Whenever I cooked at home (Maryland), forgetting something from my recipe at the store was simply and easily rectified by jumping back in the car and making the five minute (roundtrip) journey back to and home from the store again. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure I complained when this happened.
In Cambodia, it usually takes several trips to the market for me to gather the ingredients I need for more-complex-than-usual-dishes, mostly because they don't have enough of what I need or they don't have it at all. In this case, 4.5 kilograms of ripe tomatoes, a half kilogram of pork, a half kilogram of green pepper, two onions, two carrots, garlic, and fresh parsley. The tomatoes alone gave me cause to make two separate visits to two different markets. Even getting this far gives me cause to be proud.
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| Ready to cook! |
I had no intent of ever making this blog a "cooking blog," mostly because I could never do it as good as most of the ones I have seen out there already. Also, I tend to "cook from the hip" and often don't ever work with recipes. If I do, its usually something I have modified. However, cooking spaghetti in Cambodia
feels different than it would in America, so I have tried to capture the process here.
Skinning the tomatoes is the first step. Its pretty simple, the tomatoes go into boiling water for about 30-40 seconds, and then immediately into cold water. You don't want the tomatoes to cook, only to blanch the skins and then they will slide off. Cook the tomatoes a few at a time so you can easily remove them form the water after 30-40 seconds.
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An added bonus for boiling fruits and veggies in Cambodia is that
it kills any bacteria that may be on the outside of the produce. |
The skins should pop off real easily, then you are left with naked-looking tomatoes. Don't throw out the tomato skins yet.
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| Disrobed, slippery tomatoes... |
Now for the most tedious step. You need to remove any part of the tomato that won't cook down into a liquid-y sauce as well as most (not all, that is impossible) of the seeds. So...cut the top part of the tomato off (the part where the stem meets the flesh) and squeeze the pulp into a sieve or strainer that will gather the seeds. Allow the juice to run from the seeds through the strainer into a bowl underneath. The rest of the tomato parts, is what the sauce will mainly consist of. Use your hands, a blender or whatever to mash up the flesh the best you can and put it all in a big saucepan. Go ahead and turn the heat to low while you are doing the next few steps, the longer the tomatoes cook the better the sauce will be.
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I don't have a lot of cooking supplies, so I sterilized a slatted bowl
for fruit and used it to catch the seeds and tough pulp. |
Save the juice, its really helpful later and usually contains lots of sugars from the tomatoes which helps to make a tastier sauce. While the strainer is still over the bowl, squeeze the skins from earlier to ensure they the juice they hold makes it into your bowl.
I like to proceed by doing the following: take about eight or nine cloves of fresh garlic and half of an onion, chop them up fine and then put into a smaller saucepan with a few glugs of olive oil. Brown, but don't burn, the onions and garlic.
Also give the tomatoes in your main pot a quick stir, don't let them burn on the bottom. They should be simmering lightly.
Once the garlic and onions have been browned (and smell delicious) add about 2/3 of the tomato juice to the smaller saucepan and begin to season.
***NOTE: If your sauce ever gets to be too thick, that is when you add the rest of the tomato juice. If you don't need it, fine, make yourself a tasty Bloody Mary...you deserve it.
You need to season this. The tricky part is how your sauce is seasoned because this is largely dependent on the quantity of sauce you are making, personal preference, etc. Start with a few tablespoons of salt, the same of oregano and basil (or an all-purpose italian seasoning), a few generous pinches of sugar, pepper, a little bit of chopped parsley and you are golden (I also like about half a tablespoon of cayenne pepper or hot sauce for a bit of kick). Don't add too much, you can taste the sauce along the way and add more if needed, but if its too salty/peppery, you are kinda screwed.
Let that simmer, but keep an eye on it, don't let it burn.
At this point, your big saucepan of tomatoes should start looking like this:
You want this to continue simmering for a LONG time...for the amount of tomatoes I am using, (roughly 9lbs), it will go for about 2.5 hours. You want the water to boil off from the tomatoes, the sauce to thicken, the tomatoes to breakdown and the juices from the tomatoes to caramelize (it will get darker). I like to add a few pinches of salt to it right now, it seems to help coax the juice from the pulp of the tomatoes.
In the smaller saucepan, keep it simmering. I like boiling the juice down to a paste-like consistency and since you seasoned this heavily, all the seasons and flavors will intermingle and concentrate. It will take a good long while for the juice to turn into paste. Keep it simmering, keep stirring and keep it from burning.
As both pots continue to simmer, and you continue to stir periodically, chop up the veggies and meat you want to add to the sauce. Again, based on preference, for a smoother sauce, chop them up finer, for a chunkier sauce you'll want to chop them more coarsely. I like a chunkier sauce so I usually cut up my carrots, onions and peppers fairly coarsely.
Ok, so your juice should be right about at the paste stage now. Add it to the large saucepan with the majority of your tomatoes. This should all still be simmering now but with the paste now in, it should also be a bit thicker and darker.
Continue the simmering and the stirring and the thickening. Take a small handful of the chopped green peppers and add it to your sauce now, this will help with the flavor of the sauce.
Take the rest of the vegetables and put them in a skillet with a little oregano, a pinch of salt and pepper, some olive oil, and sauté until slightly browned.
Then, add the veggies to the sauce.
After this all you need to do is keep it simmering until you like the consistency. You will also need to give it a few taste tests to fine tune the seasoning to your tastes.
In the end, it looks something like this:
Notice the darker color? That is because the sugars from the tomatoes have caramelized. Your sauce is now delicious.
One final step, if you want your sauce to have meat in it. I chose to add some thinly sliced pork. This is mostly because not having a dish with meat in it is a sign of frugality or poorness in Cambodia, I wanted my family to know that we cooked them a "good" meal that contained meat.
To keep it tender, I added the pork in the last couple minutes of simmering and let it continue to cook while the sauce cooled. This way the pork stayed tender but still cooked through.
Now, after only like three or four hours in the kitchen and untold treks to countless markets (if you are making this sauce in Cambodia).
I never intended this to be such a cliff-hanging-three-part-post, but tomorrow I will post how the actual dinner went with the family (I promise!).
