The recipe in the book mentioned the original dish uses crabs instead of shrimps. So I checked out the dish bpuu pat pong garee, stir-fried crab with curry powder.
@klyeoh Is the egg/milk curd normal in bpuu pat pong garee (stir-fried crab with curry powder) or kung phat phong kari (shrimp curry stir-fry)? I guess you know this dish more than us. Thanks in advance.
RICE NOODLES WITH BEEF-TOMATO GRAVY (kuai-tiao nuea sap) - ebook
I’m putting the picture at the end of my post with this warning: UGLY FOOD ALERT. Please feel free to scroll quickly past the photo. There is no picture in the book for a good reason.
I can’t say this dish was on my radar. The only reason I chose to make it was because I had 8 oz of Impossible ground open in the fridge, left over from using 4 oz to make mapo tofu a few days ago. It needed to be used up, so I searched the book for ground beef recipes, and this is what came up.
I used dried wide rice noodles, and followed the instructions to boil, drain, and rinse. You start by stir-frying the cooked noodles with a bit of thin soy sauce and sweet soy sauce. They are then removed to the plates (which have been lined with lettuce). Then you make the sauce. Start the stir-frying with garlic, then add ground beef (Impossible), and break it up. Then add onion, tomato, and preserved cabbage. Then you add the sauce mixture, which is broth, cornstarch, thin soy sauce, oyster sauce, sugar, and curry powder. And some celery goes in. This quickly thickens to a gravy. It’s served over the noodles, and finished with white pepper.
So, yes, this is ugly. As for taste, we were divided. Mr. MM liked it well enough, and cleaned his plate. I ate most of mine only because I was very hungry. Really was not a fan. It was the curry powder that ruined it for me. It just seemed completely out of place to me. This is not a repeater as Casa de Mel. YMMV.
It’s not ugly, just looked a bit greenish, but I think it’s the tone of the photo. As for the curry, do you think it’s a dosage problem or you prefer curry paste?
You plated it beautifully, Mr. MM enjoyed, and it filled you up. I’m noticing a lot of the home-style dishes in this book are not especially showy, but hey, they are good-eating, so bon appétit!
The green in there is celery, which is oddly added near the end. As for the curry powder, I used the amount specified. It was too much. Actually I would have preferred none at all. I don’t think curry paste would have been good here either. I was kind of expecting something like a bolognese but with the sweet/umami flavors from soy sauce (both thin and sweet) and oyster sauce. The curry powder just didn’t seem to go, and judging from the headnote, using it is a topic for debate. Also I use a very fragrant curry powder that might be more pungent that most (Penzey’s Majarajah blend), so perhaps a smaller amount would have been better, but I really think I would have preferred none at all. It isn’t that I don’t like curry powder, it just wasn’t good in this application.
It seems every recipe in Simple Thai Food ends with celery leaves. I checked with the book Thai Food by David Thompson, the dishes finish with celery or spring onion, sliced onion and coriander.
I checked 4 Thai recipes meat with rice noodle and tomato sauce or gravy. 3 of them use no curry, the last one uses red and yellow curry paste with fish sauce but no soy sauce.
A few recipes I read, they said a real pad thai shouldn’t have tomato but tamarind, they said tomato version is a US thing. I need to do more research on this.
This reminds me that I did make the Pad Thai from Simple Thai Food a few weeks ago. I only had very wide noodles, but the dish turned out fine. I am no expert as I have never made it before and rarely order it. It all got eaten anyway!
Thanks! The second link you provided seems to be the same dish, right down to the lettuce leaves, but without curry powder, and pork instead of beef. I would try that version if I want to give this dish another go. Obviously Pad Thai, curry noodles, and beef with basil are different things altogether.
This is also a completely different thing than the recipe in our COTM. I mean, I’ve got the Thompson book, I bought it when it first came out 20 years ago. I’ve been cooking Thai food at home for 30 years. So I’m more interested in versions of this particular dish, which is one I haven’t made before, than dishes I have made before.