Ed. note: I had my most important work event of the year last week, thus this is both late and I didn’t bother with an essay — “just get to the recipe” fans will be thrilled, as well as “Johnathan good” fans (myself included). There will be another post this week on our regularly scheduled Friday, though! —r
A couple of Mondays ago, I did what I often do when I’m in my feelings, and I took on a kitchen project to occupy my brain and my hands. I hadn’t made a filled pasta in a while, and I had never made agnolotti, so that’s where I landed. While blanching spinach leaves and scalding a pot of milk for ricotta, I thought back on the ravioli I used to eat at a high school friend’s house. David’s mom would often cook for us, and her ravioli were always the highlight for me — delicate pasta filled with ricotta, spinach, and mashed potato.
David and I were very close; we were bandmates, and we were like brothers, until we weren’t. I don’t even remember the circumstances of our falling out — certainly some petty bullshit that seems important when you’re young. Stirring the milk and feeling nostalgic, I grabbed a Yukon Gold from the pantry. The agnolotti came out great. Not quite as good as hers, but really great. After dinner, I sent an Instagram message to David’s sister about it, and a couple of days later, David reached out. He and I have been catching up for the first time in ten years.
Since then, I’ve been thinking about other “lost tastes” and dishes I would love to eat again. Even if you’ve never read Proust, his “madeleine moment” on the connection between taste and memory is familiar enough that it’s a well-worn trope. A “madeleine” that came to mind for me was a green curry fried rice dish from a good-not-great Thai restaurant I used to live a few blocks away from. The restaurant is still there, and they even serve a “similar” dish, but the new version is vastly different from the one I still pine for, which was topped with toasted coconut and lime leaves and filled with impossibly crispy flakes of deep fried catfish. Why they stopped serving this is beyond me, and until I found a reference to it on something called “menuwithprice.com” during a deep dive on Google, I wondered if I had imagined it all together.
Green curry fried rice can be odd. Often when I order it, it fails to hit the heights of either great fried rice or great green curry, the latter of which is one of my absolute favorite foods. I can remember exactly where I was, even exactly what I was wearing when I first tasted it. The chilis, the aromatics, the fattiness of the coconut milk, the sweetness and the funky umami. It was practically hypnotic.
With this recipe, I’ve set out to recreate Silom 12’s dearly departed rice, and if I’m honest, I think I’ve come quite close. For the basic method and ratios, I riffed on Pailin Chongchitnant’s recipe for green curry fried rice with chicken. To accomplish the crispy fish flakes, I thought of a recipe that had disappeared from the indispensable blog of Chicago’s own Leela Punyaratabandhu. Thankfully I was able to find a cached copy of the post, which helped immensely.
A lot of fried rice recipes call for using leftover rice, but I’ve never been able to get a good texture that way. My preferred method is to pre-cook the rice, but not all the way, and to let it finish to perfection in the pan. This recipe does call for some ingredients that could be hard to find, but even if you don’t have a phenomenal Thai grocery store near you, things like purple basil, palm sugar, and Maesri green curry paste can often be found at H-Mart or Chinese markets. —j
GREEN CURRY FRIED RICE
serves two
1 cup of long grain rice, preferably Jasmine
8 ounces of skinless white fish fillets (I used flounder, but tilapia, trout, or catfish would be fine)
3 tablespoons of green curry paste (a little less than a half of a can of Maesri)
½ cup of slivered bamboo shoots
½ cup of blanched green beans (cut into bite-sized pieces)
½ cup of coconut milk (use Chaokoh or another brand that doesn’t use emulsifiers)
1 teaspoon of fish sauce
1 teaspoon of palm sugar/coconut sugar (you can use white sugar if you must)
⅓ cup of dried, sweetened coconut (the kind you make macaroons out of)
1 bunch of Thai basil, roughly chopped
2 makrut lime leaves (fresh or frozen, but not dried. These are optional but highly recommended)
Plenty of vegetable oil for frying
Preheat your oven to 350°F, and place your fish on a baking sheet, using either a silicone mat, parchment, or some vegetable oil to keep it from sticking. Bake the fish until it is completely cooked and flakes easily, between fifteen and twenty minutes, depending on the thickness of the fillets you choose. When the fish is done, use a fork to break it up into small flakes, leaving them on the baking sheet. Place the sheet back in your turned-off oven to dry out while you prep everything else.
Rinse the rice in a colander or strainer under cold water until the water runs clear, about two minutes. Place the rice in your rice cooker along with a cup of water and cook as normal.1 This should yield rice that is very al dente, which is what we want. As soon as the rice cooker is “done”, remove the grains from the bowl and spread out on a plate or tray to cool. Break up any large clumps of rice with your fingers.
In boiling salted water, blanch the green beans until they turn bright green, then shock them in ice water and set aside.
If your bamboo shoots are in big pieces, slice them into something like a julienne and set aside.
Roughly chop the basil, and if using them, remove the stems from the lime leaves and slice them as thinly as possible. Set aside.
In a dry pan over medium heat, toast the coconut flakes until they’re golden brown. Keep them moving to make sure they toast evenly, and set them aside.
Put a couple of inches of vegetable oil in a deep pot, and place it over medium-high heat. When the oil reaches 350°F, fry your fish flakes in batches until they are golden brown and extremely crispy. This will only take a few minutes. Be aware that the fish will still have some water in it, so it could make a lot of noise when it hits the oil. Be careful, and keep it moving so it doesn’t stick to the pot. Drain the fish on paper towels, and set it aside.
In a large pan, place two tablespoons of vegetable oil and two tablespoons of the fatty layer from the top of your coconut milk. Heat over a medium-high flame until the coconut fat melts into the vegetable oil almost like butter would. At this point, add the curry paste and stir fry it for two minutes, until it’s very fragrant and the oil again separates from the paste. Add fish sauce and palm sugar, and taste it for seasoning.
Add the green beans and stir until well coated with the curry paste mixture. After a minute, add the bamboo shoots and then the rice. Stir everything well until the rice is well-coated with the curry paste mixture. Slowly drizzle in the rest of the coconut milk as needed to loosen and moisten the rice. Taste again for seasoning and to make sure the rice is done. If it is, kill the heat. Stir in the basil, half of the fried fish, and half of the toasted coconut.
Divide the rice between two plates and garnish with the rest of the coconut and fried fish, and the lime leaves. Enjoy.
If you don’t have a rice cooker, use whatever method you usually use but make sure to keep it on the al dente side. A rice cooker is a great addition to your kitchen, though! Ours is the most basic Zojirushi with an on and off switch.