish the dish, which came looking dreary in vacuum-sealed bags but proved a masterpiece by an old pro when served.
The cooking instruction was simply to add, one by one, the stewed goose web, shiitake mushroom, Chinese kale and sea cucumber into the gravy, provided in a separate pouch, and let them simmer over low heat for just a few minutes. The dish was a heavenly sumptuous unification of two collagen-rich delicacies: the super plump, springy and jelly-like sea cucumber and the soft and pliable goose web, complemented by a deliciously rich brown sauce.
Another dish that took less, or perhaps zero, effort to cook but tasted as much refined was mui choy kau-yok, or Hakka-style braised pork belly with preserved vegetables (482 baht).
According to the instructions, you can cook the dish either on a stovetop or in a microwave. I went for the latter and the result was just exemplary.
Other interesting options of cook-at-home Chinese cuisine kits are braised Dong Po stewed pork knuckle with steamed buns; braised fresh fish maw and goose web with shiitake mushroom; braised goose web with egg noodles in brown sauce; and egg noodle soup with barbecue pork. Prices range from 161-963 baht.
My weekend gastronomic delight also included zuwai spicy nabe, or Japanese snow crab spicy hotpot (855 baht) from Uwajima restaurant.
It’s an outstanding dish that only requires a large pot and small degree of kitchen flair. You arrange all the ingredients, namely cabbage, green onions, mizuna mustard greens, inoki mushrooms, udon noodles and the sizable crab in the pot, add the milky tonkotsu pork broth and let it boil before stirring in the spicy pork sauce and eat.
It would be nice if you have a portable stove. That way you can enjoy the hotpot traditional-style at the dinner table. Otherwise, a small gathering in the kitchen over a sizzling pot of ambrosial soup, in which starred a naturally sweet and meaty crab, can also be a truly enjoyable moment.
Another form of Japanese hotpot that added a great impression to our recent cook-at-home experience was Tsubohachi’s pork tsuyu shabu (748 baht). Actually we didn’t expect much of a taste buds pleasure from the hefty package of thinly-sliced pork belly, two large bags of clear broth and two choice of dipping sauce.
In fact, I didn’t even care to gently dip each slice of pork in the boiling broth as a shabu shabu diner is supposed to. Instead, I — shame on me — sped up the process by cooking a large portion of pork at once in the katsuo dashi (bonito fish stock). One of the reasons was, again, that I didn’t have a tabletop cooker.
Our family of three, thus, ate the shabu shabu as a homestyle pork consomme. It was one of the simplest yet most hearty, delicious and addictive dishes I’ve ever had. The bacon-like pork was fresh, supple, resilient and flavoursome even after a one night storage in a fridge. The golden broth, seethed with white and green onions, was wonderfully tasty with sweetness from the onions. While the ponzu citrus soy sauce and white sesame cream sauce helped enhance the flavours. A beef option is also available.
Of all the meal kits we received I found the offerings from Breeze Café and
Bar the most sensible for the cook-at-home concept.
There were linguine pasta with bacon and mushroom cream sauce (288 baht) and kurobuta pork ribs with Asian slaw and French fries (534 baht).
The two dishes came as an all-inclusive kit that includes every ingredient needed but at the same time requires some kitchen manoeuvres.
I trusted my teenage son on crafting the pasta dish. After some 15 minutes of cutting, chopping, boiling, blanching and sautéing, the dish came out comparable to a professional creation, both the look and the taste.
The barbecue pork rib rack was precooked. All I needed to do was heat the ribs, deep-fry the raw French fries potato and serve.
The pork wonderfully retained its juiciness and succulency, though never too mushy to chew. The meat, which fell of the bone easily, was flavourful and well-seasoned but not at all over-honeyed. While the red cabbage slaw with Asian herbs lent to the meat dish a sour and spicy bracing contrast.
Hong Kong Fisherman (call 02-833-54345); Breeze Café & Bar (02-033-1851); and Uwajima Japanese restaurant (02-033-1853) are located in Muang Thong Thani on Chaeng Wattana Road. Tsubohachi (064-184-7109) has six outlets across Bangkok including in Muang Thong Thani, The Promenade Ram Inthra, Future Park Rangsit and Nihonmachi Sukhumvit 26.
Takeout and delivery service orders can be placed directly at the restaurants or via Line Man, Grab Food, and Foodpanda applications.