Cooking Internationally in Ithaca

I really like cooking south and southeast Asian food. These areas feature some of my favorite combinations of flavors, and have food that's just generally tasty. When I have folks over for dinner, these are generally my foods of choice.

I also like to be as authentic as I can in capturing the key elements of those flavors. This often requires a bit of scrambling to find ingredients. In Ithaca, this can be a non-trivial challenge. Wegman's is pretty good, but they don't have everything. In this entry I will walk you through a recent Thai-style dinner I hosted, and explain where I was able to find the ingredients in Ithaca.

I was working mostly from a cookbook I got when taking a cooking class at the (fabulous) Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School in Thailand. The recipes have probably been adapted slightly for a western palate (half the chilies, anyone?), but they're pretty close to real. I also wanted to make my own curry paste. I've not done this before, and it seemed a worthy endeavor.

I decided to make: mieng kum (leaf wraps), green papaya salad (but only if I could find a green papaya), pad thai with tofu, coconut curry with chicken, and some sort of lemongrass ice cream (ice cream not really Thai at all, but this seemed like it would fit and it was a good excuse to play with my new ice cream maker).

Ok…so I won't bore you with a full list of ingredients, but here are the more unusual things (read: stuff not usually in US supermarkets) that would be required for this: green papaya, lemongrass (for ice cream and curry paste), shrimp paste (for curry paste), lime leaves (for curry), Thai basil (for curry), galangal (for a few things), dried shrimp, and Asian eggplant.

First stop was Wegman's. They have an impressive Asian dry goods department and a decent selection of Asian produce. Lesson #1: Their Thai dry goods are not well suited to making stuff from scratch. They had lots of prepared Thai curry pastes, but no shrimp paste or dried shrimp, which are key constituent ingredients. They did, impressively, have fresh galangal however. They also had lemongrass, but it was very expensive and didn't look very good. Pass.

Next stop: Ithaca Tofu, which is a little Asian market buried behind the Triphammer Mall. I knew I was on the right track when I ran into several Asian graduate students from my department there, and this place was impressive. Thai basil? Check. Asian eggplants? check. Dried shrimp? check. Lime leaves? Needed to ask the guy behind the counter to dig them out of the freezer, but…yes, they were there. Check. Green papaya? Not so much, but I guess they sometimes have them.

Final stop: Win Li, which is an Asian market on the other end of Ithaca, almost at Home Depot. Green papaya? Yes! They had many of the other things here too (though no lime leaves or thai basil), but it was interesting to note that their prices were a lot higher than Ithaca Tofu. They also had some really nice (if slightly overpriced) Atulfo mangoes, which were pretty outstanding for this time of year.

So here are a couple shots of dinner. Making my own curry paste was somewhat stinky (if you've ever opened a jar of shrimp paste, you know what I mean), but rewarding. Some effort, yes, but really tasty. The only hitch in this was that none of the stores had red Thai chilies (only green), so my 'red' curry paste was a bit on the brown side.

The curry itself was interesting because it relied on separating (i.e., thick and thin) coconut milk, with the thick milk added first and used as a cooking fat. This also browns and thickens the coconut milk, which adds depth to the curry. It's unfortunately not possible to get the tiny (pea-sized) Thai eggplants in Ithaca (or most places in the US, as far as I can tell), but purple Asian eggplants fill in ok (though with a much less bitter taste). And it was totally worth chasing down those lime leaves; they add such a nice finish to coconut curry that just can't be had otherwise.

The mieng kum (above) were enjoyed by everybody, though not as beautiful as the ones I had in Singapore last month (I didn't even attempt to look for betel leaves, which are way cooler than Boston lettuce). Pad thai was pretty standard, perhaps slightly enhanced by the palm sugar I bought from a farmer in Cambodia (see photo). Papaya salad was tasty. And the ice cream came out nicely as well.


One other ingredient note. This isn't Thai at all, but it's also possible to find fresh curry leaves in Ithaca. The "Universal Deli" (actually a convenience store) on Eddy St. in Collegetown gets them on the first Wednesday of the month. It's $2 for a small packet (which is really pricey, for curry leaves) and you have to ask the cashier to fetch them for you.

Next post: Mexican candy.