Burmese · Soup
Mohinga
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, finishing long and savory.
Ingredients
- 700 g catfish, whole or thick fillet
- 2 L water
- 2 stalks lemongrass, bruised
- 40 g fresh ginger
- 200 g red shallots
- 25 g garlic
- 15 g ngapi, fermented fish paste
- 60 ml fish sauce
- 120 g chickpea flour, toasted in a dry pan
- 60 g raw rice, toasted dark and ground
- 300 g banana stem, outer sheaths removed
- 4 g ground turmeric
- 100 ml peanut oil
- 600 g fresh round rice noodles
- 4 eggs, hard boiled and halved
- 1 bunch coriander, chopped
- 2 limes, in wedges
- 10 g crushed dried chilli
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceFermentationDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsFrying the paste until the oil splitsSalted water & the float testKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · nuts · peanuts · fish
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
- Simmer the catfish with lemongrass, half the ginger and the water for 15 minutes until the flesh flakes off the bone; lift it out, flake it, and keep every drop of the broth. 15 min
- Slice the banana stem 3 mm thick straight into water sharpened with lime, winding the long threads off your knife as you go, then rub with salt and rinse.
- Blend shallots, garlic and the remaining ginger, fry in the oil with turmeric until the paste is brick red and the oil separates, then stir in the ngapi until it smells toasted rather than sharp.
- Whisk the chickpea flour and rice powder into 400 ml of cool broth until slack and lump free, then pour it into the simmering pot with the paste, fish and banana stem.
- Stir at the base and simmer 25 minutes, until the soup coats a spoon and the chalky taste of raw flour is gone; season with fish sauce. 25 min
- Ladle over rinsed rice noodles and hand round egg, coriander, lime and chilli at the table.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques 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.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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