Burmese · Sauce
Balachaung Kyaw
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, a warm current of chile, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 150 g dried shrimp
- 200 g garlic, sliced thin
- 150 g red shallots, sliced thin
- 350 ml peanut oil
- 25 g ngapi, fermented shrimp paste
- 20 g mild dried red chilli powder
- 40 ml thick tamarind water
- 4 g salt
Equipment
Blender
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: nuts · peanuts · shellfish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Grind the dried shrimp in a dry blender to a light floss; stop while it is still fluffy, before it packs into oily pellets.
- Fry the garlic in the oil until pale gold and lift it out, then do the shallots the same way; keep the oil in the pan.
- Slacken the ngapi in the tamarind water and fry it in that oil for two minutes, until the ammoniac edge is gone and it smells like toasted anchovy.
- Add the shrimp floss, chilli and salt and fry, stirring, for 10 to 15 minutes until the floss is rust coloured, dry, and rustles against the spoon instead of clinging to it. 15 min
- Fold the garlic and shallots back in off the heat, cool it completely, and jar it with the oil standing over the top.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Fermentation 53 recipes
- Held somewhere with a steady temperature it can actually work at, chosen on purpose rather than wherever there happened to be room.
- There is visible activity before it is called started: bubbles, rise, or movement in the liquid. A ferment showing nothing after its first hours is not slow, it is not going.
- It smells clean: sour, yeasty, or alcoholic, with nothing putrid, and with nothing fuzzy or coloured growing where air meets it.
- Everything is under the liquid or under a cover, as the method requires: nothing solid left sitting dry in the air to spoil while the rest works.
- Judged by taste and behaviour and then STOPPED: chilled, baked, or refrigerated at the point wanted, rather than left running because the stated hours had not elapsed.
Where it goes wrong It was run on the clock in a kitchen colder or warmer than the recipe assumed. Fermentation is a rate and not a duration, so the same number of hours gives an under-developed ferment in a cold room and a slack, over-soured one in a warm one, and only tasting it would have said which.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
- Also Right
- Muscadet or dry Riesling
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.
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