The hottest month of the year in Thailand is also an important one with schools out, people spending more time with family, and the celebration of the water festival Songkran. Before Bangkok sunk completely into the heat induced festivities, we gathered friends and volunteers for a celebration of our own. Since the launch of our cooking classes for visitors to Bangkok, we have been cooking and testing Thai recipes nonstop. We took the heat as our excuse to take a break and bring some American flavors to your plates, namely ribs, cornbread, and all the fixins’.
Delicious food aside, the occasion was also a special opportunity for a small group of our students. You may remember a large group of our kids recently had their first chance to bake, now a few months later we grabbed a few a let them experience the heat, excitement, and stress of a small commercial kitchen. This is a big deal for students from poor families who often have never even eaten in a real restaurant. They made the jump from learning recipes in our classes each weekend to serving customers who aren’t their parents or younger siblings.
You can bet there were hiccups and confusion, just like in a real restaurant! At Courageous Kitchen we don’t shy away from the madness of kitchen, and instead use things gone awry as an opportunity to give constructive feedback, and discuss ways to improve. We’re confident our guests made up of friends, volunteers, and interns were well fed and the evening gave our students a rare opportunity at real world application of the kitchen skills they’ve been working so hard to learn.
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Thank you to everyone supporting us near and afar. We can’t believe the month is nearly up and we’ve got more exciting updates and challenges to come. See you in the kitchen!
PS – All photos are credited with thanks to wonderful volunteer photographer Alisa Suwanrumpha, find more of them on our Courageous Kitchen facebook page.
Whether from traveling to Thailand or watching street food videos, people around the world are excited to try Thailand’s rich khao soi curry. This hearty northern Thai dish wins people over by being full of tender stewed meat, aromas from the spices in the curry, and a colorful array of condiments.
We wanted to recreate this recipe in the tradition of Thai street food in Chiang Mai. Our strongest clues for how khao soi was eaten in the past come from the 40 year old flavors you can taste at the restaurant Khao Soi Islam in downtown Chiang Mai. The taste is a sharp contradiction to the extra sweet and salty versions many restaurants, and thus many online recipes promote today.
So here’s our method for the old school version. When you come to Bangkok, be sure to join a cooking class where you can learn to make this yourself. You’ll see in the video, we even pounded the curry in a granite mortar and pestle, this is the same Thai grandma elbow grease method we teach you in the class! Happy eating and remember you can help us feed and train more students by making a donation today!
Khao Soi Curry Recipe
Prep time: 1 hour
Cook time: 45 mins
Yields: 6 Servings, Feeds 3-4 People
INGREDIENTS
For the Curry Paste:
8 to 10 dried Thai chili peppers soaked in water overnight
5-6 garlic cloves
3 kaffir lime leaves
3 medium shallots, halved
One 2-inch piece ginger, peeled and thinly sliced (⅓ cup sliced ginger)
One 2-inch piece fresh turmeric, peeled and thinly sliced
¼ cup chopped coriander root or 2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro stems
1 ½ cups oil (I prefer coconut or any high heat oil for frying)
16 ounces thick egg noodles
2 tablespoons palm sugar
Salt to taste or fish sauce
Cilantro sprigs, pickled mustard greens, shallots, chili oil and lime wedges, for serving
Directions:
1. Wash and dry chicken. Marinate with dry rub and set aside. (Can do this overnight)
2. Make the curry paste: Place the dried chiles in a heatproof bowl. Cover with boiling water and let soak until softened, 20 minutes, or soak overnight in cold water. Drain the chiles, reserving the soaking liquid.
3. Toast dry spices in a hot pan until darkened, no oil needed, remove from heat and set aside. Toast remaining paste ingredients until they have a slight char or smoky aroma. Toast shrimp paste in a small foil packet. Remove from heat and put all ingredients in your mortar or blender. 3. In a mortar, pound garlic, kaffir lime leaves, shallots, ginger, turmeric, coriander root (or cilantro stems), lemongrass, shrimp paste, curry powder, coriander seeds, cardamom seeds, and 2 to 4 tablespoons of coconut milk or the chili soaking liquid (as needed) to make a paste. Makes about 1¼ cups.
4. Make the soup: In a large heavy pot, heat 1 cup of the coconut milk over medium-high heat. When the coconut milk begins to simmer, add the curry paste and cook, stirring constantly, until the liquid has thickened and reduced, 5-10 minutes. The oils should start to bubble and separate. Add the marinated chicken, browning a little on both sides. Add the water or chicken stock (covering chicken completely) and bring to a boil. reduce the heat to medium low and simmer until the chicken is cooked through and tender, 40 to 45 minutes.
5. Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Working in 2 batches, fry 4 ounces of egg noodles until golden brown and crisp, about 1 minute. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate and set aside.
6. Cook the egg noodles one batch at a time, prepare one pot of boiling water and one ice bath for a 3 step process:
Slightly rinse noodles under cold water to remove excess flour.
Submerge into rapid boiling water, just to soften, about 30-40 seconds, remove immediately (too long and they will become gummy and inedible)
Transfer the noodles immediately from boiling pot to ice bath. This will stop the cooking, retain color and help firm them. Remove after 30 seconds, and place in bowl.
6. Stir the palm sugar into the soup. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt or fish sauce. Place noodles and soup among 6 bowls. Lightly drizzle coconut milk over top of soup, (don’t stir!) and serve with cilantro, pickled mustard greens, shallots, fried chili oil and lime wedges.
Special thanks to our friends at Spoon Fork Heart for inviting us to participate in their International Chicken Collaboration Series. If you enjoyed this recipe, please consider donation to Courageous Kitchen to help up provide more cooking classes and education to children in need!
Each week Courageous Kitchen provides fun, education instruction to at risk students. This instruction includes English language learning, cooking classes, and special outings. You can donate any amount, but if you’re unsure here are some suggestions:
$1 = sponsor one plate
$30 = sponsor a meal for an entire class
$100 = sponsor a full day of instruction
$400+ = sponsor a month or more of Courageous learning
Each gift given on the form below will help us reach our goal to fund classes for an entire year!
We appreciate you checking in with us this month and we’ve got two big announcements to share from Bangkok. The first is that there’s a piece of equipment we’ve needed for quite some time and it’s finally arrived. We’ll give you a hint, it’s not a giant oven, or some expensive “must-have” kitchen gadget.
From Your Hood to Ours
If you’ve been following our story, a few months back we renovated a run down house to be a kitchen space with the help of funding from Bangkok Patana School. The new space allowed for use to have more room to host the swarming children of the neighborhood, who all seem interested in cooking at once. However, even after painting, replacing the floor, and knocking out a wall, the new space still wasn’t much of a kitchen.
That’s because doing more cooking in large groups was nearly impossible to do safely with the little to no airflow in the building. In Thailand, most kitchens are powered by portable gas burners which can be dangerous to use with out safety precautions, including having good ventilation. This also meant when we made traditional chili filled Thai dishes, we didn’t have to do much before everyone in the room was coughing and choking on the spiced filled air which couldn’t escape the room.
The good news is we have just installed a custom made exhaust hood into the room. We should have done this a few months ago, but honestly there had been several delays in making the hood happen. We appealed to private donors and to foundations offering grants, but none of the parties were interested in the not so flashy upgrade to our kitchen. Instead we used funding from your efforts to fund cooking classes this year, and spent about $500 to install a new ventilation hood. The new hood will not only improve the safety of our students, but because it is large enough to accommodate more than one burner, it will also open up greater possibilities for our cooking curriculum in the future.
Securing our Bridge to You
The other big safety upgrade is a bit technical, as we’ve just installed an SSL certificate to encrypt our website. To put it in laymen’s terms, we’ve improved the security of our site to be sure your information is safe. This means whether you’re making a donation, booking a cooking class in Bangkok, or just purchasing a t-shirt, all your information is transmitted safely and securely.
The added encryption to our website also opens up more possibilities in the future as we grow. For example, the added security may expedite further development of online teaching resources, and fundraising products for our own mini-marketplace. And more importantly, it means you can give not only with Paypal, but with any credit card you want, without fretting about being exposed to fraud.
We’re steadily building towards ambitious goals to connect better with you and improve the lives of our students and their families here in Thailand. Thank you for joining us on this journey and stick with us as we grow, and strive to conquer our most ambitious and challenging year yet!
Few things are as powerful at bringing us together as the plate!
Admit it, there’s something special about coming together at the dinner table, even when our worlds might seem far a part. Take a look at the following Canadian ad campaign for #EatTogether and we hope it inspires you to share a meal in your community with someone new, and considering sponsoring a meal for someone who can’t afford nutritious food.
When bans, barriers, or even our technology threaten to keep people a part, let’s strive a little harder to eat together.
We hope this short ad inspires you to be inclusive in your eating and we’re confident you’ll not only be rewarded with delicious food, but with some new friends too. If you’re Bangkok bound or based, we hope to connect and share a plate and laugh with you soon!
This past week our Courageous Kitchen students had the opportunity for a special visit to local international school Bangkok Patana. There the teens participated in a student led baking activity, making chocolate chip cookies and dark chocolate brownies with students from 8 international schools from around the city. The activity was part of the 2017 ServICE Conference which aims to engage young leaders at international schools to discover ways they can more actively give back.
On the first day of the conference the participants were divided up for activities with several NGOs and small charities, where they could serve the organizations with direct action in some way. Students who indicated interest in “No Hunger”, one of the new Sustainable Development Goals, joined our Courageous Kitchen students in the Bangkok Patana cooking classroom. These students who are passionate about ending extreme hunger, improving agricultural practices, and eliminating food waste — had probably not been expecting to spend the day baking and making friends with our kids from a community in Bangkok where food can be scarce.
This activity was also rewarding because, although our students have been cooking as a part of the Courageous Kitchen activities for more than two years, our kitchen facilities are basic compared to what you would find in a western kitchen. Instead the cooking we mostly do involves Thai or Asian recipes requiring minimal electrical equipment. This means CK students are pros are stir frying on a gas burner, but had not had the opportunity to bake before. When the activity began they were forced to learn very quickly how to deal with wax paper, induction stoves, electronic scales, and the sometimes tricky controls of built-in ovens.
The activity was a giant success, and although not all of the baked goods came out as planned, the new friendships made, and young minds expanded were beyond everyone’s expectations.
All photos are credited to volunteer photographer Alisa Suwanrumpha.
