Learning to Cook

I feel that travelling is really improving my culinary abilities. I mean, its one thing to cook in the kitchen you're used to, with the ingredients you're used to, and quite another to improvise when the brands are totally different and you're working with crappy student pots and pans instead of your nice set of non-stick cookware.

I have just made red curry for the second time in Spain. In the U.K., for whatever reason, it was much easier. All of the ingredients were conveniently canned and grouped together in even relatively small supermarkets, and the recipe required very minor alterations. Here, it's been different.

It took me about a week to find all of the ingredients. I snagged a jar of curry paste in Valencia, and coconut milk was easy to find. I found Jasmine rice, albeit a small and overpriced package, at Pamplona's high end grocery store. I never planned on finding palm sugar, as the ordinary stuff works very nearly as well.

I actually thought bamboo shoots and nam pla (fish sauce) would be pretty easy to find. Surprise! No one had even heard of bamboo shoots, even after I found the Spanish translation of the name. Fish sauce was perhaps more maddening because I felt so CLOSE to finding it - the high end grocery store had three different kinds of sushi rice vinegar, but no fish sauce (!?), while one of the little asian run shops in town had, I kid you not, more than six kinds of soy sauce, but no fish sauce. On a trip to San Sebastian, I continued popping into these little asian markets, until in one of them I finally found what I sought - an enormous bottle of nam pla! I was so excited - so excited I ran up the stairs when I got home, tripped, fell, and smashed the bottle against the stairs. That was lovely. Great smell, fun to clean up, not embarrassing at all.

After this incident, however, Ana asked her daughter where I should go to find the stuff in Pamplona, and I asked Jorge. Amazingly, both of them came up with the same answer - and it was only about three blocks from my flat! I went there, and, sure enough, they had big bottles of nam pla, and enormous cans of bamboo shoots. They also had red curry paste (for when/if I run out), and big bags of jasmine rice. Basically, I was all set.

When I started cooking, however, I ran into a few surprises. The coconut milk was extremely seperated - all thick and caked up at the top of the can, and basically water on the bottom. The bamboo shoots looked like no bamboo shoots I'd ever seen, lovingly sliced in American cans. I also realized I didn't really know how to cook rice, sans-rice cooker.

The end result was okay, but definitely not the best. I very nearly burned everything on the non-non-stick pans and on the excessively hot stove-tops, the curry was a bit too watery and spicy, the rice wasn't exactly perfect, and while we did an okay job cutting up the bamboo shoots, some of the pieces were a bit big, tough, or oddly shaped.

Today I gave myself the afternoon to try again.

I started with the rice. I rinsed it like they say you should but I ordinarily don't bother to. I measured the water carefully and didn't put too much, since jasmine rice is supposed to be sort of dry and steamed rather than boiled. I added a tiny sliver of butter, just because it can only help when you're uncertain. I heated the pot to a boil, then lowered the temperature and covered. I didn't even peek (much) - after about 20 minutes I opened it quickly and tasted to see if it was cooked - it was close, so I turned off the heat and let it sit covered and warm until I finished the curry. I don't know which steps made the difference, but the end-result is awesome, some of the best rice I've ever made.

I didn't burn the curry this time (much). It helped that I had non-stick pans here in my apartment, but the stove still got hotter on 1 than mine does at 8, so I spent a lot of the cooking process removing the pan from the heat to let it cool down before I could even take off the lid to stir (coconut milk likes to jump and splatter, messy and painful). The chicken I bought this time was processed into 8 lovely, thin fillets without any nasty fatty gristly bits (and it still wasn't much more expensive than back home). I gave myself more time with the bamboo shoots and found a way to cut them that was both more efficient and worked better in the recipe.

The flavour was still a bit off - same problem, too watery, too spicy. I wondered if it could have something to do with the paste I was using, but after a minute I think I figured it out. The coconut milk comes super seperated, and I've been frying the curry paste in the top part, meaning there is precious little coconut cream being added to the sauteed meat and vegetables during part II of the cooking process. I figure there are a few possible solutions to this problem, such as buying just coconut cream (a bit fatty, possibly harder to find), using half the cream during part I, and half during part II (more labor intensive, will make it harder to separate oils), or using one entire can of coconut milk, and only taking the cream from the second can (a bit wasteful, but not much since what's left is basically just water). Anyway, I'm pretty happy that I may have solved the riddle, and I'll be experimenting to try and do even better next time. Meanwhile, I added a bit of yoghurt, since that's what I had on hand. It helped. It also added a certain something funky, since yoghurt isn't supposed to be anywhere near Thai food, but hey, it did in a pinch.