Cantonese Food, Traditional Thai Ingredients [Foreign Supermarket Challenge]
In our third installment of our ongoing Foreign Supermarket Challenge series, we invited Steph's Dad Dawei (a traditional Cantonese cook), to use produce from our local Thai market in Bangkok.
Now, this post will be a little different. No recipe this time (apologies), but we thought you might find it interesting nonetheless.
You see, as we discussed before, the two of us have this game that we like to play when we’re bored on the train or the bus or whathaveyou. Basically, one person chooses an ingredient from a certain cuisine, and asks the other person to brainstorm how a cook from an unrelated cuisine might use that ingredient if they bumped into it at the market. For example,
What would a Sichuan grandmother do if she saw some hominy?
How might a Cajun chef use young jackfruit?
What would a Mexican cook do with some smoked bamboo shoots?
And it’s interesting because… this is almost precisely how ingredients spread around the world, right? Germany didn’t adopt the potato because some ambitious young chefs were seeking to make some Peruvian-German fusion. It happened on an ingredient-by-ingredient basis, with people incorporating new produce within their own cooking system.
And that specific moment’s always been super interesting to me. What was the moment like when chili pepper was first introduced to Thailand? When the tomato was first hitting the markets in Naples? The above game is probably a pretty drastic simplification of the actual historical process, but… if you’re food dweebs like us, it can be a fun way to pass the time at least. Get the creative juices flowing a bit.
The problem with us playing the game in real life
So, to that end, we’ve made a pair of videos exploring this idea in real life:
And those were some pretty fun videos – a nice activity to do when traveling to the USA to visit family. But we can’t help but shake a mismatch between our content and the original conception of the game. We’d sometimes joke that it feels like… our minds are just too polluted with knowledge of different cuisines.
Because like, the idea of the game is that someone’s using something fresh, something that they have absolutely no previous conception of. Like, when at the American supermarket, we picked up some Brussel Sprouts. And while Steph’s never cooked Brussel Sprouts, she’s read enough cooking magazines and watched enough random cooking videos on YouTube that she already knows the general thrust of how it’s usually cooked, and the flavors that people usually put with it.
So, the whole thing ends up feeling closer to an episode of Chopped than it does an actual intermingling of cuisines. Which, like, still fun… but we can’t help but feel that the exercise ends up a little less interesting than it could be?
Playing ‘The Game’ with Dawei, Steph’s Dad
This year was the first time that Steph’s parents could really travel abroad again post COVID, and decided to swing down to Bangkok for Chinese New Year. Fun to have them around (if a little stressful/busy, thus the slow uploading as of late), and we figured we could have Dawei try to whip up some Cantonese food using ingredients from our local Thai market.
Because at first blush there’s actually a lot of overlap between Thai and Cantonese ingredients (outside of herbs), so we decided to pick the primary ingredients for Dawei. We settled on:
Coconut Milk. Self explanatory. In Guangdong, you might see the ingredient now and then in desserts and at some Hong Kong Cha Chaan Teng, but it’s not something you see in Cantonese cooking or at Cantonese markets.
Red Ant Eggs. These are a seasonal delicacy in Northern and Northeast Thailand. In Bangkok, they start to hit the market around mid February, and goes until Delicious ingredient - they’ve got a slight pop to them, but less so than something like salmon eggs. They’re incredibly umami, however. They’re often used in Thai Salads, or tossed on top of soups.
To this end, he ended up making a stir fry with the ant eggs and turning the coconut milk into a soup. Do watch the video to see his thought process, it was pretty interesting. But, we thought we’d list some random thoughts here:
Some Random Thoughts
From the video, I think you can see the basic logic of a Cantonese homecooked meal. Not sure what to make? Make a quick soup, make a quick stir fry. Go incredibly heavy on vegetables.
In a similar sense, it was interesting to see that he immediately defaulted to blanching the Tuapu, i.e. the Thai wingbean. It was a good instinct, because wingbean is often blanched in Thai cooking as well. Always safer to blanch something unknown first to make sure it’s cooked through.
The ant egg stir fry was incredibly delicious. If I had to slightly critique it, ant egg is pretty expensive (that bag was 150 THB, or ~4 USD), and it might’ve been nice if it was featured a little more prominently? But it added an undeniable freshness to the vegetable stir fry.
For the rice noodle soup, in Cantonese cooking you’d usually soak some noodles and mix it in with the at the very end (or boil it in with the soup at the end). These were served separately because Thai Kanom Jeen rice noodles are incredibly bouncy and soft, and don’t really take boiling well. Steph told him the usual way that the rice noodles were eaten in Thailand, mostly because… we still wanted some tasty rice noodles.
We were both very surprised at the quantity of coconut milk he added to the soup. Because Cantonese soups are usually not very rich, our prior was something like Tom Yum Gung (which is usually made with evaporated milk, but similar concept). He added a quantity that was much more… Tom Ka Gai. Still worked in the context of a noodle soup though.
That said, we can’t help but feel that - similar to Steph in the Mexican supermarket - the coconut milk soup might’ve been similarly ‘polluted’ with previous conceptions of Thai/Southeast Asian cooking. Because after all, Steph’s Dad has traveled around Thailand and Malaysia, and already has some concept of coconut milk. Further, there’s plenty of Thai restaurants in Guangdong… and just like in the west, you can often see random ‘Thai inspired’ dishes gracing Cantonese restaurant menus. Because while the soup was tasty, I can’t help but think it might’ve been a bit better with a bit of chili, some lime leaf, some lemongrass, some fish sauce…
In any event, hope you enjoy the video - it was a fun one. Happy Year of the Dragon, and we’ll be back next week with a proper recipe video!