It’s a common immigrant experience, dreaming about certain tastes and foods from your home country. My most recent bout of food home sickness involved a certain condiment from my childhood. When I was a kid, my mother used to buy us a pack of cooked sio mai from the canteen near the hospital where she worked. The dumplings were accompanied by a chili sauce that was slightly sweet and a packet of soy sauce. You mix the soy sauce with the chili and boom, a flavor bomb that is addictive.
I have made chili sauces in the past, but none approximated that dip. Until now. Recently, I came across a recipe from the NYT about nam prik pao, the Thai chili jam/ dippin sauce. (Mark Bittman wrote it and if it was good enough for Bittman, then it’s good enough for me!) It really looked like the sauce that I remember from my childhood and I thought, with a packet of dried chilies in the cupboard and some fresh ones I got for free, I should try making it. Sriracha is all delicious and good, but I wanted a sauce that I could use for wontons and fried rice and other things. A sauce that has a solid kick and a sweetness to it. And lots of chilies.
The making of nam prik pao is fairly easy if you have a food processor. If you do not have one, a blender might be useful. The most difficult part of the process is the waiting for the mixture to cook. I cooked mine on a low-medium heat on a small sauce pan for 15 minutes. At the end of the process, the mixture transformed from bright red to dark amber (possibly from the palm sugar and the tamarind paste).
Nam prik pao has a complex taste thanks to the tamarind paste, shrimp paste, fish sauce, and palm sugar. And it really looks like a sticky jam. I always have this urge to eat a tablespoon of it, and then I remember that the spiciness would be too much for me. With some honey or maple syrup mixed in, I could easily imagine this as a coating for crispy pork or fried chicken wings. Or spread thinly on a grilled cheese sandwich. Like sriracha, the possibilities are endless.
Today, I used the nam prik pao to make leftover fried rice with egg – a really simple lazy Saturday breakfast. I used the oil from the chile jam to fry some leftover rice and added about half a tablespoon of the sauce. A few days ago, I used dollops of it on a Thai-style vegetable stew with coconut milk – it was delicious. The heat and the sweetness from the sauce complemented nicely the coconut milk. It was much better and cheaper than the instant jarred curry paste they sell at the supermarket!
The Lucky Mushrooms 