Gaeng Hed – Mushroom Soup

I’m a little confused when it comes to soups. ‘Gaeng’ and ‘Tom’ are the words used, yet without going too far into Thai etymology that nobody is sure of, they can be remarkably similar. What I do know is that their soups are ridiculously clean, balanced, and almost medicinal. Especially the ones hailing from Isaan.

My favourite, by far, is Gaeng Hed.

Mushroom soup. Possibly the best treatment of mushrooms short of simply frying them in butter. This is odd for me, as prior to tasting this, the thought of boiled mushrooms made me wince in reminiscence of rubbery, squeaky, bland…eugh. This, is somehow different.

The array of mushrooms available here is remarkable. Varieties that back in the UK stretch your budget to the gourmand (but are confusingly only ever served on top of overly thick risotto) are sold on market stalls for a pittance.

I can’t quite pinpoint exactly what it is about this soup that I love. Its not the sort of thing I can put down to a texture or taste. As sad as it sounds, it is a feeling.  Never have I tasted anything that feels more like a dense green forest, earthy, and warming. The steam rising like a dense mist amongst the fungi that dot the forest floor. The colour of pine trees and moss. Ok, probably not, but you get the idea. It’s a good soup, and with a few tweaks, worth making at home.

Cha-om – A salty, funky, coniferous herb with a meaty, astringent texture

Recipe-ish

I say ‘ish’ because I’ve never had one the same, and googling seems to fetch a wider variety of recipes than make sense. I guess mushroom soup is as adaptable as its name suggests. Instead, I will just make a version that I believe is really really good, and offer suggestions for what you could change at home.

The recipe is rough and pretty open to interpretation depending on how spicy/ sour/ salty you want it.

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Ingredients (serves 2)

• A big bunch of Ya Nang Leaf (Triliacora Triandra, this is a leaf found throughout SEAsia and is scrunched between fingers to give off the distinct green colouring that gaeng hed should have. I’m at a loss of what to recommend but I believe similar results could be achieved with nettles or spinach.)
• 5 or 6 small chilies
• 2 Shallots
• A small handful of squash
• A small handful of asparagus or green beans
• A few large handfuls of mushrooms of your choosing (for this we had Oyster and Straw mushrooms)
• A big bunch of Cha Om (This is an acacia used all over SEAsia. Raw it has an interesting, almost eggy taste and can smell a bit off, but cooked it has a nutty sweet flavour and a meaty texture. I would suggest using very young asparagus or perhaps a small amount of samphire.)
• A big bunch of Thai basil
• 2 tbsp of Pla ra, fermented fish sauce (or half a tin of anchovies, a guessed amount of marmite)
• 2 tbsp of fish sauce (or salt)
• A thumb sized piece of tamarind (this can be bought from supermarkets but if not, a sour jam such as quince could be used instead)

***I will say at this point that these dishes were conceived and brewed from availability of produce. I would encourage anyone keen to remake this to go out foraging for green edibles that can be stewed together.

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Ya nang leaf – Pulped with water to yield a thick green liquid.

This is Ya Nang, the green leaf that Ree scrunched together to create the vibrant coloured water we used as a base for the soup. It has that ‘fresh cut grass’ smell of chlorophyll that reminded me of my Mum’s weird fruit shakes using spirulina and wheatgrass. It also thickened the water it was squeezed into, I believe it has some sort of gelatinous property.

Fire on.

After pouring the green goop into our ghetto soup dish, it was brought to a simmer before the chillies and shallots were added. These were not cut, but instead smashed roughly in a pestle and mortar to release their flavour without making the dish too powerful.

Then the squash was added in small chunks so that it would cook quickly, followed by asparagus and tamarind. Finally the large chunks of mushrooms were placed on top of the mixture and barely stirred. We put a lid on top to allow them to boil/ steam. All mushrooms have a large water content, which was why the amount of green water we used looks relatively small. As the mushrooms cook they release alot of their water into the dish.

After about 5 minutes it was time to uncover the mushrooms and add the herbs.

These were cooked for roughly a minute while we tasted the soup, adding Pla ra and fish sauce to taste. It’s truly amazing how different things can taste without any salt, as the Pla ra truly transforms this dish from a nice vegetable broth, into an earthy, moreish concoction, that could cure a stubborn cold.

Here is Ree looking chuffed with herself.

Traditionally the best way to eat this is alongside a variety of other dishes, dunked at with sticky rice. Everyone gets a small bowl and helps themselves.

Som Tam Ma Muang Boo Maa – Mango and Blue Crab Salad

Unripened green mangoes are one of the most common things you will see sold in Thailand. They vary in taste and texture depending on the time they are harvested but are usually sour and crunchy. They are used widely in Som Tam as a substitute for papaya and their face mangling sourness lends them favourably towards the spicy, salty flavours used here.

If you were to make this at home and can’t find unripe mango, I suggest using carrots, squash, hard cucumber, or generally anything crunchy.

One of the best things I’ve learned in preparing this is how they are cut to give the optimum size and texture for the salad.

As you can see in the pictures, you take a knife and thwack it in a uniform direction, this creates the long thin strands across the length of the fruit. Then you shave the mango away from you into a bowl (If we were doing this properly we would use a big pestle, but I’m yet to purchase one) and repeat until you are left with the mango stone.

I always just assumed you could grate the fruit to get the same results but you really need the thickness to create that desirable crunch.

Next we added fresh red onions, celery leaves, coriander, fish sauce, chilli flakes, sugar, and last but not least, roasted rice powder. This is one of the surprise ingredients that puzzled me for so long in Thailand. There was a strange grainy substance in my chilli sauce that added a weird smokey flavour and a glutinous thickness that I just couldnt work out. I’ve never seen it on sale in the UK but it is easily made by roasting or dry frying rice until golden brown, then ground up with a pestle and mortar. It is especially used in combination with grilled meats.

The hardest thing about using these mangoes is there varying degrees of sourness. As everything has to be in perfect balance, you can’t use the same amount of chilli and sugar for one that you can for another. There is a constant intuition required with making this food that needs testing at all stages, its hard to learn how much fish sauce is right, cos that stuff can be strong. I guess less is always more.

One of the biggest perks of being by the sea is that we managed to buy two of these amazingly blue crabs from the market for 80 baht each. That is about £1.50 a crab. Before I would have been so excited to boil the crabs for a few minutes and spend an hour or so slowly devouring them. I’m not sure why it amazed me so much, but here they regularly just eat them raw, so that’s what we did.

Ree went about dissecting them, disassembling the creatures into smaller pieces and scooping the white meat into the salad.

Unlike a cooked crab, the meat doesn’t pull out so easily but the freshness is just insane. Ideally, still cold, the juices are salty and sweet, and the meat is soft and creamy with just a slight resistance in the bite that assures you of its meatiness.

With no crab crackers at hand the only way to eat the legs is to pop them in your mouth and squeeze the meat out using your teeth.

The crab and mango is an awesome combination. Fresh fish loves sourness. To me, crab will always be one of my favourite things to eat because it is slow. It is satisfying to have to work for your food, maybe some sort of caveman connection is triggered, the same way ripping chicken wings with hands and teeth is more satisfying than a knife cut breast.

ข้าวเหนียว + ส้มตำปลาร้า – Khao niao and Som Tam Pla Ra – Isaan starter pack

Khao Niao – Sticky Rice. 

Since being in Thailand I have missed bread. Soft, stodgy, comforting bread. Bread is like a blanket for me and Thailand just hasn’t got its head around that yet. (At least not affordably) So what is a poor English man to do when he needs the loving embrace of carbohydrates in a dense block of no fuss finger food. Khao Niao (literally ‘Rice sticky’).

Eaten with almost every Isaan dish, sticky rice is traditionally torn off in chunks with your hand, rolled into grape sized balls, and dunked into the watery juices of your main dish. Served hot or cold depending on what is available, it is a perfect soaker upperer.

To make it, the special variety of glutinous rice is soaked for 3 hours and then steamed in a bamboo contraption that looks like a big ol’ fancy hat until it is cooked. I think for around 20 minutes. Generally you just cook it until it looks or tastes done.

Som Tam Pla Ra – Papaya salad with fermented fish

Papaya salad. The starter dish for anyone wanting an initiation into Isaan food. A perfect example of the divine balance of 5 flavours that this cuisine is built around:

• Salty (Kem)
• Sweet (Wann)
• Spicy (Peht)
• Sour (Pliaow)
• Umami (I’m pretty sure there’s no word for it but we’ll just say its the Pla Ra)

*Bitterness (Comm) should also get an honourable mention but I will talk about this in a later post.

Som Tam is a dish prepared all over Thailand, with its mainstream Thai variant using fish sauce, dried shrimp, and nuts in substitution for the strong Pla Ra flavour which is present in the original North Eastern dish. I believe the original to be much better due to its deeper flavour and its tendency to not be so sweet.

It is prepared using two techniques which I find fascinating, first the Papaya is shredded using a knife tapped length ways along the peeled fruit then shaved off into slivers. I’m sure you could get similar results with a coarse grater but this is much more fun. Secondly the mixing of the salad is done in a huge pestle and mortar named a Tam, because of the sound it makes, hence Som Tam. All other ingredients are expertly smashed and folded into eachother in record time. I am confident that when I first attempt to make it things may get slightly messy.

So what is in Som Tam Pla Ra? 

• Shredded Papaya
• Green beans
• Tomato
• Chilli
• Garlic
• Lime
• Palm Sugar
• Pla Ra
• Fish sauce

This is your basic artillery, and of course there are as many variations as you can imagine. Add in any animal, vegetable, or mineral you see fit and as long as the general flavour base is the same you’ve still got Som Tam. It’s all about the balance. You will regularly order this from a street stall and then before being given the final dish, a spoon will be thrust into your hand for you to taste the sauce. More lime? More Chilli? OK mai?

The more popular version than this which you hear uttered constantly on any street corner is ‘Som Tam Boo Pla Ra’. Boo being crabs, tiny crabs which are lightly pickled to preserve and chopped up into recognisable chunks of crab carcass, randomly poking beady eyes a midst your Papaya strands. These taste amazing and it is oddly satisfying to crush the sweet meat from within the shell using only your teeth. However, I seem to have developed some form of allergy to raw shellfish which results in my lips expanding to gargantuan proportions, so I tend to avoid it.

This dish will probably be the first Isaan dish you try and it is incredibly healthy. Good carbohydrates from the Papaya, a huge dose of Vitamin-C from the Chili, magical properties of the fermented fish juice, and vegetables, good old fashioned vegetables.

This is not a delicate salad in a western sense, these are not delicate flavours. These are big, nose watering, tongue tingling, all consuming, stop talking to your friends because you’ve fallen in love with the meaty headiness of fermented fish flavours. You will need tissues, you will need water, you will need to be within close proximity to a toilet the following day (but your delicate stomach will steadily acclimatise).

Here’s a picture of the King looking cheeky.

ปลาร้า – Pla Ra

Like all of the best things to eat, Pla Ra smells pretty foul. To be honest fermented fish is never going to be something you want to dab behind your ears before a first date, but trust me when I say it is amazing.

My journey into the world of Isaan food gained real traction sitting cross legged on the floor of my girlfriend’s restaurant. On the bamboo mat in front of me, surrounded by girls talking so quickly in a language my brain could only compute as squiggles, I was presented a humble feast. No big deal to those who ate it every day but I was immediately transfixed.

Bags of sticky rice, Fresh mackerel fried and mashed into a sweet, spicy, sour paste, the biggest plate of Som Tam (Papaya Salad) I had ever seen, Gaeng Hed (a hot earthy mushroom soup), boiled eggs, and a miniature garden of leaves, herbs, and vegetables so green and vibrant, yet all so unknown to me.

Unsure of etiquette and not wanting to offend I decided the best thing to do was devour everything in sight. Everyone was moderately surprised and genuinely appreciative at my love for their food. These were all things I had eaten before, but not this good.

I noticed Ree take something from a small bowl my eyes had missed before. Hidden behind the vegetables was a bowl of leathery brown, almost black water, and inside were tiny, dark fillets of small fish.

“Ow mai?” She said to me, noticing my eyes widen.

I said yes and before I knew it she was pulling the meaty flesh from tiny bones and plonking it down on my plate, black juices pooling around a silvery chunk. The other girls had started to look on in amusement, smiles twitching on to their faces, wondering if I could go through with it. I perched it onto my spoon and lifted it gradually to my face. Yeah. Ok. It does smell, but I think my upbringing had prepared me for this moment. Raised on the stinkiest French cheeses, I knew that this smell could only mean good things. I tilted the spoon into my mouth and felt it on my tongue… Fishy? Yes! Salty? Yes! But more than anything, UMAMI! It all made sense now. The meatiest most mouth watering flavour, so strong, so aggressive, but so god damn good.

Where in popular culinary culture we have soy, mushrooms, meat stocks, cheese etc and to a lesser extent the more popular thai condiment nam pla (fish sauce) in Isaan they have Pla Ra. Fermented fish is obvioulsy not exclusive only to this region, it has a history around the world, even our most beloved Worcestershire sauce is made from fermented anchovies but here it is a real big deal.

So what is Pla Ra and how do you make it?

Made by chopping and pickling different types of small fish, it is then mixed with salt, rice bran, and sometimes pineapple husk. It will then be put in a big covered jar and left for a minimum of 3 months or up to a year. Ree assures me however that in her home she has a batch that has been there for maybe 7 years. You would be amazed at how excited she got reminiscing about 7 year old rotten fish water.

After this moment of enlightenment everything began to make sense, my addiction to Isaan food had a name, a driving force behind the craving. The real reason Som Tam Boo Pla Ra was miles better than Som Tam Thai, why that Gaeng Hed tasted like I was eating a dense rainforest.

It is my new crack and the namesake for this blog. A blog that will follow my journey into the world of Isaan food, food from the North Eastern region of Thailand and my take on it all.