Extreme Cooking Blog

I’ve been on a Asian dumpling and dim sum tear. Expect many more photos of these.

This month’s challenge at pizzamaking.com was to make a pizza without dough. Without dough? That sure isn’t anything I would ever call a pizza, but I decided to give it a try.

My “crust” was made from sticks of sweet potato soaked in slaked lime (calcium hydroxide).

These sticks were then combined with a binder/batter of rice and tapioca flours and fried into a disk in peanut oil:

Then topped with shrimp, mint leaves, cilantro, roasted peanuts, red onion and a sauce made of lime juice, fish sauce, garlic, sugar, and thai chiles.

Eaten wrapped in lettuce leaf.

This one was a little involved, but fun and really delicious. Here are the basic steps:

1. Separate whole duck into parts.
2. Marinate with some rice wine, soy sauce, etc.
3. Seal in plastic pouches
4. Cook the legs and wings for 8 hours @ 175F
5. Cook the breast for 1 hour @ 145F
6. Remove all of the skin and cook until fat rendered out and the skin is crispy
7. Make Mandarin pancakes (see video below)
8. Make hoisin-based sauce and fava bean paste sauce
9. Assemble and eat!

Here is my sous vide rig:

Mandarin Pancake Movie:

Just a little of the honey/lemon sauce so that it isn’t too sweet and lets the flavor of the deep-fried shrimp shine through.

Lunch today was miso-glazed sea bass with sticky rice and skillet-roasted broccoli. Dessert was Key Lime Meringue Pie:

This dish was fun and delicious. The black rice was dressed with a bunch of SE Asian ingredients. Peaches from the garden and chicken pieces were mixed with a bunch of other SE Asian spices. Made a sad day just a wee bit less sad.

Made the “Extreme Cook” way: freshly-made coconut milk and cream, boiled with pandan leaf, sweetened with palm sugar. Lasted about a nanosecond.

These steamed dumplings have a glorious glutinous skin made from tapioca flour. The filling has

• Shrimp
• Pork
• Onion
• Bamboo shoots
• Fish sauce

The dressing is just a simple scallion oil.

I learned how to make the pork version of this dish almost 40 years ago from Joyce Chen. My palate has come a long way since those days, but I still love this clichéd American version. I do cut way back on the quantity of sauce and also make it a little less sweet and a little less sour than I used to. Rather than use the original flour/corn starch batter, this I time I marinated the shelled-shrimp in egg whites and salt and then breaded them in water chestnut flour.

Roughly based on a recipe in Thai Food, by David Thompson (one of my favorite books), this duck curry blew my socks off with the combination of intense, but delicate, flavors with an intoxicating balance of sweet, salty, spicy, and greasy. Ingredients included:

• coconut milk
• coconut cream
• lemongrass
• kaffir lime leaves
• chiles
• garlic
• palm sugar
• raw and fried shallots
• thai basil
• fish sauce
• coriander seeds
• cumin seeds
• cloves
• nutmeg

You can imagine how the house smelled while all this was cooking. Tasted even better!