Inspired by yesterday’s entry about Cafe Jacqueline, last night I decided to try making a ham and cheese souffle for dinner.
Very cool to watch how it rises during the 30-35 minutes of baking.
It turned out quite nicely, although could have used a bit more salt and pepper to season it.
Sorry for being absent from Xanga for over a week. We returned from the United States with my sister and brother-in-law in tow, and have been showing them around Bangkok, leaving little time for blogging. With that said, let me pick up where we left off in Hawai’i. For the final segment on food in Maui, we visit a lavender farm, a goat dairy, and eat some fantastic fish tacos.
Ali’i Kula Lavender Farm
One of the interesting things about Maui is that it is agriculturally more diverse than you initially expect. While there are wide swaths of land dedicated to sugar cane and other tropical produce, as you ascend the slopes of Haleakala (the volcano that forms the eastern 75% of Maui), you pass through a more temperate zone. The combination of rich soil, moisture-laden air, and the filtered tropical sun provides a fertile growing environment for a wide variety of produce. Ali’i Kula Lavender Farm is a great example of this.
Situated 4,000 feet above the ocean in the town of Kula, the Ali’i farm stretches over 13 sloping acres. Different varieties of lavender are cultivated and the grounds are largely open for self-guided walking tours. In the early afternoon, the breeze was pleasantly warm but we were protected by a thick layer of clouds that reminded me of the fog of my native San Francisco, but without the need for multiple layers of clothing.
Here, Sugi and Tawn pose amidst a field of lavender on the upper edge of the farm. The farm offers settings for private events including weddings. While the steep slopes might prove challenging for guests with limited mobility, the views (and fragrance!) would be unforgettable and worth the effort.
Close up of one variety of lavender. The air really is perfumed with a subtle, but pleasant aroma from the acres of lavender.
In addition to the lavender, the farm has extensive gardens with many different plants and beautiful flowers. Many of the plants were familiar to me from growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has a similar climate. I was excited to see the fuchsia (on the right) because my father used to grow these in our back yard.
No trip to the farm is complete without a stop at the gift shop for a snack. Beverages include lavender lemonade and tea.
The highlight is the lavender scones served with passion fruit and lavender jelly. A few years ago, I purchased some food grade lavender but rarely used it. Tasting these scones, I was sorely tempted to buy some more and make it a point to cook more frequently with this beautiful flavor.
Sitting on the shady balcony outside the gift shop, we were visited by a flock of small birds who waited not so patiently for scone crumbs. Tawn decided to share his crumbs with them and they gingerly approached and pecked them from his hand.
Surfing Goat Dairy
Just down the hill from the lavender farm is the Surfing Goat Dairy, another example of the agricultural variety found on Maui. A working farm that produces more than two dozen varieties of goat cheese that are used at restaurants across the island, Surfing Goat Dairy proudly claims to make da’ feta mo’ betta!
One of the younger goats playing on a surf board.
The dairy offers tours and there is a small gift shop that sells a variety of their products. Recommended are the cheese tasting flights, which feature both fresh and aged cheeses.
We sampled six cheeses, a mixture of fresh and aged. From the back left, clockwise: fresh feta, “Ping Pong Balls” (drained chevre, rolled into balls and marinated in garlic olive oil), Ole! (chevre with jalepenos, lime juice, artichokes, and cilantro), Udderly Delicious (plain, salted chevre), Garden Fantasia (chevre with fresh garden herbs), and French Dream (an aged cheese with herbs de Provence). Lots of fantastic cheese here, many of which have won national awards.
A pleasant, shaded seating area was populated with a friendly farm dog and cat, both of which came over looking for some attention. Despite being outside, both animals had exceptionally soft, well groomed coats. Perhaps the result of drinking plenty of goat milk?
Before we left, I snapped a picture of these kids feeding kids. Ha ha…
Coconut’s Fish Cafe
The final entry about Maui food concludes with a stop at Coconut’s Fish Cafe in Kihei. This restaurant, which is in a strip mall, looks like nothing to write home about but surprises you with tremendous quality. The must-eat item is fish tacos, which are prepared from fresh, locally-caught fish.
The owner, Mike Phillips, who is in the shop most evenings, supervises operations and comes out to chat with customers. He took this picture for us. He explained that they are just setting up franchises on the west cost of the mainland, with the initial store to be in Santa Cruz. If a Coconut’s Fish Cafe opens near you, please make sure you try it. As Mike explained, the only advertising they do is customer word-of-mouth. So from my mouth to your ear: word.
The beautiful fish taco, made with fresh mahi mahi, crunchy cabbage slaw, and a sweet and tangy mango salsa. This taco was so good that I would seriously consider stopping in Maui next time I’m flying back to the mainland US, just to eat here. My only quibble is that the toppings are cut in very large chunks, making them a bit hard to eat. Smaller bits would ensure you get a little bit of everything in each bite, but that’s a tiny complaint.
There you have it, the conclusion of my Maui Food Madness entries. I hope you enjoyed them!
Each first Saturday of the month, the upscale, down-home Thai restaurant Bo.lan hosts a farmers’ market they dub “Eat Responsibly Day.” Located on Sukhumvit Soi 26 in Bangkok, chefs Duangporn “Bo” Songvisava and Dylan Jones’ commitment to slow, local, organic, and sustainable food shines at this market, which is held on the front yard of the restaurant.
Tawn and I visited in early April. We arrived shortly before 11:00 on a hot morning that threatened rain, midway through the market’s run, which begins at 8:00 and runs until 2:30. At least a dozen local vendors were present, selling everything from produce to prepared foods. Here is a selection of what was offered:
From Samut Songkhram province, one vendor had fluer de sel (sea salt – left) and palm sugar (right). These are two staple products made in the smallest of Thailand’s 77 provinces and I had to chuckle a bit as the palm sugar comes from the sub-district where I used to volunteer as an English teacher. Every time I went down there, it was all I could do not to return home carrying several kilos of the palm sugar. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but I could have repackaged it with a nice label and sold it as an artisinal product!
Another vendor was selling freshly-baked bread and jars of homemade roasted tomato relish. This relish was amazing, full of whole garlic cloves and cooked at a low temperature for several hours until the flavors combined beautifully. The lady who makes it brought the recipe back from Europe and has been making it for friends, who would wash and return their empty jars, asking her to fill them up the next time she made a batch. April was her first time at the market, and I certainly hope she returns.
Maarten Kaspersma runs a busines selling microgreens, evenrything from mustard greens to carrot, kale to mizuna. The business name is Mr. Maarten’s Microgreens and you can find them on facebook.
We bought a pair of trays. I recall that one was mustard but I don’t remember what the other was. They certainly make for an interesting way to spice up the flavor of salads or sandwiches. I could also use a pair of tweezers and artfully decorate a plate with them and charge an extra few dollars. (If I was charging for my food!)
Joe Sloane of Sloane’s Sausages made an appearance with his grill. Joe has gained fame around Bangkok as a purveyor of fine pork products. He doesn’t yet have a retail outlet so he informs his customers whenever he has purchased a hog or two (always organic breeds that come from up-country) and has more products for sale. In the near future, he hopes to open a proper storefront so he has more processing space.
Cumberland sausages and fresh chorizo. These were so nice, I see no further need for me to experiment with sausage making at home!
Homemade sauces and onion relish with which to tart up your sausages.
Fresh baguette from Le Blanc on Sukhumvit Soi 39 with a heap of onion relish, fire-roasted tomato ketchup, and a chorizo sausage. Heaven on a Saturday morning.
Accompanying Joe Sloane’s sausages was galangal porter, brewed at home by our friend Brian’s Happy Cat label. Hopefully, he will one day turn this into a proper business and make his fine hand crafted brews available for retain sale.
We stopped by the table hosted by Pattaya’s own Lulu and Daisy Goat Cheese company and bought two rounds of medium-aged goat cheese. Nice and tangy, we’ve been shredding this on salads for a wonderful, rich flavor and aroma.
Organic, free range eggs. Not sure if I understood correctly that these came from hens that live on the restaurant’s property. Perhaps I’m mistaken. They were tasty, though.
The restaurant does have its own mushroom hut and so we purchased mushrooms freshly harvested on-site. While it has been more than two years since I wrote a review on Bo.lan, at which time I found the food very tasty but the prices just a little dear, I have to commend the chefs’ commitment to local and sustainable foods. Quite an emphasis on quality!
When we returned home, Tawn whipped up an omelet using the eggs, mushrooms, goal cheese, microgreens, and tomato relish that we had purchased at the farmers’ market. Another Eat Responsibly Day will be held on Saturday, 5 May and will continue on the first Saturday of each month at Bo.lan restaurant, Sukhumvit Soi 26. I already have my calendar marked!
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!
A week ago I tried making homemade mozzarella cheese, using milk bought at the local grocery store. The results didn’t come together – literally. Analyzing it, I figured it was either due to an insufficient amount of rennet, the enzyme that helps the proteins in the milk coagulate, or else it was due to the milk being pasteurized at too high a heat. Undaunted, I wanted to try again and learn how to do this.
While I originally put more weight in theory that the pasteurization was the cause, now that I look back on what I’ve learned, I suspect the insufficient rennet was probably more likely the problem. But hindsight, as they say, is 20-20.
In the wake of my first attempt, a German-Thai friend suggested I try buying milk from Murrah Dairy, the only water buffalo dairy in Thailand. Great idea, especially considering that the original Italian mozzarella is mozzarella di bufala – buffalo milk mozzarella. So I ended up driving to their retail store and bought five litres of raw buffalo milk. The best way to address the pasteurization issue is to use unpasteurized milk, right?
Sadly, I don’t have many pictures of the second attempt. You’re welcome to watch the video and/or read the description below.
After sanitizing everything in the kitchen, I started heating the milk. One challenge I encountered was that my recipe is in imperial measurements but the dairy sold the milk in metric measurements. Being an American (even a fairy metric-savvy one) I made a few errors in calculation and initially thought I was working with two gallons of milk, when in fact I had only about one gallon. Because of this, I prepared citric acid and rennet solutions that were twice as strong as necessary.
Thankfully, I realized this before adding the solutions into the milk, and added only about half of each solution. The proteins came together much more nicely than in the first attempt, although they still didn’t have the nearly-solid, soft tofu-like consistency shown in the recipe’s pictures. I strained the curds from the whey and ended up with a pretty nice mass to work with.
My next problem came from a lack of understanding of what was meant to happen in the next step. As a learner, it is helpful for me to know not only what a particular step is but the rationale behind the step. The recipe told me to either microwave the curds and then knead them, or else to put the curds in hot water (about 170 F) and use a spoon to fold them together, then pull them out and knead them.
The problem was two-fold. First, I don’t have a microwave. There goes the easy option. Second, I was hesitant to put the curds in the water because I thought they would just dissolve. Knowing what I know now, I realize that the whole point of microwaving or putting them in the water is that the cheese begins to melt a bit, helping it form more elasticky strands that you can knead. No heat and no melting means no kneading.
Before I figured this out, I tried placing the curds, still in the cheesecloth, above some boiling water – kind of a bain-marie. This resulted in the bottom of the curds melting into the cheesecloth, while the tops of the curds didn’t change. Finally, I figured it out and put the curds into the water and used a spoon to shape them.
Of course, I didn’t have rubber gloves, so kneading the hot cheese was a little painful! Long story short, having a microwave would have been a huge help.
In the end, I wound up with a ball of mozzarella that was a bit tough and overworked, not nearly as elastic as it should be, and it had picked up a little bit of a greyish cast, possibly from the bread board I was using to knead it on. Also, cleanup was a pain as the curds cling to everything, especially the metal utensils!
The important question is, how did it taste?
Well, after a few hours soaking in a brine/whey solution, the cheese turned out okay. I used it on a pizza in a taste test, half of the pizza covered with my cheese and half with the Murrah Dairy’s cheese. My cheese was much more rubbery and not as bright white, but it actually tasted fine, like real mozzarella cheese.
Conclusion: This is a product that is probably worth buying in the store, even if it is a bit pricey. Making it is very time and effort consuming. That said, I’m kind of curious to try another time using store-bought milk, just to confirm my new understanding that the pasteurization wasn’t the issue. I still like the idea of making my own cheese, and if I had an opportunity to apprentice with a cheese-maker, I would jump at it. But the constraints of my Bangkok condo kitchen are such that I don’t think I’ll become a regular cheese-maker.
Okay, what’s the next thing to try?
As you may know, a lot of my choices of what to cook are dictated by my desire to try new things, to understand the characteristics of individual ingredients and the techniques used to coax the most flavor out of them. Recently, I’ve been keen to try my hand at cheesemaking.
My aunt’s sister Jan makes homemade mozzarella cheese and, assuring me that it is easy, sent me back to Thailand armed with baggies of citric acid and cheese salt (I swear, customs officer, that white powder is not what it looks like!) and some tablets of rennet.
Yesterday, I invited Ken over to help me. An American retiree, Ken has this dream of starting a goat farm up in Lampang province near Chiang Mai. He’s convinced there is an untapped market for chèvre.
Jan recommended a recipe for 30-minute mozzarella from cheesemaking.com. It is pretty straight-forward, except for the fact that I don’t have a microwave at home. They had an alternate recipe for those of us without microwaves, so I was pretty eager to give it a try. The big question mark that was facing me: could I make the cheese from the milk we have here in Thailand?
The recipe’s author insists you can use store bought pasteurized milk, so long it is not UHT (“ultra high temperature”) pasteurized, as this destroys the milk’s ability to curdle properly. But inspecting the labels of milk here in Thailand, there is no information about what type of pasteurization process is used, only that the milk is in fact pasteurized. Figuring I could afford a few dollars and an hour of time to experiment, I started with four litres (two gallons) of Foremost brand milk.
The process is pretty easy: you heat the gallon of milk combined with 1.5 teaspoons of citric acid diluted in a small amount of water. Once it gets to 90 F you add a quarter tablet of rennet which has also been diluted in some water. Thirty seconds of stirring to distribute the rennet evenly, then you cover and let the milk sit undisturbed for five minutes.
By this time, what you are supposed to have is the curd (milk solids) separating from the whey (liquid) in a pretty solid, tofu-like substance. Unfortunately, even after trying some of the suggested remedies, my curds never came together any more than runny cottage cheese.
I went ahead and scooped them out to drain, but most of them just ran through the colander. There wasn’t anything solid enough to handle.
Conclusion? Either I didn’t use enough rennet (although I did follow the recipe) or, more likely, the milk is UHT pasteurized.
Options: Try again with another brand of milk, give up, or be thankful that a smart Thai-German friend left a comment on my facebook page asking if I’d considered buying buffalo milk from Murrah Dairy, a local outfit that specialized in a breed of milking buffaloes from India.
What luck! They have a small cafe/retail outlet out near the airport, even though their farm is about a two hour drive east of the city. Tawn and I drove out there Sunday afternoon and located the shop in the midst of an old housing estate.
Murrah Cafe and Bistro: The first buffalo farm in Thailand. In Thai, it reads “The cheese restaurant that is the first and only in the country. You must stop by then you’ll know why.” Yeah, it doesn’t sound as compelling when you read it in English.
Talking with the owner’s daughter, it looks like although they don’t regularly open the farms for visitors, we could call and arrange a tour. She agreed that my problem with making the cheese was probably related to the pasteurization. As it turns out, they sell raw buffalo milk so I placed an order for 5 litres to pick up this Tuesday afternoon.
The cafe is cute but tiny. Lots of cheese and milk for sale and all of their espresso drinks are made with buffalo milk. Here’s the best thing about buffalo milk: 18% fat versus 4% for regular Jersey cow milk. Yum!
Since we were there and it was lunchtime, we ordered some food. The menu is mostly Italian and makes liberal use of buffalo milk products. (Worth noting, by the way, that their price for a container of mozzarella is 140 baht – US$4.40 – versus a minimum of 180 baht for the other locally made cow’s milk mozzarella and 250+ baht for imported. That in itself makes it almost worth the drive.)
What better way to really experience their excellent fresh mozzarella than on a caprese salad? Except for the fact that Thailand’s tomatoes are chronically anemic, it was wonderful.
Baked ziti in tomato sauce with… you guessed it – Mozzarella cheese!
And, finally, an excellent thin-crust Pizza Margherita. This was a small pizza and had a nicely charred, crisp-edged crust. Just like the real deal in Italy.
So here’s where I stand with the cheesemaking experiment: first attempt was a failure but I’m going to drive back out to Ramkamhaeng on Tuesday afternoon, but the raw buffalo milk, and then make a second attempt at the cheese. Stay tuned…
christao408 