Burmese · Salad
Laphet Thoke
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, aromatics blooming from the first bite, with warmth in the tail.
Ingredients
- 120 g laphet, fermented tea leaves
- 60 ml garlic oil
- 20 g garlic, sliced paper thin and fried crisp
- 60 g yellow split peas, soaked and fried crisp
- 40 g dried broad beans, fried crisp
- 40 g roasted peanuts
- 25 g toasted white sesame
- 30 g dried shrimp, shredded
- 150 g firm tomato, in thin wedges
- 120 g white cabbage, finely shredded
- 2 green chillies, sliced
- 15 ml fish sauce
- 1 lime
The skills inside
Allergen screen
Found: nuts · peanuts · fish · shellfish · sesame
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
- Taste the laphet first; rinse it briefly in cold water and squeeze it dry only if it is harshly astringent, because rinsing takes the ferment with it.
- Loosen the leaves with half the garlic oil and a squeeze of lime until they sit as a glossy dark mound rather than a dry clump.
- Heap the crisp peas, beans, peanuts, sesame, fried garlic, dried shrimp, tomato, cabbage and chilli in separate piles around the leaves on a wide plate.
- Toss it at the table with the fish sauce and the rest of the oil and lime, and eat it straight away.
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
- Albariño
- Also Right
- Champagne
- From the Taps
- Pilsner or witbier
- Zero-Proof
- White grape & tonic
Shellfish sweetness meets acid, salinity, and bubbles, precision instruments for delicate meat.
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