plate 35: thailand

I'm in love. With my new mortar and pestle. The chemistry took hold as I embarked on my culinary adventure to Thailand this weekend, cooking from Thai food guru David Thompson's enormo and amazingly photographed book Thai Street Food (kindly given to me by J Lee - thanks Jules). We're pretty spoiled for choice for Thai food in Sydney, so I was a little nervous about making a killer phad Thai - one of my usual Thai takeaway picks (not overly adventurous I know). But there's an interesting story about the dish - I'll get to that a little later on.

While miles from the markets and street stalls of Thailand, I headed to Chinatown, where there's a little pocket of Thaitown dotted with a few Thai supermarkets - I never knew! Looking for things I'd never cooked with before was a little challenging, but certainly fun - like how you find yourself in a foreign supermarket when travelling trying to decipher a product by the strange images and 'serving suggestions' on the packet.

These were things like galangal (a relative of ginger with a pinkish hue, woodier texture and fiery flavour); and kaffir lime (looks like a geriatric lime: small with wrinkly skin) and its leaves, which are two bound into one like Siamese twins (which is interesting in itself since the first famous pair of conjoined twins were born in Siam (now Thailand) hence the term Siamese twins).

The love of the mortar and pestle developed when making the spice paste for a Green Curry of Beef. We had it for dinner, but David says it's eaten as a mid-morning snack in Thailand - a far cry from the yoghurt swirled with cinnamon and honey in my routine. Either that or an extremely pippy mandarin - ah, so frustrating! Anyway, David explains this style of eating comes from southern Thailand and that the best cuts of meat to use are the tough ones that will become meltingly tender.

I can't tell you how exciting it was pounding each ingredient with the pestle and letting the aromas waft right into my face while I watched them turn to mush in front of my eyes. In it was 15 little green chillies (the recipe called for up to 30, but our heads may have exploded), lemon grass, red shallots, garlic, galangal, kaffir lime zest, plus cardamom, coriander seeds and fennel seeds that I dry roasted. The taste was as rewarding. It was full of spicy deliciousness, mellowed ever so slightly by the coconut milk and cream the meat was cooked in. The heat was appreciated by me and our two guests. As for AJ - well, he did really enjoy it, but it took a while to get through it, what with his frequent breaks for patting the sweat off his little nose.

So green curry beef: success. Not so much for the phad Thai. (Annoyingly, for a word nerd like me, there's no conclusive spelling for this in English: pad Thai, phat Thai, phad Thai, or in David's book pat Thai.) Sadly it was just a little bland. I didn't have the 1/2 teaspoon of shredded salted radish that was required, but surely that wouldn't have made too much of a difference to the overall taste? With a squeeze of lime and a dollop of some leftover green curry sauce it was salvageable, but not as good as I hoped. At least the dish's history is interesting.

It's actually a fairly recent addition to Thai cooking, having only been developed in about the 1930s or 1940s when Marshal Phibun, who was prime minister (and responsible for the name change from Siam to Thailand), urged Thais to include more noodles in their diets. Competitions were held in schools and government offices for the best and this one, with a sauce of tamarind and palm sugar, won. Given David's credibility as Thai chef, I think I must have stuffed up the recipe somehow, but I'll keep hunting for a winning phad Thai recipe of my own. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know!