Bangkok Glutton

I am a big believer in karma. It always works, but it takes longer to set in for some. Of course, when it comes to karma visiting me, the payback is always prompt, and well-deserved. But I like to think that people who do me an ill turn eventually get their own visits from Lady Karma, too.

Now, it’s been a while since I talked about deeply personal stuff in very cryptic terms. But at the very beginnings of this blog, well nigh on 1000 years ago, it was always meant to be a sort of “dear diary” type entity, something I have tried to explain to people who contacted me about guest posts. These are my stupid dumb thoughts, I would say, so maybe you should find a better outlet. After all, it was in this blog where I wrote about friendship breakups, professional woes, and self-image problems. But I, too, eventually strayed from the personal aspect of this thing, thinking it would be far more professional and mature of me to stick to exploring Thai food.

Today, I’m like naaaaaahhhhhh. After the past few weeks I’ve had, I’m back to burn booking this shit.

And then this debate, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Have you seen a skankier bitch? And yet somehow also a luckier one? The skank-to-luck ratio on this guy is incredible. He gets rapped for 34 counts, rambles on incessantly about windmills and sharks, lies like a 5-year-old caught kicking the dog, and yet, because our world is a flaming capitalist hellscape in which views equal money for media outlets, we’re all focused on how old Joe Biden looks. “But his stutter,” we’ll say, as our daughters become handmaidens and longtime immigrants to the US get put into camps and deported. “How did we end up with these two choices?” we cry, as if they are somehow on the same playing field instead of one on earth and the other in the flaming abyss of hell. “Wah wah wah,” writes the New York Times, and if I could cancel my subscription, I would (I’ve never subscribed because they have never asked me to write for them and I’m super mature like that). Hmmmm, what to order, the chicken or the broken glass-encrusted turd? (Thanks David Sedaris). Well, how is the chicken cooked? I worry it might be too dry.

When I get in these moods, only something as heated as I’m feeling will do. Enter “pad cha”, a dish that I’ve always wanted to mean a “numbing stir-fry” so hot that it renders your mouth incapable of feeling, like how I feel when I watch a political debate in 2024.

Alas, “pad cha” is one of those onomatopoeic dishes — like Japanese shabu-shabu, which mimics the sound of the meat in the water, or Vietnamese banh xeo, which is the sound the batter makes in the pan. “Cha” is the sound of the sizzle in the blazingly hot wok, which is what you’ll need (a hot pan will also do) when you’re making this dish. Also, and you might catch Thai cooks saying this a lot, but it’s especially true here: you need the heat. It’s not good if it’s not spicy. You don’t have to kill yourself, but a good tingle goes a long way. Make this atop a good mound of jasmine rice, and slurp, chomp, and munch your way to onomatopoeic oblivion (as well as hopes and prayers for a visit from Lady Karma for those who deserve her).

Scallops pad cha

Serves 4-6 (as part of a Thai meal)   

Prep time: 10 minutes                          Cooking time: 10 minutes

• 10 scallops (or jumbo shrimp, or fish, you get the picture)
• 1 Tablespoon unscented oil
• 3-10 chilies chopped roughly, depending on spice tolerance and type of chili used (this dish does need to be well-spiced, so we recommend 3 spur chilies at the very least)
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• 1 teaspoon peppercorns (white or black fine)
• 3 coriander roots, chopped roughly
• 1-2 Tablespoons fish sauce
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 Tablespoon oyster sauce
• ½ cup-1 cup water
• 5-10 “fingers” of wild ginger (grachai), julienned (or ½ cup wild ginger, julienned, if jarred)
• 1 stem green peppercorns, picked from the stem
• 1 handful holy basil (bai gaprao) or Thai sweet basil (bai horapa), washed
• 2-3 stems green peppercorn, on the stem (for garnish, optional)

First, make your chili paste. In a mortar and pestle (preferably stone), pound chilies until well mashed. Add garlic cloves and repeat the procedure. Add peppercorns and mash, then add coriander roots and do the same. By the end, you should have a nice, generally uniform reddish paste.

In a wok over medium heat, add oil. WIth a spoon, scrape paste out from mortar into the wok. Stir-fry paste in the oil until golden and aromatic, about 1-2 minutes. This is when you might start sneezing. This is a good thing! It means the paste has the right amount of spice in it.

Turn heat up to high and add scallops (or shrimp). Stir to encase in the nice aromatic paste. Add 1 Tablespoon fish sauce, oyster sauce, a splash of water (not all), and sugar. Taste for seasoning. Add julienned wild ginger and green peppercorns (stemmed) and stir. Because scallops (and shrimp) cook quickly, check doneness after 3 minutes, and do not cook them beyond 5 minutes. There is nothing worse than rubbery scallops (or shrimp). Remove them to a plate next to the wok, but continue cooking the sauce.

Taste the sauce again. If it’s too salty, add a bit more sugar and water. If it’s too sweet, add more water. If it’s not salty enough, add another Tablespoon of fish sauce. The point is to make this sauce intensely flavored, like it’s been dialed up to 11, as Nigel Tufnel would say. You are supposed to eat this stir-fry with rice, after all.

Once satisfied with the taste, continue with the sauce bubbling for about 5 more minutes. The sauce should get glossy, like a red wine sauce for coq au vin. You want enough sauce that it will coat the scallops (or shrimp) and form a pool around it, but not so much that it will look like a soup. The Thai term for this (halfway between “dry” and “soupy”) is “kluk klik”. 

Right before the end of the 5 minutes, add your scallops once again to the wok, turn off the heat, and add basil and green peppercorn stems (if using). Stir to incorporate, then plate and serve immediately with rice and the rest of your nice Thai meal.

I remember my occasional visits to Thailand in the summers of my high school years. These were meant to be earnest explorations of my roots, but ultimately ended up as half-assed hijackings of my long-suffering relatives’ lives. One summer, the relatives saddled with my presence were the family of my father’s older sister, then head librarian at Chulalongkorn University. Every weekday, I would brave the traffic with my aunt, sitting down in a desk in front of her office to write abstracts on various books. This was the extent of my foray into “Thai culture”.

When I was not at the university with my aunt, I was in her home, eating dinners that were obviously made up of Thai food. Occasionally, my relatives would take pity on me and bring home pasta from a “farang” restaurant like 13 Coins or The Carlton. These pasta dishes were invariably based on the recipe for “pad macaroni”, even when they featured spaghetti.

Now, those were the days of restaurants like Paesano, with its famous salad of sliced tomatoes topped with Kraft cheese slices and a sprinkling of dried Italian seasoning, and the heyday of The Cup, home of the Caesar salad made with a clear, lime juice-based dressing. Pan Pan was but a twinkle in an Italian expat’s eye, and pasta was a no-brainer, made quite simply with “sauce makuea tet” — literally, “tomato sauce” but in real-life terms, “ketchup”. In fact, all pasta sauces at the time were based on ketchup mixed with margarine or butter, in which the protein of your choice — ham, seafood, minced meat, hot dogs — would be as generously coated as the chef’s chosen noodle. There was no carbonara, bolognese, alfredo; those things would arrive with the advent of Pan Pan. There was only “macaroni” or “spaghetti”.

Now, I have a lot of negative things to say about where I grew up, but none of them have to do with food. Specifically, Italian food. My hometown, New Castle, had long been known as the town with the most people of Italian descent per square mile outside of Italy. Restaurant and family tables were heaving with smelts, lasagne, cavatelli, braciole, pasta fagioli, and most deliciously, wedding soup, incomplete without an egg-and-cheese crust. So I thought I knew pasta. And these ketchup-coated monstrosities were not it.

I begged my aunt to take me to the grocery store, which in those days meant a trip to Villa, because most grocery stores did not have the ingredients that I deemed good enough for my spaghetti. I got imported pasta from Italy and expensive olive oil. I bought balsamic vinegar for no reason. I got Parmesan cheese — the shakey shakey kind that was the only kind available. I got basil (this was Thai). And I got tomatoes, onions, and garlic, because I was making this shit from scratch.

People, even now, like to complain about Thai tomatoes, charging Thais with not understanding them. It is true that real Thai-bred tomatoes are typically a different breed (literally, duh), tough and some would say rubbery on the outside, tart, watery and acidic within. When you make a sauce out of these tomatoes, they naturally pass those innate qualities on to the sauce. After forcing my cousins to a home-cooked spaghetti meal of “my pasta”, my cousin Boyd said, “This definitely does not taste like ketchup.” We finished the meal. I did not cook again that summer.

It took me almost 50 years to learn to appreciate Thai tomatoes. No, they are not the same kind that sprout up in the volcanic ash on Mt. Vesuvius, so sweet and juicy that no cooking is required to make a good sauce. They aren’t even the beefsteak tomatoes of an American summer, bursting when you bite into them like apples off the vine. They are plum tomatoes, a little oblong like San Marzanos, but that is where the resemblance ends. They are bred for yum salads, for som tum, as sour little punctuation marks in a fatty curry like gang phet ped yang, or as part of a flavor chorus in a soup like tom yum. As with all Thai ingredients that begin with the syllable “ma” (“manao”, or lime; “mamuang”, or mango; “magorg”, or water olive), their point is their acidity. They are not meant to coat pasta. Ketchup is.

Today, I appreciate the occasional ketchup pasta. Maybe this is because I’m sort of from Pittsburgh. Or maybe it’s because I’ve lived most of my life in Asia at this point, and I now understand (a little better) how people adapt their food to their surroundings. Ketchup is not the culinary equivalent of a gaudy golden toilet. It’s not even the Asian food equivalent of an American dousing his well-done steak in ketchup. It’s a piece of history, harkening back to the mid-1900s when post-war Asians began to learn about American food. It’s a tribute to a different time, when we were all younger and more innocent (or not even born). So when Chef McDang told us that he used to enjoy the occasional “pad macaroni” as a child at teatime in the palace, we got to thinking about pad macaroni again (as well as khao pad American, but that’s a different post).

I made it at home. I used leftover pasta, because that’s the point of this dish. I used whatever luncheon meat I had in my fridge at the time. I did buy a green bell pepper from the nearby Fuji though. I just can’t imagine pad macaroni without it.

Serves 2 (if a one-dish meal) to 4

Prep time: 10-20 minutes                        Cooking time: 5 minutes

• 4 oz (120 g) short pasta of your choice, cooked 2 minutes shy of package instructions (or leftover pasta)
• 2 Tablespoons unscented oil
• 1 Tablespoon butter
• ½ green pepper, chopped
• ½ white onion, roughly chopped
• 1 small carrot or ½ large carrot, peeled and chopped into pieces of roughly uniform size
• 1 tomato, cut into wedges
• 4 slices of luncheon meat of your choice, diced
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 egg
• White pepper (optional)

For sauce:

• 3 Tablespoons ketchup
• 3 Tablespoons Sriracha (Thai, preferably. If making for children, omit this ingredient)
• 3 Tablespoons Maggi or Golden Mountain sauce

If not using leftover pasta, set a pot of salted water to boil and cook pasta according to package instructions, but stopping shy by 2 minutes of recommended cooking time (for most pasta, package instructions say 6-8 minutes, so that would be 4-6 minutes, the extent of the math that we will do for you).

In a small mixing bowl, combine ketchup, sriracha (if using) and Maggi or Golden Mountain sauce until well mixed.

When pasta is cooked, take out of the pot and drain well. In a big frying pan or wok (this is important), heat vegetable oil or other unscented oil and add your vegetables: green pepper and carrot or whatever, onion, and, to be really true to Chow’s memories of this dish, tomato wedges. The wedges are only cooked when the skin starts peeling off.

Add butter and garlic, mix well. Add luncheon meat and repeat the mixing procedure. Push everything off to one side and crack your egg; allow the whites to set a little bit, then scramble into the mixture until well incorporated.

Add your pasta and the sauce. Make sure everything is coated with the sauce. Once you’ve achieved this coating, you are finished. Find a plate that reminds you of your grandma (even if your grandma wouldn’t come within 10 feet of this dish) and decant onto the plate. Serve immediately with a sprinkling of white pepper if you like.

(All photos by Lauren Lulu Taylor)

I should probably be embarrassed to write this, but I had no idea that there was a travel advisory on the three southernmost provinces of Thailand. Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat have all experienced some sort of unrest since 1948, incidents which have grown more numerous since 2001. I even went down to the border to report on it, back when my then-employer was trying to make me feel better for having such a mind-numbingly boring job. But, 20 years later, I thought that things had simply “gotten better” somehow, because I was too ignorant and lazy to hear about anything bad happening since then. So this is what it feels like to be an undecided US voter, I think as I type this. They really do exist and aren’t lying just to get on CNN.

Blithely unaware, I recently dragged Lauren to Pattani during our research trip for our next cookbook, even though our government website urges us to “reconsider travel” there. OTOH, it’s only an hour and a half drive from Hat Yai, and it has great food. Hmm, I ponder. Great food, or possible danger?

After a mammoth road trip in which we are kept from eating for a full 90 minutes, we break our fast at Moksu Soup Chormalee (138 ถนนยะรัง Chabangtiko, Mueang Pattani District, Pattani 94000), a friendly open-air place that is filled with locals, all of whom look surprised to see us. We are with our Thai friends Frank and Oui, and I am frequently mistaken for a real Thai, but there is something about us that signals our outsider status (or maybe it’s just Lauren). In any case, we are treated warmly and order two large steaming bowls of tart and spicy oxtail soup, accompanied by a nice plate of kai yat sai, an omelette stuffed with minced chicken.

But wait, there’s still lunch to be had. Only a couple of hours later, we descend on the charming outdoor Roti de Forest (V6HX+F2W, Rusamilae, Mueang Pattani District, Pattani 94000), where all of the cooks and servers look to be my daughter’s age at most and the large video screen is playing a movie in which giant frogs are threatening to eat a small town.

The savory roti is delicious, tissue paper-thin and accompanied by a light-on-the-meat red curry that is still toothsome in spite of that.

But there’s also a HUGE selection of sweet roti — chocolate sauce, bananas, caramel, a mountain of whipped cream, sweet egg yolk floss, or just old-fashioned butter and sugar and a dash of condensed milk — whatever you can think of. This is our real cultural heritage; although many countries throughout Asia eat roti with curry, only Thailand douses it in whatever is sugary and calls it a day!

At the end, the meal comes to 400 baht total, including our Southern Thai-style “cha chak”s, poured for us by yet another amiable teenager.

All the same, dinner is what I’m most excited about, and rightly so — we had to actually make reservations! Kama Khao Yum Racha (ถนนนาเกลือ ซอย 3 Anoru, Mueang Pattani District, Pattani 94000) has actually received its fair share of national attention, thanks to its delicious grilled local fish, brushed with coconut milk and tamarind to a golden sheen; its lasae, thick fermented rice noodles accompanied by coconut milk, yeera blossoms, green beans and bean sprouts; its stir-fried pad mee noodles with shrimp; and of course, its namesake dish, khao yum, accompanied by a handy little basket of ingredients you can mix into it, like green peppercorn, boiled eggs and chilies.

The price after we’ve stuffed our bellies full of local goodies? 267 baht.

The evening ends as we imagine most evenings to end in Pattani, with more cha chak.

At the crack of dawn the next morning, we make one last stop before we swing north for a 4-hour drive to Khanom. Open at 6am, Nasi Dakae di Fathoni (073-312-646) specializes in, well, nasi dakae, rice seasoned with dried shrimp and coconut, paired with a thick slice of mackerel, boiled egg, banana pepper, and a side of red curry. This is a breakfast that can only be found in southernmost Thailand (although I’m told Usman on Sukhumvit 22 in Bangkok also serves it) and, if you’re in Pattani, it can only be bought before 8:30am, when they usually run out.

I’m not saying ignore your government’s travel advisories to run down south for this dish (don’t sue me!), but I would say, if you were ever to, like, find yourself in the vicinity of Hat Yai, a quick jaunt down south at the crack of dawn probably wouldn’t be the worst thing you could do. And if you were to, say, get a flat tire, necessitating a stay there for around 24 hours, there could be worse uses of your time.

Just saying, I type before calling my lawyer.