Yoghurt is a western thing, and I've included this recipe, not because it's Thai, but because it contains a common Thai ingredient: coconut milk. You see, yoghurt doesn't need to be made from milk, it can be made from coconut milk too, and if you use the coconut milk powder you can make a much thicker concentrated and creamier yoghurt by using less water than the powder was designed for.

Once you've made it, it's not healthy! Coconut milk is rich at the best of times, and a concentrated coconut yoghurt is best used sparingly as a topping for fruit, or a sauce on a desert!

The main things you'll need, a thermometer that can read 40 degrees Celsius and a live yoghurt as a starter. It must be live, with live bacteria, as the lactic acid making bacteria are the key to a yoghurt. I've used Yolida, a Thai brand. I've also made this using my rice cooker, which I found to be ideal, but a double boiler pan can also be used.

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This mango pudding is moist, quite dense and not very healthy! But a treat in small doses is fine. The key flavors are coconut, mango with plenty of sugar making for a sweet fruity desert.
You can see from the ingredients, I've used coconut cream powder here. I've really taken to it, it's lasts for ages in the cupboard and all you need to do is add some water to make it back into coconut milk. You'll need 150 ml of Coconut milk, or the equivalent made up milk powder, coconut cream is just richer coconut milk by the way.

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This pie is popular during celebration times (it's Songkran!), and it's very expensive and complicated to make. Well I decided to make my own, without all the pomp and ceremony and traditional flower molds and they tasted just as good.
I'm using the salted duck eggs I made a few weeks back. The duck egg yolk is large, and I find I can cut the cooked yolk into quarters and use only a quarter in each pie.
The yellow beans need to be soaked overnight, so best to prepare these the day before. Melon seeds add a bit of bite and crunch to the filling, you can substitute other seeds, or flaked almonds if you prefer.
Finally, the traditional shape for these is a flower, and special molds are available if you can find them. I'm going to be using my cute animal egg molds instead!

Continue reading "Green Tea, Salty Egg, Pies ( Ka Noom Wai Pra Jarn Cha Khiew )" »

More pickling at Cassa Khiewchanta to go with my preserved mangos. We have a small cucumber in Thailand that very cheap and widely available. Whereas pickled gherkins have to be imported and are very expensive. But since a gherkin is just a variety of cucumber, why not simply pickle the small cucumbers and use those instead?

It works! But to get the sourness into the center, you will need to slice them and make pickled sliced gherkins instead. The Thai cucumber isn't quite small enough for the vinegar to permeate all the way through, but the finished flavors are the same.
Oh, and I added some coriander seeds and chillies for a bit of bite and burn, but that's what we do in Thailand, it seems a pity to have sour all on its own.

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I've made salted eggs before, normally using the brine technique. That involves soaking them in saturated brine, and letting them absorb the salt.
But there's a second kind of salted egg, the dry salting. That's salted in the salt and white clay, with soot, ashes and charcoal powder to dry them out. The result is a firmer egg yolk than the wet method, but the strong salt flavor remains, the end flavors are the same.

Since Songkran is coming, and white clay is sold everywhere, (it's used to powder the faces of people, a more polite alternative to spraying them with water), I thought now would be a good time to make some dry salty eggs with them.

I'm also going to be making salty egg sweet pies, a tradition for this time of year, and so I'll need some salty eggs for this.

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Pickling and salting is a worldwide tradition and Thailand has it's own set of classic pickled dishes. Pickled cabbage, pickled limes and so on. It's April and I have a glut of mango. I could leave it to go ripe and eat myself silly on ripe mango, but instead, I'm going to take some unripe mangos and make pickled green mango, that I can keep and eat slowly.

I call it pickling, but there's less vinegar and much more salt than regular pickling. The sour green mango can't take too much extra sourness, the saltiness is what preserves it. Pick the mango at the firm green unripe stage, you can see the stage they're at from the photo below.

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