Bakmi Ayam

For me, bakmi ayam is synonymous with university. My friends and I basically had bakmi ayam for every lunch we had during our university studies. Our campus was in Haymarket, right next to Sydney’s Chinatown, and there were a plethora of cheap and authentic Asian restaurants to go to. While we did occasionally go to other places, bakmi ayam was our staple. I remember sitting in my university lectures, looking at my watch and just waiting for lunch. It was always just assumed that we would have bakmi ayam for lunch. Looking back on it, it’s very surprising that I didn’t get sick of it. Some of my friends would occasionally put up a fight, but both the proximity of the Indonesian cafe (the Joy Cafe) and the tastiness of the dish were too easy to ignore. Bakmi ayam is an interesting dish.

At first glance, bakmi ayam doesn’t seem to be a complicated or exotic dish. It certainly doesn’t have the multi-layered textures of a lot of other Asian dishes or the exotic flavours of Thai or Malaysian food. However, there was something special about it that I could never put my finger on. The chicken had a unique flavour that I had no idea about, and the noodles were never too wet or dry – they seemed almost oily but without an abundance of oil. I always thought it was rather a mystical dish. It’s served with a nice, hot chicken broth, once again nothing extraordinary, but perfectly complimenting the chicken noodles. I always ate the dish without any accompaniments, whereas one of my friends always smothered it with sambal oelek (chilli sauce). I used to give my friend a lot of grief over his tendency to smother basically every dish that he ate with chilli – what was the point of ordering the dish if all you could taste was chilli? Ironically, probably because of my time living in Thailand, I now also love to use sambal oelek as an accompaniment to not just Indonesian dishes, but many other Asian dishes.

I was recently ruminating and reflecting on my university days, and I realised that, while I didn’t miss university at all, I really missed bakmi ayam. Then all of a sudden I realised something – why couldn’t I cook bakmi ayam myself? The thought of cooking such as dish during my university would never have occurred to me, as I wasn’t really into cooking back then. Given my fond memories of the dish, it’s not surprising that I cooked it the night after my epiphany. Making the chicken noodle element and the chicken broth are two distinct processes, and the latter is arguably more time-consuming and complicated than making the main dish. It was the first time that I made a broth using the carcass of a chicken – it was quite satisfying, as none of the chicken went to waste. The result was a genuine broth made from scratch, using no processed ingredients. As for the actual bakmi ayam, I started to figure out the puzzle that bakmi ayam had been for me in university. In particular, I realised that the primary flavours of the chicken came from kecap manis and oyster sauce. I knew that it would be very hard to recreate the same bakmi ayam that I had had 2-3 times weekly for five years, but I was very pleased with the outcome. The only part of the recipe I didn’t include was the bakso (meatballs), as they were never part of the broth at Joy Cafe. Bakmi ayam is a great recipe for people who want to cook authentic Indonesian food other than the better known nasi goreng and sate. 

Recipe (serves 2-3):

300g boneless & skinless chicken, cut into 2cm x 3cm pieces

2 cloves garlic, crushed and finely diced

3cm ginger piece, crushed and finely diced

2 tbs light soy sauce

1 tbs kecap manis

1 tbs oyster sauce

2 red shallots, finely sliced

400ml chicken stock

1 tbs tapioca starch, or 1 tsp cornflour

Fresh egg noodles, prepared as per instructions

Garlic-infused oil, or chicken oil

Bok choy or choy sum, blanched

Sambal bakso/oelek

Tongchai (Chinese preserved vegetable), to garnish

Spring onions, to garnish

Chicken broth

3L water

3cm ginger piece, finely diced

3 cloves garlic, finely diced

Bones and carcass of 1 chicken

4 red shallots, roughly sliced

10cm cane sugar stick, peeled and cut, or equivalent amount of white sugar

White pepper

Salt

2 spring onions, sliced diagonally

Bakso (meatballs)

To make the chicken broth, bring the water to the boil in a large pan. Add all the other broth ingredients except for the spring onions and bakso, and bring back to the boil. Reduce to a low heat and cook the broth for 30 mins. With 5 minutes left, add the bakso.

Meanwhile, combine a small amount of oil, half the soy sauce, the chicken and the ground white pepper in a wok or heavy-based frying pan. Add the tapioca starch and mix well. Remove from the wok.

In the same wok, stir-fry the garlic and ginger until fragrant, adding some more oil if required. Return the chicken to the wok and continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the chicken changes colour.

Add the shallots, oyster sauce, remaining soy sauce, kecap manis, stock, salt and ground white pepper, and cook until the seasoning is absorbed and the chicken is cooked.

In a bowl, combine 2½ tbs of garlic-infused, 2½ tbs of light soy sauce and a sprinkle of ground white pepper. Add 1 portion of the egg noodles, and mix well. Add the chicken and bok choy and garnish with tongchai and spring onions.

Pour some of the broth into a smaller bowl and add some bakso. Serve with sambal bakso/oelek.

Category: Indonesian

Source: http://indonesia-eats.blogspot.com

Rating: Four stars

Butter Chicken

A friend of mine once said to me that every dish has a story, and butter chicken certainly has a story in my life. One of my best friends is Indian (actually I have a few Indian friends – I’m including Sri Lankan in that category!!!), and we’ve been friends since the first year of highschool. I think it’s generally agreed that everyone believes that their mother’s cooking is the best, and that’s certainly the case with my mother. However, the first time I ate my friend’s mum’s butter chicken, I fell in love with it straight away. It was definitely one of the most delicious meals I had ever eaten in my life, so wonderfully fragrant and authentic. It became a standing arrangement that whenever I went to my friend’s house, his mother would cook butter chicken – I just NEEDED it! So, while I’m obviously biased towards my mother’s cooking and the dishes I grew up with, my friend’s mum came to have a special place in my heart through her beautiful Indian food.

At lunch time at highschool, I would often see my friend’s lunch and want to smack him down with pangs of jealousy. Most of the time he would have delicious-looking Indian food that I presumed were leftovers from dinner the previous evening. Although I must admit that by the last two years of highschool, he seemed to have an inordinate amount of leftover pizza. I suppose I was still envious then, though. Whenever I was at my friend’s house in highschool, I was always waiting for his mum’s food. One of my favourite memories involves when I stayed at my friend’s place overnight as we both undertook the 40 Hour Famine. We were absolutely pathetic! After only a few hours or so, we were already thinking of ways around the ban on eating, and even came up with some alternatives. The two favourite alternatives, to the best of my recollection, were not talking for 40 hours, or not writing for 40 hours. We were particularly excited about the latter, as what would we bloody write on the weekend? Not to mention the fact that it wouldn’t have stopped us from typing something on the computer, not that we were going to do that either. We vacillated and our stomachs grumbled, but we decided to stick it out and we made it through the 40 hours. I remember looking at my watch and waiting for his mum’s food. In a way, I was glad that it wasn’t butter chicken, because I think the sudden switch from no food to the addictive butter chicken would have put me into shock and maybe have even shut down my nervous system. His mum made us a beautiful Chicken Spaghetti Bolognese, and I thought that I would wolf it down within five minutes. As it turned out, I didn’t actually eat that much of it because my stomach had obviously shrunk even within that small period of time. It was still one of the most satisfying meals I have ever eaten, though.

So butter chicken was one of the first recipes that I cooked in this cooking journey. In a way, it’s similar to my Thai red curry with chicken. Red curry is my favourite dish of all time, and trying to cook it to the standard that I was used to in Thailand was virtually impossible. I knew that I would never be able to achieve the same degree of perfection as my friend’s mum, but I now have a lifelong love affair with butter chicken because of her and I was determined to cook it for myself from scratch. I love now making all my pastes and spice mixtures from scratch rather than purchasing pre-packaged jars. I’m sure that there will be times in my life again when I will used jarred sauces, obviously when I’m busy and stressed, but I have enough flexibility in my life at the moment to put a lot of effort into my cooking. This recipe for butter chicken attracted me just by the picture – I had looked for quite a few recipes, and this seemed to look like a very rich and traditional recipe. It was very delicious, and, although Lamb Rogan Josh is also one of my favourite dishes, butter chicken will always be my favourite Indian recipes. I wonder if my friend’s mum will give me her recipe? I suspect he won’t let her. I’m just fortunate to have experienced it, and hope to experience it again soon!

Recipe (serves 2-3):

500g chicken, cubed

1½ tsp garam masala

1 pinch cayenne pepper

1½ tbs cornflour

1/3 cup water

Peanut oil

Sauce

Peanut oil

1 shallot, chopped

½ onion, chopped

3 tbs butter

3 tsp lemon juice

4 garlic cloves

½ tbs ginger

1½ tsp garam masala

1½ tsp chilli powder

1½ tsp ground cumin

1 bay leaf

1/3 cup plain yoghurt

1 1/3 cups cream

1 1/3 cups tomato paste

1 pinch salt

1 pinch pepper 

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Sauté the shallot, garlic and onion until soft and translucent.

Add the butter, lemon juice, ginger, garam masala, chilli powder, cumin and bay leaf. Stir for 1 minute.

Add the tomato paste and cook for 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Stir in the cream and yoghurt. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Season with salt & pepper. Remove from heat and set aside.

Heat oil in a large, heavy skillet over a medium heat. Cook the chicken for about 10 minutes or until lightly browned.

Reduce the heat and season with garam masala and cayenne pepper. Stir in a few spoonfuls of sauce and simmer until the liquid has reduced.

Add the chicken to the sauce. Add the cornflour and water (pre-mixed) and cook for 5-10 minutes, or until sauce has thickened.

Serve with Jasmine rice and garnish with coriander leaves.

Cuisine: Indian

Source: www.bigoven.com

Rating: Four stars

Chicken, Olive and Preserved Lemon Tagine

I had intended to publish this post a couple of days ago, but the last few days have been a bit rough, especially because one of our cats, Maya, who I’m looking after while my parents are away, has come down with pancreatitis and it took a while for us to finally come to that conclusion. Anyway, I’m glad to finally get back to what I like doing – cooking and writing. Around three weeks prior to cooking this recipe, I had prepared some preserved lemons (I will post the instructions for doing this) and was awaiting the outcome. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I had ever actually had preserved lemons before, at least not intentionally, and I was intrigued about their texture and the impact they would have upon a dish.

So I searched for a recipe which not only included preserved lemons, but actually celebrated them and made them a predominant part of the recipe. Many recipes use only small amounts of preserved lemon rind in their recipes, or even use them as garnish on dishes such as Moussaka. This dish, which I found in Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Does..., one of the series of cookbooks that came with the Daily Telegraph recently, seemed the perfect recipe to cook, as not only did I want a dish that used preserved lemons as a primary ingredient, but I was also quite eager to cook a Moroccan dish. The recipe includes up to 3 whole preserved lemons, but I only used 2 because I didn’t want to go overboard on my first time with this ingredient. It was quite interesting dicing up the lemons in preparation for cooking – the flesh of the lemon was almost jelly-like and seemed translucent, and the rind was so wonderfully soft and tender.

Unfortunately I don’t have a tagine, but you can actually substitute a tagine with a heavy-based pot which is what I did and which proved to be adequate for the purposes of cooking this dish, although it would be interesting to cook the same dish using a tagine to see the difference, whether subtle or distinct. As for little tweaks on my own part, I didn’t actually use saffron, but rather a saffron substitute that provides the same effect, at least in terms of colour, and you can see from the photo that the substitute also provides that beautiful, rich yellow that comes from saffron. As I was slicing up the fennel, I was wondering whether it would impact upon my enjoyment of the dish. It’s the first time that I’ve used fennel in my own cooking, and I noticed the distinct aniseed scent which I’m absolutely no fan of. As it turned out, the chicken was beautiful and tender, but I must admit that I just wasn't a fan of the flavours coming out of the recipe. I think the combination of the preserved lemon, the fennel and the olives (which I usually like) provided for too tart a taste for my palate, whereas Asian cuisine, my favourite type of food, generally is sweeter. I’m sure people who prefer less sweetness in their food would love this recipe. Nevertheless, I’m going to cook plenty more Moroccan and North African recipes, and this was just part of my exploration of ingredients and cuisines that I’ve never cooked.

Recipe (serves 4):

1 whole chicken, divided into 4 pieces

Olive oil

1-2 large bulbs of fennel

2 onions, peeled and roughly chopped

Small bunch of fresh coriander

2 garlic cloves, peeled and sliced

2-3 preserved lemons, deseeded & chopped

80g black and green olives, stoned

A good pinch of saffron

500ml hot chicken stock

Couscous

Spice rub

1 heaped tsp coriander seeds, bashed up

1 tsp ground cumin

1 heaped tsp ground ginger

2 tbs olive oil

Sea salt & freshly ground black pepper

Mix all the spice rub ingredients together in a small bowl. Put the chicken pieces in a large bowl, massage them with the spice rub then cover with cling film and put into the fridge to marinate for a couple of hours or, even better, overnight.

Heat a generous lug of olive oil in a tagine or casserole-type pan and fry the chicken pieces over a medium heat, skin side down first, for about 5-10 mins or until golden brown.

While the chicken fries, chop each fennel bulb into 8 wedges and add these to the pan along with the onions, coriander stalks and garlic. Stir well and fry for a couple more minutes, then mix in the preserved lemons, olives and saffron. Pour in the hot stock, give everything a good stir, then cover with a lid or foil and simmer on a low heat for 1½ hours, or until the meat starts to fall away from the bone. Halfway through, have a check and give it a good stir. Add a splash of water if it looks dry.

After 1½ hours, stir gently. If it’s still a bit liquidy, leave it to thicken with the lid off for a bit more. Sprinkle with coriander leaves, and serve with a large bowl of steaming couscous.

Category: Moroccan

Source: “Jamie Does...” by Jamie Oliver

Rating: Two stars

Red Curry with Chicken (Gang Dang Gai)

It's quite apt that the first recipe published on this blog is my favourite dish. I cooked this dish for a friend and myself at PB in February. I had just returned from Thailand two months prior to the trip to PB, and was trying to re-adapt to life in Sydney, something that I'm still finding hard. My friend has also been going through a difficult time after experiencing many setbacks throughout his 20s. So we can relate to each other greatly, and it was great to go to PB to get out of the city and relax, or to get grounded, as my friend would say.

My friend cooked slow-braised lamb shoulder on the first night, which was aroi maak (Thai for very delicious), and which I thought would be impossible to come close to, not that I was treating it like a competition at all. I decided that I would cook Thai red curry. I was a bit concerned that it would not turn out well, but I followed a recipe from a Thai cookbook that I bought at the Bookazine store on Khao Sarn Road, and it turned out to be wonderful. My friend was very impressed. I had wondered whether I should use chicken or beef, as I actually had initially fallen in love with red beef curry (Gang Dang Nua), but I thought that it had the capacity to toughen up too much. As it turned out, the method of cooking this recipe made everything so tender, especially the vegetables. I decided to use asparagus rather than aubergines, as I’m not a great fan. They turned out to be a beautifully tender addition to the dish. I had to use canned baby corn because there was no fresh baby corn – it’s Umina after all!!! I loved the twist of adding the halved tomatoes towards the end of the dish, together with a handful of brown sugar. The tomatoes actually melted into the dish quite quickly, and added a layer of lushness. I topped it off with a garnish of coriander, which actually was lovely (I’m not usually a huge fan of coriander).

As I said to my friend, the best red curry I’ve ever eaten is at Center Khao Sarn in Bangkok. I would eat it probably twice a week, if not more! My friends, who have been there, agree. It’s just so rich and luscious, my mouth waters even thinking of it now. Red curry for me is the epitome of Thai cooking. I believe you can judge how good a Thai restaurant is by its red curry. Most can make a decent Pad Thai, but red curry is a marker of excellent Thai cooking. I was a bit hard on myself when tasting my dish, as I was comparing it with Center Khao Sarn's red curry, which obviously can’t be beaten. However, I’m proud to say that I was very happy. The only thing that I would do in hindsight would be to add one or two chillies, chopped in large slices keeping the seeds in, in order to add heat to the curry base. It’s Thai cooking, after all! One other thing to note about this recipe is that it uses jarred red curry paste. The advantage of using jarred paste include reducing the cooking time and getting to know the general flavour of a red curry paste. However, I now make my own red curry pastes because the ingredients are fresh and I can alter the balance of the ingredients depending upon my own taste (the spicier the better!).

Recipe (serves 3-4):

500g chicken breast, sliced

3-4 tbs Red Curry Paste

1½ tbs sunflower oil

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

Bunch of asparagus, chopped into inch-length pieces

15 baby corns, halved

1 red capsicum, chopped into inch-length pieces

500 ml coconut milk

50 ml chicken or vegetable stock

2½ tbs fish sauce

25g brown sugar (or 2 tablespoons clear honey)

2 tomatoes, cut in half

3 kaffir lime leaves, torn in half

2-3 red chillies, sliced into large pieces

Coriander leaves, chopped

Jasmine rice

 

Heat the oil in a wok or saucepan and stir-fry the Red Curry Paste and garlic over a medium heat for 3-4 minutes or until fragrant.

Add the chicken and stir for 4-5 minutes. Add the vegetables, coconut milk, chicken stock, fish sauce and sugar and cook on a low to medium heat for 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring occasionally.

Add the tomatoes, sliced red chillies and kaffir lime leaves and simmer for an extra two minutes.

Spoon into dishes and garnish with chopped coriander leaves. Serve with Jasmine rice on the side.

Cuisine: Thai

Source: "200 Thai Favourites" by Oi Cheepchaiissara

Rating: Four stars