Kao Mok Gai
The companion recipe to the weird sweet potato curry puff.
I had already planned to make this with the chicken & yogurt from Noah’s parents’ fridge, so the curry puff was actually just a nice little addendum.
I followed Pailin’s recipe pretty closely for this. The instructions are pretty clear there. The only thing I would do differently is lower the sugar amount in the dipping sauce. 2 Tbsp for that batch yields a weirdly sweet sauce; 1 Tbsp is probably plenty.
I’m not going to copy her recipe here - for this one in particular I like the way the original is organized!
The gist of the recipe is:
Make spice mix.
Make herb mix.
Marinate chicken in yogurt, herb mix, and spice mix. I did mine in a plastic bag, but still inside a bowl for insurance.
Fry shallots at some point while the chicken marinates.
Sear chicken (w/ marinade scraped off) in shallot oil. Then toast rice in the same oil, and add marinade into the rice.
Transfer rice to a rice cooker. Add chicken broth (after deglazing pot with it) to almost cover the rice. Sprinkle half the fried shallots on top, and nestle the chicken in one layer as much as possible.
Make dipping sauce while the whole thing cooks.
To me, old spices are fine if they’re still whole. Of course fresher would be better, but toasting them really brings out the flavor. Pre-ground would taste a lot like sawdust at this point though.
Notes:
I don’t own a spice grinder, so I pounded my spices in a mortar & pestle after toasting. It was pretty easy, except the cinnamon. I had to sift out the most stubborn pieces of cinnamon bark and grind it separately a few times.
Add less chicken stock to the rice than you think. I think for whatever amount of rice, add liquid to the rice cooker to almost cover the rice. In my photo, I added a little too much. Also, all the flavor falls to the bottom, so do stir the rice when serving.
I went the rice cooker route, and my chicken created a lot of fond at the bottom of my pot after searing the chicken, so I used my chicken stock to deglaze the pot before adding it to the rice. Scraped hard with a wooden spoon over low heat to transfer all that f l a v o r.
When frying shallots, take them off the heat just as they start to turn the slightest hint of golden, or they’ll be burnt by the time they cool.
I really liked this recipe, but it was a lot of work. It’s pretty different from a classic Indian biryiani, but definitely smells and tastes of Indian food.
