Dining in Bangkok: Krua Apsorn

Posted on 10 January 2012 by christao408

A few weeks ago, I accompanied my friend Chow for lunch at Krua Apsorn. Chow, who is the author of Bangkok’s Top 50 Street Food Stalls, was researching restaurants for an article in an Australian airline’s inflight magazine and needed an extra mouth to help her evaluate the food. Who am I to shirk my duty as a friend?

Krua Apsorn is a Central Thai style restaurant that has garnered much attention in recent years. With a homey charm, decent food, and a slightly obscure location, it is the type of place that makes foreigners feel like they’ve stumbled into a secret cave of culinary treasures. While it is worth a visit, I wouldn’t necessarily put it on my list of “must-visit” restaurants.

The original location of Krua Apsorn (there are now three) is on Samsen Road, which runs north from the Khao San backpacker district towards the Dusit Palace. Located a little ways past the National Library, the restaurant is off the beaten path for most visitors but not terribly difficult to reach. The chef used to cook for the King’s now-deceased mother and older sister and when this restaurant opened, Princess Galayani was known to visit it. Six years ago, the Bangkok Post named it one of Bangkok’s best restaurants and you can now find it listed in nearly every guide book.

Lunch reservations are recommended as this location is popular with large groups of office workers. The interior is modest and the emphasis is on the food rather than the decor. The staff is friendly although rushed and it took a while for us to get their attention to order and then again to get the bill at the end of lunch.

To ensure we gave the restaurant a fair sampling, we brought tremendous appetites, ordering and (for the most part) finishing more dishes than you would think two people could eat. We started with a classic Central Thai appetizer: miang kana. These make-it-yourself appetizers feature a variety of sweet, sour, spicy, savory, and salty tidbits that you wrap in a kailan (or Chinese broccoli) leaf with a splash of tamarind sauce.

Can you spot the following items? Shallot, lime, white ginger, peanut, dried shrimp, and fried pork rind. Combined with the tamarind sauce, this appetizer exemplifies the typical flavor profile that Thai dishes aspire to, a balance of different flavors that leave you very satisfied.

While I’m leery of ordering mussels thanks to a bad experience years ago in Seattle, we couldn’t pass up this dish that sat on nearly every other table. Called hoi malang puu pad chaa, these super fresh mussels were stir-fried in basil, fish sauce, and chilies. At first they didn’t seem too spicy but trying to avoid the chilies was a challenge and eventually you just had to give in and enjoy them.

Another dish was gaeng kiaow waan luuk chin plaa, green curry with fish balls. Green curry is one of the more accessible types of curry for foreigners’ tongues. This one was passable but the taste was watered down.

The rice arrived molded into the shape of a heart. Na rak maak! (Very cute!)

A dish for which the restaurant is famous is neua puu pad prik lueang – crabmeat stir fried with yellow chilies and long beans. The portion of lump crabmeat is generous, fresh, and sweet. The sauce itself is also a little sweet, almost tasting as if it had ghee added to it, although I doubt it does. The long beans were a little undercooked for my taste – reminding me of how when I brought my now-deceased paternal grandmother to eat Thai food once, she commented on a dish of stir fried vegetables, “My, they certainly like their vegetables crunchy.” All in all, this was a well-made dish, though, and one I would order again.

A dish of pad yot pak maew – chayote stems fried with garlic – provided a simple and refreshing contrast to some of the other, more strongly flavored dishes.

Another highlight from Krua Apsorn’s menu is kai fuu puu – crabmeat omelet. Their version, however, is so unlike the omelets you see elsewhere that it really makes you take notice. Cooked in a narrow dish rather than a broad skillet, the omelet gains a lot of volume, looking more like a souffle than a traditional Thai omelet.

Cross section of the kai fuu puu – standing very tall. That said, the amount of crabmeat in the omelet seemed skimpy when compared with, say, the amount of crabmeat in the stir fry with the yellow chilies. Still, this was one of the best dishes.

The final dish we ordered, this one from the daily specials menu, was puu lon pak sot or salted crab and coconut cream stew with fresh vegetables. This is a dish that is less common for foreigners to try and one that I haven’t run across too many times. It is made of salted crab, minced pork, coconut cream, and a variety of herbs and spices, boiled until thick.

The dish is actually more of a dip than a stew, as it is served with a selection of fresh vegetables – two types of eggplants (including the white ones), tumeric root, cabbage, and cucumbers – with which you eat the puu lon. I found the taste of the dish to be interesting, both complex and unusual. It is a bit sour, a bit salty, and very herbal. Chow didn’t care much for it because it has sort of a milky aftertaste but it wasn’t a problem to me.

For dessert, we tried some of the homemade fresh coconut sorbet (which was refreshing but didn’t photograph well) as well as this saku biak tua dam – miniature tapioca with black beans, served in sweetened coconut milk. This is one of my favorite Thai desserts because it is not overwhelmingly sweet and has a bit of saltiness as well as the heartiness of the beans.

What to think of the restaurant overall? You have to start out by understanding that this type of restaurant serves aahan juut, literally “bland food”. It is the type of food that appeals to your grandparents, comfort food that isn’t too assertive. That’s not a knock on the restaurant itself, because the food is well prepared with a lot of attention to the quality of ingredients and the methods of preparation. The flavors are relatively bland because that’s characteristic of Central Thai cuisine when compared with Northern, Northeastern, or Southern Thai.

With all that in mind, Krua Apsorn delivers a good dining experience and value for the money. Is it worth seeking out? If you are already near the restaurant, it is worth stopping by. If you have to trek all the way across the city, there are probably other aahan juut restaurants closer by that will satisfy you just as well and, if you are visiting from outside Thailand, there are other restaurants I would recommend you try before you get to Krua Apsorn.

Christmas Dinner

Posted on 8 January 2012 by christao408

Yes, I am a few weeks late with this entry, but our friend Nat hosted such an extraordinary feast on Christmas day that it would be a shame not to share some photos with you. Nat and his twenty-some guests supped on a dozen dishes and three desserts. The meal was several days in the making, aided by his half-dozen staff members, some of whom formerly worked as hotel sous chefs.

Our menu:

Salmon Wellington	Sous-Vide Turkey
Garlic Honey Roast Turkey	Cornbread Chestnut Stuffing
Mushroom Garlic Stuffing	Carrot Puree
Brussels Sprouts	Grilled Broccoli Rabe
Steamed Corn	Potatoes Savoyarde
Yorkshire Pudding	Chinese Rice Wine Gravy
Cranberry Chutney	White Chocolate Bombe
Coconut Christmas Cake	Strawberry Caramel Angel Food Cake
Vanilla Poppy Seed Ice Cream	Pistachio Ice Cream
Dark Chocolate Ice Cream	Homemade dessert sauces

I arrived mid-afternoon to find the production already well under-way. In fact, Nat and his staff were working from a five-page itinerary that had every step of the multi-day preparation scheduled!

First off, let’s talk about the Salmon Wellington. You may be more familiar with the version served with a beef loin inside, called Beef Wellington. In this version, two whole salmon fillets are topped with a ground mushroom mixture and then baked inside puff pastry dough. Not only is it a tasty way to eat salmon, but it is quite the show-stopper!

Left: Nat takes his frustration out on the puff pasty dough, which he made himself. Puff pasty is one of those pain in the neck sort of things that most people are perfectly happy to just buy from the freezer section of their local grocery store. Right: The salmon is covered with the mushrooms and additional dollops of butter before the top layer of the pastry dough is added and the edges are sealed.

Left: I used some leftover pastry dough to cut out decorative shapes that seemed appropriate for a seafood dish: a squid, a shark, a starfish, and some goldfish. Instead of slits to release the steam, I used a knife steel to make “bubbles”. Clever, huh?

Next item, the Garlic and Honey Roast Turkey. This is Martha Stewart’s recipe and it produces a reliably moist and tender bird. The trouble is that you have to remember to baste it every thirty minutes. If you have a staff, you can assign someone that responsibility. (Oh, if only I had a kitchen staff! Ha ha!)

The turkey, mid-carving. The skin gets very dark and crispy but fear not! Because you have remembered to baste it throughout the cooking, the meat remains moist and flavorful.

Our third main course was another type of turkey, this one prepared sous-vide. Sous-vide is French for “under vacuum” and the style involves cooking the food inside vacuum-sealed plastic bags which are then placed in a water bath for a long, low-temperature spa session. For example, the water bath for the turkey was something like 168 F. This way, the meat cannot get dry and tough, although more delicate cuts can turn mealy if you overcook them.

P1190406

First step, turkey parts are sealed in bags with loads of butter and other seasonings. Next, the bags are placed in the sous-vide machine, which regulates the water temperature. It took about three hours to cook the whole turkey. Afterwards, the bags are taken out and put in a bath of ice water to immediately stop the cooking.

Once cool, you remove the turkey parts, pat them dry, and then immerse them in boiling oil for a minute or so. This allows the exterior to quickly crisp, forming a wonderful skin and an appealing color. On the right, you can hopefully see just how moist the turkey was after the combination of cooking methods. While the roast turkey had been moist, you had to add the qualifier, “for a roast turkey” afterwards. For the sous-vide turkey, the meat was very moist by any standard.

Other selected side dishes:

Left: Cornbread and chestnut stuffing. Right: Brussels sprouts with pine nuts.

Left: Yorkshire puddings (which are kind of like popovers). Center: Grilled broccoli rabe. Right: Cranberry chutney.

Just after 8:00, the guests had all arrived and the food was ready to serve. Dishes were lined up all along the edge of the kitchen counter, a buffet for which no plate had room enough!

I tried to get a little bit of everything on my plate but, alas, a dish or two may have been missed! I did try all of the main dishes and was in agreement with the other guests, all of whom preferred the sous-vide turkey to the traditional roast turkey. The Salmon Wellington was moist and perfectly cooked through but such a shame to have to cut the pastry in order to serve it!

Of course, the most memorable dinners are made not by the food – no matter how elaborate – but by the quality of the company. Tawn and I had the opportunity to dine with wonderful companions, some of them familiar faces and others new acquaintances. All of them, though, made our Christmas dinner an especially enjoyable one.

You may find this hard to believe, but some of us had enough room for dessert. Nat had prepared a trio of cakes. From the left: Strawberry and caramel angel food cake; coconut Christmas cake; and milk chocolate bombe. He also prepared homemade sauces – strawberry, coconut cream, and creamy caramel – to match the cakes. Since no cake is complete without ice cream, he made three flavors: dark chocolate, vanilla poppy seed, and pistachio.

I indulged in a slice of the strawberry caramel food cake but topped it with some coconut sauce, which had plenty of fresh coconut meat in it, and a scoop each of pistachio and vanilla poppy seed ice creams. What a spectacular end to the meal. Many thanks to our friend Nat for hosting this memorable Christmas dinner!

Building a Better Acoustic Screen

Posted on 4 January 2012 by christao408

After I resolved the issue of not having a monitor stand wide enough for my new laptop computer, I had to address the next item on my to-do list: building a proper acoustic screen to reduce extraneous noise when recording audio. A major responsibility in my work is creating online training materials. One part of this is recording the narration that accompanies the training.

The condo unit I use as an office has concrete walls and ceilings and a tile floor. From an acoustic perspective, the room is very “live”. My previous arrangement was to use a stack of throw pillows, carefully balanced, to try and reduce the noise. Not only was this prone to collapsing in the middle of a recording session, but it also didn’t do a very good job reducing the noise.

Over the past few months I had tried to source acoustic foam panels here in Bangkok, an elusive product that exists but nobody actually seems to sell. Finally, after going to a high-end audio shop that I had been told would have the foam, an employee there told me to go to the Ban Mor district near Chinatown. “That’s where everyone gets everything,” he explained.

Ban Mor is about two blocks of a small soi, or alley, located across from the Old Siam shopping center. I go there all the time with Tawn but never realized we were literally across the street from the electronics district. Going from shop to shop on the crowded street, I finally located a speaker store that sold sheets of acoustic foam.

Truth be told, this foam isn’t the same high-density acoustic foam that I originally had in mind. But it is dense enough to do the job and was not too expensive. I brought the sheets home along with some plastic fiberboard then started constructing the acoustic screen. The idea was to measure carefully so the the two panels would hinge closed with the foam fitting together like crocodile’s teeth. This way, it folds up flat, allowing for compact storage when not in use.

After about an hour’s work, I had everything fitting together neatly. The noise reduction is much better than the pillows I was using before and I don’t have any problems with them collapsing mid-recording. One more thing I did to improve the quality of the recordings was to purchase a better quality microphone.

Previously, I was using basically any random microphone you could plug into your computer, just like the ones you might use to talk on Skype. After some research, I settled on a Snowball USB microphone from Blue Microphones. This condenser mic has both omnidirectional and cardioid modes and produces professional quality sound. Pairing that with a pop screen and the acoustic screen and my recordings have improved many times over.

Another project checked off the list!

Building a Monitor Stand

Posted on 2 January 2012 by christao408

While in Kansas City, the IT department decided the best solution to my laptop’s performance issues was to replace it with a new model. When I returned home, I discovered that the laptop’s size would require me to make my first visit to an obscure woodworking district that lies along the railroad tracks near the entrance to the Chalerm Mahanakorn Toll Road.

The new laptop in its place in my office armoire. The laptop is about three-quarters of an inch wider than the previous one, although thankfully they are both made by Dell and use the same docking station. (A docking station, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a device that allows your laptop to function as a desktop computer. You can turn it on while it is closed, attaching it to an external monitor, laptop, and mouse. Very helpful for those of us who really aren’t traveling anywhere with our laptops and would like a large monitor.) Since this laptop was wider than the previous one, the wooden shelf I had used as a monitor stand would no longer fit.

Alongside a dusty road near the entrances to the Khlong Toei Port and the toll road, is a row of woodworking shops. This ragged bunch of shops looks more like a shanty town than a business district, but these businesses can fashion most anything from wood. The shops closest to the port focus on making shipping pallets. Further down are shops with photo albums showing the wares from bookcases to bedposts that they have made.

Not sure which shop would be the best one, we walked for a bit until finding someone who looked welcoming rather than wary. We showed him the sketch I had drawn, explained what we were looking for, and he went off to find some sample pieces of wood to see if the quality would be sufficient. After settling on the wood, he started cutting and rough sanding. I noticed a lack of safety equipment being used by any of the workers. I also noticed that our fellow was missing part of one finger.

Looking down the inside area of the shops, it is unclear where one ends and the next begins. Perhaps it is all really just one big shop with different fronts? The railroad tracks running down the middle of the shops were no longer shiny silver on top, so I concluded that the tracks are not frequently used. That said, some repairmen with a rail repair cart appeared to be fixing the rails, so maybe they are still in service.

After about ten minutes and a couple of careful measurements (he ascribed to the “measure twice, cut once” philosophy – a good sign), the woodworker glued and nailed the legs onto the monitor stand and checked that it was level. We turned down an offer to stain it – I can do that in the future, if I so desire – and headed home. The price for materials and labor? 400 baht – about $13.50.

The finished product, the monitor on the (admittedly not the most handsome) monitor stand with the laptop underneath, and a remote keyboard. Not only is the end product completely satisfactory, but I enjoyed finally having a chance to see what was going on at the woodworking community next to the tollway entrance.

Cooking – Feta and Spinach Phyllo Pie

Posted on 1 January 2012 by christao408

To ensure a tasty start to the new year, I cooked a simple but fulfilling brunch for Tawn and myself, a feta and spinach pie made with phyllo dough. The recipe was based on one in Jamie Oliver’s “30 Minute Meals” series, which is available on iTunes.

The filling is eggs, feta cheese, cheddar cheese, and sauteed spinach seasoned with a little nutmeg, dried oregano, and salt and pepper. I modified the recipe slightly, substituting provolone for the cheddar and also sauteeing an onion to give the filling more flavor. The exterior is formed of sheets of phyllo dough, splashed with extra virgin olive oil and a dusting of sweet paprika. The dough is folded over the top to create a sealed pie and then baked in a skillet in the oven for 20 minutes.

The result is a flaky crust and an oozy, rich interior – a combination of flavors and textures that is very appealing. When paired with a mixed greens salad (in our case with some steamed beets and persimmon), it is a very pleasant meal and a tasty start to 2012!

christao408

The adventures of an expat American who moved to Bangkok for his husband.

Monthly Archives: January 2012