Susan Jung's recipes for miang kham, and Thai beef heart
You don't have to get on a plane to feed your Thai cravings.
When I travel, I often taste dishes that I'm eager to replicate when I'm back home in Hong Kong. Some are easy, while others take a few attempts before I get the flavours right. These recipes fall into the easy category but they're still delicious.
This, to me, is a perfect dish. At first glance, it looks like a bunch of ingredients - most of them uncooked - laid out separately. If you taste each ingredient on its own, it seems too strong: raw shallots, raw ginger, bird's-eye chillies and skin-on fresh lime. Those ingredients, plus peanuts and coconut, are essential, but I've tasted versions that add pork cracklings or tiny pieces of salted fish. When you combine the ingredients by putting them in a wild pepper leaf and adding a dollop of sauce, it's hot-sour-salty-sweet, which is everything a good Thai dish should be. It's a hands-on dish, where everyone assembles the mouthfuls as they want them. It takes a little bit of practice to shape the wild pepper leaf into a cone, to hold the ingredients so they don't fall out, but it's not difficult.
The recipe for the sauce, made by my helper, Kamonwan, makes more than you'll need for this amount of filling ingredients. The leftover sauce keeps well in the fridge; just heat it and dilute as needed.
Thai shrimp paste is not as dry and hard as Malaysian/Singaporean belacan. Buy top-quality dried shrimp that aren't too dry - they should be a little pliable, have a deep pinkish-orange colour and shouldn't smell at all of ammonia.
You'll need to go to Southeast Asian specialist grocers for the wild pepper leaves. At Thai shops, ask for bai cha plu; at Vietnamese ones, ask for la lot leaves. You may need to order them in advance.