All the discussion of Next's tour of Thailand prompted me to make pa nang curry with beef cheeks. I was following David Thompson's recipe pretty faithfully, but then decided to modify the paste a little by adding ingredients in McDang's recipe. Thompson recommends brisket or beef cheeks for this. In the past, I've used brisket. After seeing Mike Sula's article about Chef McDang being in Chicago, I decided I should experiment with his
cookbook a little more. For the Thai cookbook addicts out there, Principles of Thai Cookery is a gorgeous book and I love the background he provides on Thai culinary history and food culture. I actually find the organization of the book and the fundamentals of Thai cooking as he explains them to be much more intuitive than Thompson's (don't get me wrong, I love Thompson's books).
As I noted above, I've been using homemade coconut milk/cream a lot more. With a drill, it's pretty easy to make. And I feel like I can't really 'crack' the coconut cream (separate it into oil and solids) with the canned stuff. The homemade cream is thinner than canned but it reduces/thickens and 'cracks' beautifully resulting in the nice oily sheen that Thai curries are
supposed to have.
I picked up a couple pounds of Dietzler Farm beef cheeks from Butcher and Larder and got to work.
Coconut cream: This is from the flesh of two coconuts with about 2 cups of boiling water for a 'first press' which I let sit for 10 minutes, then 'liquify' in the blender and strain (I subsequently did a second press with about 4 cups of water).
The coconut cream floats to the top nicely after about 10 minutes.
Paste ingredients (after I took this picture, I decided to McDang-ify this and added roasted shrimp paste, lime zest, as I didn't have kaffir lime zest, white pepper, ground toasted coriander and cumin seed). Shown here: peanuts boiled for 30 minutes, red chiles, galanga, cilantro stem (my roots aren't big enough to harvest yet), roasted nutmeg, lemongrass, garlic and shallots (the fresh chiles and kaffir lime leaves went into the curry later).
Curry paste:
Frying the coconut cream:
Thickening cream:
'Cracked' coconut cream (you can see the oil adjacent to the coconut solids)
With sauteed curry paste:
After additional coconut milk/braising liquid, palm sugar, fish sauce have been added, with nice pools of oil on the surface
After adding beef cheeks braised in coconut milk
I forgot to get a nice picture of it plated.
I really liked the beef cheeks but I'm not sure I liked it any more than the brisket I've used in the past.