June 2024: Random Things

Cheaty satay, chicken-ginger stir-fry, good lemongrass vs. bad lemongrass, and fried sun-dried gourami

Happy June to everyone! The grilling season has arrived in Chicago, and what a wonderful time it its. Those new to The Epestle can find my recommendations on grills, smokers, and more here.

One dish I look forward to the most during the grilling season is satay. I know it’s nothing super exciting, but hear me out: the grilling season in America is the only time you can experience satay at it best. You can make the dish by cooking the meat on a griddle in advance and reheat it like most Thai restaurants in North America and Europe do, but you know it’s not going to be good. This really is a dish best cooked hot and fast over charcoal and enjoyed immediately (a real “street food” among many dishes labeled such that really aren’t). In fact, it’s the sadness over how bad satay almost always is at Thai restaurants in the States that has driven me to write Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill.

Satay is pretty easy to make, especially if you use my mother’s easy peanut sauce (the recipe is in Simple Thai Food and Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill), and it cooks quickly. However, the most time-consuming, labor-intensive part of it is the threading of the meat onto bamboo skewers, something I admit I hate to do. Now, the practice is standard in Southeast Asia because it’s convenient for the hibachi-style grill prevalently used over there. One big advantage to cooking your satay this way is that the meat gets more charred, crisped, and smoky surface area. Also, with the meat occupying about a third or half of the skewers, which is the part that goes on the hot coals, the bare parts of the skewers extend outside the direct heat, remain cool enough to touch throughout the process, and conveniently serve as “handles.”

However, at home, if you prefer to simplify your satay, like I often do, you can skip the skewers. Simply marinate your meat in larger pieces. Quick-cooking cuts, like the chicken breasts shown in the first photo, can be cut into cutlets (so it cooks more quickly and evenly), marinated according to the recipe, grilled, and sliced into bite-sized pieces for serving.

For tougher cuts of meat, you can grill or smoke them whole over more moderate heat and a longer cooking time. Baby back ribs and spare ribs are among my top favorite cuts for satay. My recipe is in my third book, Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill, but you can also find it on the National Post.

The beginning of the grilling season also coincides with the time when younger, more voluptuous, and more tender ginger floods the market in my neck of the woods. And one simple dish I like to make to take advantage of it is chicken-ginger stir-fry from my Simple Thai Food book. There isn’t a photo for the dish in the book, so I thought I’d show it to you here. I love to use dried wood-ear mushrooms in this dish because that’s the norm in Thailand (and the version I grew up eating) and because I really like their crunchy texture and mild flavor. However, you can use any mushrooms you like. I’m not a fan of shiitake mushrooms in this dish, though; they’re pretty strong and tend to overpower the chicken and ginger, which are the main stars of the show.

This time of the year is also when you can start growing lemongrass. Lemongrass grows better, bigger, and more fragrant when grown in the ground in a warmer climate. That said, if you live in a cold place like I do, you will have to grow your lemongrass in a pot and keep it indoors when it’s too cold out. Regardless, if you cook Thai or Southeast Asian food often and you don’t have access to a well-stocked Asian market with fresh lemongrass stalks in the produce section (the photo on the right), you always want to have fresh lemongrass around.

Otherwise, if you can find fresh lemongrass at all, it will most likely be the subpar lemongrass packed in a small clam-shell plastic box in the herb section of a mainstream supermarket (the photo on the left). As you can see, these are the fibrous top parts of lemongrass stalks that usually get trimmed off and discarded. It’s the bulbous parts at the root ends of the stalks that are tender and rich in essential oils and, therefore, more fragrant. You can maybe get away with using these parts of lemongrass stalks in tea or a tea-like infusion soup like tom yam, but when it comes to curry pastes or other dishes where you need strong lemongrass fragrance and/or tender lemongrass slices, they just won’t do.

With the weather getting warmer and sunnier, it’s also time to think about making your own Thai-style sun-dried fish. I will publish a post on how to do this for paid subscribers in the next few days. However, if you’re not interested in making Thai-style sun-dried fish yourself from scratch, one way to experience it is to source dried gourami fish (pla salit) from a well-stocked Asian market.

In Thailand, the fatty gourami fish is rarely prepared fresh. Instead, they’re either salted and fermented into pla ra (fermented fish) or gutted, salted, sun-dried, and served pan-fried with rice. The latter is my favorite way to prepare the fish.

In Thailand, you can find sun-dried gourami just about anywhere. They’re sold already sun-dried and ready to be pan-fried. Outside Thailand, you need to have access to a large Asian supermarket (specializing in Southeast Asian ingredients), where you may be able to find frozen gourami. They come already gutted, salted, sun-dried, and ready to be pan-fried.

Serve the fish with lots of jasmine rice. (Paid subscribers, serve and enjoy these fish the same way you would the salted chicken shreds.)