The finished product
There is a scene in the movie “Pretty Woman” (have you ever heard of it?) where Julia Roberts (do you know who she is?) is having dinner at a fancy restaurant with Richard Gere (my mom’s boyfriend). This woman met Richard Gere the night before while wearing a tie-dyed dinner napkin and Woody Harrelson’s toupee from “True Detective”, and now he is taking her to a French restaurant with waiters and everything. That’s really realistic. And then this douchecanoe goes and orders the escargots, even though his date has no freaking clue how to use her cutlery and one of the dinner companions (the “hothead” grandson who plays polo) has clearly cottoned on to Richard Gere’s game and ordered a dinner salad. Why didn’t Richard Gere order her the salad too? Is he really that attached to the prix fixe menu? Isn’t he rich enough to order a la carte? That is the moment when I figured out this movie was complete horseshit. Let your hooker order her own meal, Richard Gere!
I was thinking about this because, well, there are lots of mealtime etiquette thingies that even I, with all the many many meals that I have eaten, have no clue about. When faced with the mushroom chili dip you see above, I did what I usually do and piled all the crap I could find onto my plate, crowned with a healthy heaping of aforementioned nam prik. My dining companions snorted in my face. “Steady on!” they basically said, in Thai. “That chili dip will still be there in a few minutes’ time”.
“Thais are very fastidious about their manners while eating,” said one person, trying to be nice. “That’s is the only thing Thais do properly”. (Again, horseshit).
Oh, but wait. Let me start at the beginning.
I love nam prik. But I am extremely lazy. So it’s rare that I will make my own, preferring instead to pester harried-but-obliging wet market vendors or darken the doorstep of the occasional Thai restaurant in order to get my chili dip fix. It’s just that there are so few dishes that are as immediate — spicy, tart, funky in that fermented, garbage-y, wrong-side-of-garlic sense that Thai food is known for — as this one. Strange, then, that it’s not such a well-known dish once you find yourself out of Thailand.
It’s also so pretty and deceptively obliging: that little dollop, that big taste. Always surrounded by its various little accomplices, all chosen to offset whatever chili dip you’ve decided to guzzle on that particular day: sweet silky tamarind (macaam), sharp peppery roasted banana pepper (nam prik num), the ubiquitous, funkier-than-George-Clinton shrimp paste (gapi), a pillar of the standard Thai meal. In fact, nam prik was such a go-to dish in Thailand that husbands were once said to choose their wives on the sound their mortars and pestles made when pounding out a particular dip (if this were the case today, I can confidently say I would never get married).
So when my friend Chin took me to Nakhon Pathom with the promise of a good meal and a cooking class, you could color me curious. I rarely take cooking classes, because a.) they remind me of the time I was in culinary school, where I was bad and not good and to which I was generally unsuited, and b.) I don’t like to listen for long enough to follow directions (which may explain a. Really, though, why cook and then not eat? Who cares about these so-called “customers”? Let’s not discuss cooking school ever again.) But at Oo Khao Oo Pla (a take on the Thai saying “Nai nam mee pla, nai na mee khao” or “There is fish in the water, there is rice in the fields” aka Thailand is a lucky land of bounty), the friendly chef is happy enough to chat with me as she gives her hand-picked mushrooms a quick stir-fry with sugar and garlic in the wok, and garnishes her thom kloang pla salid (sour soup with smoked dried fish) with freshly plucked tamarind leaves from the tree out back. Better yet, she lets me pound the nam prik hed (mushroom chili dip) into a paste on the dinner table, peppering her commentary on my poor working style with the occasional “pok pok pok” (the sound a mortar and pestle should ideally make).
Sacrificing my shirt to the cooking gods
So with her blessing, I’m giving you this recipe. A tip or two: when you are pounding the shit out of that chili mixture, make sure you do so with intent and malice. Pretend you are Mike Tyson in the ring. Thais may seem all smiley and happy-g0-lucky, but that is because they are getting all their aggressions out on their food.
My chili paste
Nam Prik Hed (makes 4 servings)
– 2 hed fang (large straw mushrooms), cut up
– 4 red bird’s eye chilies and 4 green bird’s eye chilies
– 1 green, 1 orange, and 2 red prik chee fah (chili peppers)
– 5 garlic cloves
– 4-5 shallots
In 1 tsp oil, fry garlic, shallots and sliced chilies in hot wok with mushroom pieces until “dry”, about 5 minutes.
It should look like this.
Next, mix the dressing:
– 3-5 tsp fish sauce
– 2-3 tsp sugar
– juice from 2-3 limes
Or, if you are going the vegetarian route, substitute the fish sauce for light soy sauce and salt.
Mix to taste.
Pound your wok mixture with your mortar and pestle. Add “dressing” to taste.
Done!
Bangkok Glutton 
Pingback: How to Thrive as a Vegan Living in Thailand - Thailand NOW
A good Nam Prik is like Durian, or Tua Now, or a well aged cheese, they smell awful, but taste divine.
Agreed!
What I remember from childhood are the amazingly MASSIVE stone grinders of (south) Indian design which are easily 20-25 times the mass of the largest Thai mortar and pestles. These gigantic creatures are huge chunks of square granite or some metamorphic rock, and in their center is carved a round well, just like a Thai device. The pestle is an immense, carefully crafted thing, or used to be, many decades ago, since we received ours from the previous generation, and that one also must have been another couple of generations old by then!
I used to wonder at this overkill until I learned the reason behind the mass and the shape. The “pestle part stays inside the well and the top fits beautifully in the middle of one’s palm, the fingers lightly resting along the stone. I can still feel the stone and regret the events that have separated us permanently. Whatever you put in the well, you grind by manipulating the angle of inclination, and rotating the “pestle” in an orbital manner. It is not lifted or pounded, and yet it achieves the very same effect. Even dried turmeric rhizomes, soaked in water, the most recalcitrant objects to grind into a smooth paste, become so in a practiced hand. So does that raw tamarind pod, which one can manipulate to various textural levels, and we do, creating chutneys, with multiple textures in the same dish and taking out the coarser and leaving in the rest for more smooth treatment.
Chutneys with Ridge Gourd Skin, chutney with various fried and roasted hard dals like chickpea, ginger, and coconut, [chutney in the Tamil sense], and most of all, the pastes of rice and split legumes are achieved in this rotary food processor, without the use of water. The practiced orbital motion and the rhythmic changing of the angles is a joyful activity, a sort of challenge one subconsciously adopts towards the edible object, however childish that may sound, and a race to pulverize and unequivocally subjugate it. Sorry to put it that way, but some spices etc. are pesky and truculent-seeming, and seem to call out for grinding down.
I used to pretend to “cook” as a child by pulverizing everything in my backyard with a big rock, so I think I get what you mean.
Labour intensive but it looks delicious 🙂
I may cheat & use a food processor.
OK, but make sure to pound just a little bit if it and mix it in, in order to get the right consistency (should feel SMASHED) and so the essential oils are released. Worth it!
Hello! Just letting you know we’ve nominated you for the versatile blogger award. As always, acceptance is purely optional, so if you’re interest then please visit my post here http://arecipeforgluttony.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/versatile-blogger-awards/
Thank you! That’s very nice.
Chow – now you ahev me confused … is it George Clooney (yum!) or Bill Clinton (you, yum!) … or am I missing something? XX Anney (BTW – any Istanbul recommendations very gratefully received … so far, so grim – 5 nights left)
Oh no! Have you had fish sandwiches by the bridge yet?
Check out istanbuleats.com for good recommendations!
Thanks Chow …. we had found that site, we passed on the fish sambos yesterday because we had already eaten … and we’re not giving up – some great food will be found! And – as soon as the Thai Troubles resolve we will be back – can’t wait to eat divine Thai – so yummy and so accessible!
Let me know when you come back!
You’ll be the first to know! That will be excellent!
Found this one too – http://sirkecirestaurants.com – looks interesting, and the couple are marrying today and heading to Bangkok for their honeymoon!
You are so…oooooo welcome back to my computer screen after a year’s absence. Where the hell have have I been!
Glad to be back, thanks!
So, I made this, as in, I just closed my fork and spoon and then sat my arse down in front of the laptop to tell you that I made it and ate it. My glasses are still splattered with bits of paste, but I am content.
I had with it the contents of my local vegetable box. We’re not exactly abundant vegetable-wise in England at the moment, but this mushroom chilli relish was lovely with wilted shredded spring greens, slices of sweet fresh carrot, and a runny fried egg.
Thanks for sharing the recipe!
I am so happy that you made it, and that it worked.
Thank you for letting me know!
My aunt told a really funny story about this pungent and dirty looking paste. She kept her delightful nam prik in the fridge and one day she asked her farang husband, What happened to my food? and he replied, after they figured out what she was talking about, “Oh that thing? Oh, that went bad. It smelled bad too. I threw that out.” 😛
Haha, that’s funny. And very believable!
Thanks for reading Lani!
😀