whine & dine

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Okay, okay, I know I owe you guys a post on a certain restaurant in Spain. But I wrote my post down somewhere on a piece of paper when I was on a bus back from KL and I can’t find it. So let me talk about something a little more recent which I did and which I’m rather proud of.

There comes a point in a cook’s life where he/she stops copying recipes and starts creating dishes. The transition is actually generally a lot more prolonged than what you might think, as it starts with making slight changes to recipes to suit your taste (or, similarly, to suit different ingredients that might be available in your part of the world/during a particular season), or pulling different components from different recipes to assemble into an entity of its own. For me, I reached a sort of nirvana when I started cooking multi-faceted dishes with different components, most of which I’d come up with on my own.

As I’ve always said, cooking is really about a bunch of simple, basic techniques more than anything else. Whenever I cook/bake/make something for friends, I always find myself surround my hysteria – friends screeching, “HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY MAKE ALL OF THIS? IT’S SO COMPLICATED!” To which I more often than not reply, “But it’s all really simple!” And I’m not being a show-off/overestimating my friends’ skill sets. You see, if you know how to boil water for instant noodles, or do a simple Chinese style vegetable stir-fry, you’ve got all the techniques down pat for making a simple pasta from scratch – you can boil water, you can judge doneness for noodles, you can cut/chop/slice (chances are garlic will be in the mix for both types), you can sauté, and you can check for seasoning. Likewise, if you can make cupcakes (following the most basic of butter cake recipes), and you understand the flavour pairing of strawberries, vanilla, sugar and softly whipped cream, you can assemble a multi-layered berry cake with crème chantilly easily. Even better: if you’ve ever played with playdough, or made a simple dough for messing around with and rolling around as a kid, you can make your own pasta. See? It’s all simple. Just break everything down into its components.

Now, one of the other things I like to do is to re-create dishes based on classic street food. Bunny observed the growth in my skill set by how I went from one modification to another – I started out simply looking for new ways to present the dishes (such as in the case of my Bakkuttini), and slowly I started remodelling one aspect at a time of each dish.

My latest creation is an amuse bouche based on Laksa. It started out with a good friend demanding to taste Laksa Pesto. I was bored of this – I didn’t find it challenging enough anymore, and I’d made it too many times – so I wrangled my way out of it by telling her I’d do a different Laksa dish for her instead. Another friend had been itching to try a self-saucing laksa ravioli, and after tossing ideas around, I came up with a list of ingredients that went into a traditional bowl of Laksa, and came up with this:

It’s – again – really quite simple. (This time, though, I will admit that the entire dish is rather time consuming to make, even though the individual parts aren’t actually very challenging at all.) I made ravioli using egg-yolk-only pasta (roughly 150g of plain flour to 2 large egg yolks, with a little salt), which I opted for because I wanted it to mimic the richness and texture of the springy egg noodles normally served in Laksa, and filled this with a mixture of minced prawns, XO sauce, minced laksa leaves and fresh chilli (i.e. your basic laksa pesto) with a little oil to bind, and served this with two sauces: a fragrant prawn stock which was heavily reduced until almost syrupy, infused with lemongrass, galangal, and some carrots for colour and sweetness, and the second sauce was a ready-out-of-the-packet coconut cream. (I decided that I wanted the coconut cream to actually come off with a very clean flavour on the palate in contrast to the rich shellfish broth, which would – in itself – be quite interesting since coconut’s usually the rich, cloying component in these dishes.) I topped it with a prawn coated in salted-egg-yolk (quite a common dish on many Chinese menus) which embodies both prawns and eggs – i.e. two of the common toppings in laksa, and finally garnished it with a crisp fried laksa leaf to pay homage to the humble beginnings of this dish.

(You can see the entire sheet of paper with my doodlings, scribblings and conceptualising on this scan which I’ve uploaded into my flickrstream.)

The best part of it was that when you sampled a mouthful of each of the components, it actually really tasted like Laksa. Also, it means I now know how to make Laksa, which could prove handy considering I’m now HK and very far away from my local Katong Laksa stall.

Laksa Amuse
(serves 6)

For the prawn stock:
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and bruised
4 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped
1 small white onion, peeled and roughly chopped
1 carrot, peeled and diced into 1cm pieces
Heads and shells of 20 tiger prawns, roughly chopped
Pork bone stock (or chicken stock or water) – I probably used about 1.5 litres
2 1-inch pieces of galangal, bruised
1-inch piece of young ginger, bruised
3 lemongrass stalks, bruised and roughly chopped (white part only)
Vegetable oil

For the pasta dough:
150g unbleached all-purpose flour
2 large egg yolks
a pinch of salt

For the ravioli filling:
Meat from 14 prawns
2 tbsp XO sauce (I used some from the Peninsular hotel in Beijing which I got as a gift, but any brand you like the flavour of will do – e.g. Lee Kum Kee which is easily available in many supermarkets)
1 large red chilli, deseeded and roughly chopped
1 handful of laksa leaves (I used about 3/4 of the packets you get in Cold Storage)
2 tbsp chilli-infused sesame oil (or the oil from your XO sauce)

100ml coconut cream/thick coconut milk
6-10 pretty laksa leaves
1 salted egg
20g unsalted butter
6 prawns, peeled and deveined but with the tails intact
potato starch/flour
oil
sea salt
finely ground white pepper

Peel and devein all 20 prawns, but reserve 6 with the tails intact. Set these 6 aside. Blend the flesh from the other 14 prawns with the rest of the ingredients for the ravioli filling and season with salt and pepper. If necessary, add a little more olive oil or vegetable oil so the mixture binds. Cover tightly with clingfilm and set aside in the fridge. (Can be prepared up to 1 day in advance.)

In a stockpot, gently sweat the onions, carrots, shallots and garlic in a little oil until softened, but not browned, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat. In a sauté pan, fry the prawn heads and shells in a little oil until all the shells turn a deep orange and are very fragrant. Tip the shells into the stockpot. Do this in batches if necessary to prevent the pan from overcrowding. Deglaze the pan with 1 cup of the stock, ensuring the scrape up all the caramelised bits at the bottom of the pan. Pour this liquid into the stockpot, and top it up with enough stock to cover by about an inch. Bring this to a gentle simmer, then add the lemongrass, ginger and galangal, and simmer for 1 hour, skimming off any impurities that rise to the surface. After 1 hour, strain the stock through a china cap, pressing on the solids with the back of a wooden spoon to extract all the liquids, into a smaller pot. Strain this again through a fine-grained sieve without pushing any particles through this time, then simmer gently to reduce until you have about 1 cup of liquid left. Season with salt (it’s important that you only season at the end), and set aside until ready to assemble. If desired, you can prepare this in advance, then cool and refrigerate until needed.

To make the pasta dough, lightly beat the egg yolks with the salt and add the flour – about a cup first, then slowly add in the rest until the dough is no longer sticky and wet. It should feel a LITTLE bit too dry. Knead for about 10 minutes until the dough is smooth and satiny, then wrap well in clingfilm and set aside at a cool room temperature for 30 minutes to relax. Dust your work surface and rolling pin with flour (or set up your pasta roller), and roll the pasta out until it is about 1mm thick (slightly thinner than you would roll it out for noodles like tagliatelle). Cut out 12 circles, each 5cm in diameter, then place a heaped teaspoon of the prawn filling into the centre. You should have enough dough and filling for a few extras in case of breakage. Place the ravioli on a tray lined with a sheet of waxed paper dusted with flour or semolina, dust with more flour, place another sheet of wax paper on top, and wrap well with clingfilm and keep in the fridge until needed. You can prep this a few hours in advance, or even freeze it. (If cooking from frozen, add another minute or two to the cooking time, but do not defrost it first.)

Fry the reserved laksa leaves for garnish in a little oil until crisp and translucent. Be careful not to burn them. Set aside on some kitchen towels to drain. Separate the salted egg, and steam the yolk for about 5 minutes. Allow it to cool, then chop finely.

When ready to serve, bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil. Reheat the prawn stock, keep warm, and bring the coconut cream to room temperature. Dust the reserved 6 prawns in potato starch, then fry until the flesh turns pink and the flour is golden brown and crisp. Drain on some kitchen paper. Wipe out the sauté pan, and melt 20g of butter in it, and when it starts to foam, add in the chopped, steamed salted egg yolk. Stir the yolk in until you get a foamy buttery sauce, then add the prawns to the pan, tossing to coat. Once the prawns are warmed through and well coated, remove from the heat. Cook the ravioli for 2-3 minutes (fresh pasta cooks VERY quickly, so be careful not to overcook it!), then drain onto an oiled pan (to prevent sticking).

To plate, place 2 tablespoons of the prawn stock into the bottom of each small dish. Place the cooked ravioli in the sauce, then spoon over 1-2 teaspoons of coconut cream. Top the ravioli with a prawn crusted in the salted egg yolk, and garnish with a fried laksa leaf. (See the dish/illustration.) Serve immediately, and enjoy. :)