Twelve days and eight plane rides into our trip, we arrive in a little village near Ubon, where northern-eastern Thailand borders Laos. Wannida – a waiter at my restaurant, Smoking Goat, and impromptu guide since we landed on Thai soil – has brought our little restaurant team to her family home, where a ceramic tao barbecue has been lit in anticipation of cooking. A few generations of the family sit outside, working pestles and mortars in preparation for the meal.
The plants surrounding the house reveal turmeric, galangal, chillies, papaya ... more or less the entire contents of our walk-in fridge in Soho growing wild.
As I taste a few of the hot mint leaves, I remember being taught by a vegetable farmer, far away on a seaside hill in Cornwall, that plants need to struggle to develop good flavour. I’d never really understood what he meant, but here I can see it. Despite the oppressive heat, and ground that’s dry, red and cracked, these plants look proud and taste bright. They’ve worked hard to turn out this way. This is what lemongrass is supposed to taste like.
When the cooking begins, I gather there’s some animated discussion over who makes the best laab (a spicy roasted rice and chopped meat salad, when to start grilling the pla pao (a salt-crusted river fish) and who, therefore, should talk us through it. Uncle Pwan prevails, and it’s his recipes we learn. Their absolute simplicity and the high quality of their ingredients were a turning point for me and have become the rudder that guides my cooking.
I started cooking a few years ago, having meandered through previous lives in art galleries, music and interior design. I’d not cooked much before, but Thai flavours had always spoken to me, and when I tried cooking Thai food, I just found I could do it. It’s the only food I really know how to cook.
It taught me to understand produce more deeply, and about things such as seasoning, heat, and the distinction between flavour and aroma. For this residency, I’ve tried to pick recipes that pinpoint these areas of understanding for me: the Thai approach as a prism through which to view any food.
Over the past few years, the order of the day among chefs has been to get the best ingredients you can and to do as little to them as possible. While I believe in this approach, it wasn’t until that trip to Wannida’s family that I really understood how it could apply to Thai food.
At Smoking Goat, we’ve always made great produce a priority, but any we had were very exotic – so a long way from the kind of simplicity championed by chefs cooking modern British food. What’s more, for a long time, doing “as little as possible” to ingredients didn’t seem very compatible with Thai cooking – until Ubon, it had always felt relatively complicated.
But then came Uncle Pwan’s cooking. Everything was so fresh, distinct and purposeful, infused with ginger root pulled straight from the ground and fragrant makrut lime leaf plucked from an adjacent tree. He focused on the flavour of good rural ingredients, with little regard for what I had understood as traditional Thai recipes. His laab contained a fraction of the ingredients of the recipe I’d learned (no cumin, macquen warming spices as found in northern Thai laabs), but it tasted incredible.
He seasoned less and allowed the produce to shine; his “recipe” was more a loose guide to be adapted around what was good at the time. In rural Thai food, I’d found a style of cooking that combined a preference for simplicity with the Thai flavours I loved – pungency, aroma, spice and heat. This idea became our second restaurant, Kiln.
Thais think about flavour and aroma differently to westerners. There are numerous Thai dishes savoured for their aroma before their taste, which I can’t see happening in the UK. Furthermore, Thai recipes tend to focus largely on balancing flavours, where we are often more orientated towards adjusting seasoning and texture. This is most noticeable when cooking fish: where we tend to prefer the taste of “fishiness” to be in the background, Thais tend to prize it. Generally speaking, this is achieved by grilling the fish more slowly, wrapping it in a banana leaf parcel, or steaming.
For a long time I had a faint, unfulfilled idea of what really good, fresh fish tasted like. Does a brill actually have a different flavour to a turbot, or even to a bass? Or do they just vary in texture, in “meatiness”, in how the flesh flakes? Exploring Thai cuisine has brought me to realise it’s as much about the scent as it is actual flavour.
The salt-baked freshwater fish we ate in Ubon is made by encrusting a fish stuffed with lemongrass with salt and then slowly grilling it. The salt seasons the fish, of course, but it also prevents moisture from escaping during cooking, thus effectively steaming the flesh on the bone inside. Even when surrounded by a meal of very strongly spiced plates of food, the fish flavour was noticeably pronounced and delicious.
For me, a penny had dropped. I’ve been a convert to the slower cooking of fish ever since and have since found the Thai style of steaming to be the most rewarding.
Thai food is naturally fish-heavy and recipes require you to cook the fish beyond what would be considered correct in the west. Our kitchen team are all now converts to the Thai approach and we try to use recipes that allow us to give the seafood a little more time on the heat to extract all the flavour locked in the bones, sinew and fatty bits.
Steaming is a fantastic way of doing this, cooking the fish more slowly to retain the moisture. This steamed bass recipe reveals just how uniquely delicate but satisfying bass can be. The accompanying clams and green chilli seafood dipping sauce recipe is extremely simple, but no less tasty for it.
Steamed seabass with soy
You can use any white fish to make this recipe, but you’ll need to get a good one, otherwise you’re better off just roasting it instead.
Serves 3-5
For the dressing
300ml light chicken stock
50ml light soy
A dash of fish sauce
A pinch of palm sugar (or caster sugar)
To steam
A small to medium-size seabass (or similar white fish)
1 lemongrass stalk, crushed
3 slices of ginger (3-5cm long)
4 spring onions, bulbs gently crushed with side of a knife
2 fresh makrut lime leaves
A small handful of oyster mushrooms, trimmed
1 Make the dressing by gently heating the stock with the soy, fish sauce and sugar. It will need to be slightly over-seasoned to complement the fish.
2 Stuff the fish with the crushed lemongrass, ginger, spring onion, mushrooms and makrut lime leaves.
3 Wrap the fish in baking paper and add a few tablespoons of the dressing (it’s OK if it’s a little loose).
4 Steam the fish in a steaming pan over a boiling saucepan for 15 minutes, or until very fragrant.
5 Transfer to a dish and taste the hot dressing: it will have been diluted a little, so add any remaining sauce to your taste.
Clams or cockles
Serves 4
400g live clams or cockles
1 Fill a pan with about 2cm of water and bring to the boil. Tip the cockles in, put a lid on the pan and steam for about 8 minutes, or until they’re all open and bright orange.
2 Serve with the green nam jim dressing, see below.
Green nam jim dressing
You’ll have a lot of nam jim dressing left over from the cockles. We like to use it to dress freshly shucked oysters.
Makes about 560ml (1 pint)
3 or 4 garlic cloves, whole
3 coriander roots, washed and finely chopped (omit if you can’t find them)
A pinch of coarse salt
5 or 6 fresh bird’s eye green chillies, chopped
2 tbsp palm sugar (or caster sugar)
300ml freshly squeezed lime juice – about 6 limes
50ml fish sauce
1 Pound the garlic and coriander root to a paste, adding a pinch of salt to the pestle and mortar to act as an abrasive.
2 Add the chillies and continue pounding into a paste. Then add the sugar and start pounding again. Keep going until it’s smooth.
3 Add the lime juice and fish sauce. Taste and adjust to balance as you go. The dressing should taste sweet, sour and hot, with a salty edge.
- Ben Chapman is a chef and founder of Kiln and Smoking Goat Thai restaurants in London; @Kilnsoho and @SmokingGoatSoho
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