Burmese Fermented Green Tea Salad – Laphet Thoke

JWise Food

Burmese Fermented Green Tea Salad - Laphet Thoke

Like the title says, this is Burmese fermented green tea which is the basis for making one of the most amazing salads, also known as Laphet Thoke. Prior to trying this for the first time at Little Rangoon in Scottsdale, Arizona, I’d read about it, but the closest place to give it a try was a restaurant in El Monte, California, that had mixed reviews and it closed before we could visit. Finding ourselves in a restaurant that had this delicacy on the menu, it was the first thing we ordered.

Back in 2009, fermented green tea could not be imported to the United States from the military dictatorship of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. People visiting neighboring country Thailand could buy it there though and bring it back to the States. Lucky for us there was enough traffic from the owners and their friends so over the course of the year we were eating at their place, there was never a shortage.

The bulk bags of tea arrived unflavored, this turned out to be very important because as time went by I had the opportunity to try some pre-seasoned products and they were horrible. Once unpacked the leaves would have to be prepared for storage and for use in salads. The first place they ended up was in a mortar so they could be adequately pounded to break up the leaves.

Burmese Fermented Green Tea Salad - Laphet Thoke

Once mashed up but not yet a paste, they could be stored in a jar with a bit of vegetable oil to keep them moist. After this, they’d be sealed and put in the refrigerator until needed.

Finding this stuff in America was a challenge. Back in 2010, when Little Rangoon closed up shop, the owner Elizabeth gave Caroline and me a full tightly packed quart jar that lasted us about a year. After that, we could on occasion find it at a small shop in Monterey Park, California, but that was hit and miss. Finding it online was impossible. Then around 2016, I finally ordered some online but it had to be shipped from the United Kingdom; not a cheap way to get a few small packets. Just two years ago in 2018, while on a hunting expedition in one of our local Asian stores, I found it on the shelf. St. Albert Tea Flower is how it’s labeled and for about $10 a bottle, I get nearly 11 ounces of fermented green tea. Compared to $20 for 8 ounces on Amazon, it’s quite the bargain. Now, if I were living somewhere I couldn’t buy this essential ingredient locally, I’d jump at the chance to pay $20 for 8 ounces.

Burmese Fermented Green Tea Salad - Laphet Thoke

Once you find fermented green tea your job is not done yet as some of the other ingredients can be equally difficult to find in the United States. In the bottom center of this photo of plated ingredients to mix up a Laphet Thoke (Green Tea Salad) is smoked dried shrimp. I’ve used dried crawfish as a substitute which works well but what I really want are the smoke shrimp. There is a product available here but it’s pricey with just 8 ounces costing $15 and the shipping is roughly the same amount so be prepared. It’s called Naz African Smoked Shrimps and can be found by clicking here.

Please notice the crispy garlic, peanuts, sesame seeds, and beans. In Burma, you’d make your own and I suspect that the kitchen staff made what was used in the restaurant but I never inquired as Elizabeth gave me enough to last a good long time; well, until we ran out. Not only was our inventory depleted, but what do you ask for when calling someone a state away trying to explain how you needed the crunchy/crispy stuff for Laphet Thoke that you are certainly butchering the pronunciation of? These days, I just go to Amazon and order ပင္ပိ်ဳရြက္ႏု ပဲႏွစ္ျပန္ေႀကာ္ and I’m all set. That, for those who don’t read Burmese, is also known as Crispy Mixed Beans and can be found clicking here.

Burmese Fermented Green Tea Salad - Laphet Thoke

Time to make the salad.

Ingredients:

  • 2 Tbsp Fermented green tea
  • 3-4 Tbsp Mixed crispy beans
  • 1/2 Sliced hard-boiled egg
  • 1/2 Diced Roma tomato
  • 1 cup Shredded cabbage (Little Rangoon didn’t use this much)
  • 1/2 Tsp Smoked shrimp powder
  • 1/2 – 1 Tsp Fish sauce
  • 1 – 2 Tbsp Peanut oil (or your choice)

Now mix it all together and serve with a side of steamed rice. For me, no Burmese salad would be complete without some Thai Bird’s Eye chilies to accompany the dish. Because they are not always easy to find I buy a lot when I find them, dice them into thin rounds, and freeze them. When I need some I pull them from the cold and throw them into a small ramekin with extra fish sauce (this from a guy that doesn’t like fishy flavors). A word of warning, if you’ve never used dried shrimp or fish sauce you are in for a rude surprise as I for one have never grown accustomed to their pungent stench but like the worst smelling washed rind cheeses, they add something undeniably perfect to the flavor profile of a dish and so I must endure.

Burmese Onion Chili Salad

JWise Food

Onion Salad from Little Rangoon Restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona

Back in 2009 Caroline and I started frequenting Little Rangoon restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona. By that time they’d already been there for a year and a half but we didn’t live in the area and so it took a while before we discovered them one day while driving by. Immediately we were smitten and became regular customers, sadly we alone couldn’t sustain their business, and about a year after we had fallen in love with Elizabeth’s amazing take on Burmese cooking, they were closing for good.

Along the way, we were rewarded with off-menu dishes or invited in when no one else was in the place to try things like various preparations of durian. Before they shut their doors I was invited into the kitchen to pick up a few tips and tricks so Caroline and I could continue to enjoy some of our favorite dishes. Those notes have languished unshared with anyone else until now, though we have resorted to them time and again for our own fond culinary memories. As a matter of fact, this very recipe and these photos were shared back in 2009 in a blog entry in which I first spoke of Little Rangoon. I wasn’t a food blogger so I tried to avoid featuring too many entries about the subject and now I regret it. But I can move to rectify that as I have all the photos and notes to share now. Over the next weeks, I’ll try my best to post as much as I can for the sake of permanently preserving these recipes which I hope will survive on the internet well into the future.

Onion Salad from Little Rangoon Restaurant in Scottsdale, Arizona

I have to admit it’s been more than 7 or 8 years since I made this Chili Onion Salad for myself. Caroline won’t eat it, nor would Elizabeth or her husband Alfred. This is peasant food and one of the most unlikely dishes for me to fall in love with. When I was a kid I hated raw onions: the basis of this dish is raw onions and some incredibly hot chili flakes.

There is one bit of preparation that could take place before setting in to make your salad and that is roasting the chili flakes. There are no special requirements for the chili flakes, any old ones will do, maybe even a few packets that are given away with pizzas would work. Simply roast them in a dry frying pan until they start to darken, but don’t burn them.

Ingredients:

  • 2 Tbsp oil of your preference such as peanut, canola, or avocado
  • 2 Tbsp of roasted chili flakes
  • 1 Tsp salt
  • 1/2 Cup of thinly sliced red onion
  • 1 wedge of fresh lemon

Preparation:

Mix all the ingredients in a small bowl, preferably by hand, and that’s it.

I’d have this served with a bowl of hot steamed brown rice as brown is my preference but any hot rice will do. Like all Burmese salads we’ve had, rice plays a role in being the contrasting temperature complement to the colder, raw, and crunchy other ingredients. This salad is not for the faint of heart as it’s the only thing I’ve ever eaten that has made my eyelids sweat. While this dish may sound simple, the complexity of its ingredients after the lemon and salt go to work on “cooking” the onions and melding the flavors, are far greater than the sum of the parts.

There are almost two dozen recipes in my old notebook and about 300 photos I took in the restaurant and the kitchen. Little Rangoon was our first favorite restaurant in all of Arizona and we miss the place more than any other restaurant we’ve visited. Oh, how I’d like to sit down with Elizabeth and Alfred just one more time for one of her incredible meals.

The Familiar is Unfamiliar

JWise Thoughts

Sunrise over Phoenix

I want to believe I need to return to some of the things I used to do, but I’m running into some deep-seated ambivalence that is nearly impossible to define. Being home is different, meals are different, shopping is different, traveling is different, most everything seems different. I went to the dentist this morning; that was different. Being here at my favorite coffee shop, other than the masks, is possibly not different enough. I’m feeling as though I’m trying to shove something I used to know into the present by being in the familiar.

As I searched for an environment conducive to writing creatively, it dawned on me somewhere along the way that, no matter where I ended up, I was still with myself and that just because my location changed, the inside of my mind hadn’t. Of course, I can trick myself when out in the world, as writing about a place creates in me an illusion of something else influencing me, but it’s still my filter from whatever inner dialog I’m working with. Maybe the inspiration when visiting a cathedral, a canyon, a forest, an ocean, or a monument is that I have a moment of focus without the trappings of the familiar, but how this works in allowing me to convey anything of interest must fall back on what I bring to the exercise.

So, when I’m struggling to find words and ideas that paint a picture of where I think I’d like to be, I try to figure out what might be the impediment. Here at the coffee shop I’ve visited countless other times, it could be that I cannot return to the familiar. It might be that I’m struggling with only 3 of us ten people wearing masks in this small environment. Or could it be writer’s block? I’m gonna say that I seriously doubt it is the latter because when I give myself the challenge to capture something of my thoughts, I’m usually pretty good at noting something just as I’m doing this very moment. But this is not what I want to write about, or so I think.

Well then, what do I want when I go out to write? I want the same thing all writers who sit down to write are looking to do: I want to discover. Maybe what I’m trying to explore cannot be found in the past, and this particular place represents a time in my life when things were seen differently. Like so many other aspects of life that required adjustments as I’ve grown older, is my ability to discover being stymied by the overly familiar?

The dawn is familiar; my wife is too. I know our apartment quite well and many items in our diet, and yet these things do not represent the same kind of conflict. Let’s look at that as the dawn is always different; it’s forever shifting with the play of clouds and hues delighting my senses every time I witness it. My wife is like the dawn over the ocean, never quite the same with her fluctuating interests; subtle changes are found in her smile, and she possesses a horizon I find to be infinite, at least in its potential. Our apartment is some ways, like the Grand Canyon; depending on where you look, you might find something you’ve never seen before. Not to imply disorder and chaos, though there is an element of that, between our evolving hobbies the view has the potential to show us new things, just as searching for new foods brings us into different ethnic culinary adventures.

Is the larger problem then that I have a low tolerance for the familiar? Has it always been this way? The quick answer is certainly a resounding yes. The common and familiar is the fodder for the masses gorged on the cultural gruel of conformity, and I’ve known this for a very long time. But today is different, as though the plague has cut the final thread between me and the blind, obedient herd that best represents the status quo.

In this sense, I feel that I’ve been shoved deeper into a nomadic intellectual existence. Where our ancestors were on the constant search for that which sustained life, I require the sustenance of that which sustains the imagination. In an age where the hunt for food and shelter has been mitigated for those with access to adequate capital, and my preoccupation with media and entertainment is either gone or in hibernation, I’m now on the lookout for horizons that illuminate where humanity is headed.

Star Trek’s intro spoke of space as the final frontier; I would reboot that into “awareness is the real final frontier.” Knowledge of hyperbolic absurdity found in entertainers and politicians hardly suffices to satisfy the deeper quest of humans to find meaning, even if the unsophisticated might believe differently. This pattern recognition machine of senses evolved in the form of memories and imagination, offering people the opportunity to discover things such as art, music, technology, and the mind to examine the hows and whys of what it all means. Yet we squander our most valuable resource, time, on the petty and believe in convenient expediencies in order to not challenge our nature to change.

Just how much of the familiar is really your friend?

Celebrating World Food Culture

JWise Food, Thoughts

Rau Ram

The dark side of America’s cultural seclusion can be abated by the exploration of the internet and especially YouTube if one can figure out what to search for. On one hand, we live sad, tragic, and isolated lives cut off from most cultural influences aside from some benign facsimiles of authenticity. On the other, there are many people around the globe sharing unfiltered looks into crafts, foods, places, and customs that mainstream media has failed to cover except when they can be used for sensationalist and or propagandist purposes.

Take food: ethnic cuisines, as they are prepared outside of America, have mostly remained a mystery. For example, search for fried rice, and you’ll be hard-pressed to see anything that resembles the real thing as it’s eaten in Asia, but how would you know that if all the recipe sites, cooking shows, and local restaurants are only offering a type of dish that was designed for the American palate?

Food Ranger

Somewhere between watching synthesizer videos and Russian car crash dash-cams, I must have seen a YouTube recommendation for a travel show from this guy named Harald Baldr. Through his travel exploits, I ran into the work of his friend “Bald and Bankrupt.” Maybe because I was binge-watching these guys traveling across India, Russia, Chechnya, and Belarus, I saw a recommended video in the sidebar for The Food Ranger, and something about it caught my eye. For the next weeks, I drove Caroline crazy with its host, Trevor James, and his particularly enthusiastic intonation of “Going Deep” into the local cuisine of wherever it is he happens to be.

What I was seeing from Trevor, aka the Food Ranger, were deep dives into street food across Asia with equal treatment for non-Western dishes surrounding various organ meats. Knowing he was fearless trying new foods and wasn’t squeamish in the slightest about any of it was a large part of the appeal. While YouTube was busy trying to get me to tune in to various other cooking shows of all the big American names, I was hooked on exploring a side of Asian food totally unknown to me.

Laphet Thoke or Green Tea Salad from Burma

Sure, Caroline and I had first tried pig ears, durian, and pork bungs (pig rectum and large intestine) more than a dozen years ago, and we were exposed to Indian home cooking years before that. I’d tried Ethiopian food while still living in Germany and had my first taste of Chicken Korma in Vienna before I’d met Caroline. What we didn’t realize was the breadth of culinary options and how often much of what is passed off as Chinese, Italian, Thai, and Mexican foods are seriously boring and far from their ethnic roots. Even when I learned how to make my own Lahpet Thoke (Burmese tea leaf salad – pictured), finding the ingredients in 2008 was nearly impossible. So difficult, as a matter of fact, that we had to travel to Los Angeles to pick them up as the online place in the U.K. wasn’t shipping the stuff to America.

While we were culinarily curious, there were no guides for shopping at our local Asian stores, and back before the days of YouTube or even in its early days, there was no reference to see how someone might be using Zao Lajiao, and that’s if you could even find fermented chili sauce in America. The worlds of authentic Asian, African, and Middle Eastern foods remained largely mysterious and hidden.

Best Ever Food Review Show

Today, that is no longer true. After the Food Ranger, I finally gave in to another recommendation of this guy named Sonny with his food show, also based in Asia, called Best Ever Food Review Show. I was reluctant at first as I felt that Trevor was blazing the trail and how could Sonny do any better; well, I was wrong because the Best Ever Food Review Show was living up to its name. What I didn’t know was that Mark Wiens was actually the trailblazer of food reviews in Asia, having started his channel back in 2009. What united these three reviewers was their serious interest in exploring the flavors of the places they were visiting instead of presenting their content as an example of shocking their audience with food challenges that might put off others who’d be open-minded enough to try a new cuisine.

Learning about food is only a small part of getting to the point of trying it, especially if you aren’t ready to jet off to a far away destination for the sake of eating local delicacies. Next up were the people who could bring us into the actual recipes, and this is where Maangchi, Chinese Cooking Demystified, Seonkyoung Longest, Refika, Yaman Agarwal, and even Townsends have been paving the way to inspiring millions of people from around our planet. But even with guides to help show us how to make these dishes, we still need ingredients that are not always easy to find.

Noodles and Tofu

Amazon is one source for some ingredients, but local ethnic grocery stores are essential for many of the fresh foods that are required, and they sadly are not very ubiquitous across America. Even when we find a local Filipino or Middle East grocery, the inconsistent quality and visual appeal of these small stores might turn some people away. Other online sources can be helpful, but then again, you must first know what it is you are looking for, and while you may want to buy hing powder if the vendor knows it as Asafoetida and has it listed as such, you may never connect the dots to buy what you need.

Posharp Store

The better cooking shows offer alternatives when they know particular ingredients will be hard to find for people in North and South America, along with Europe. Just today, I was able to find a single online source at The Mala Market for Er Jing Tiao and Facing Heaven chilies for making Ciba chili paste, but had I not found those, it was recommended I try cayenne and Thai bird’s eye. Another recipe I’m interested in calls for Duolajiao, preferably from Tantan Xiang, but it’s acknowledged that this is likely impossible to find outside of China, so an alternative was offered but with a lot of vigilance, I found that the PosharpStore in Massachusetts carries it, wish I’d known I would be buying this when back in August I bought Shaoxing rice wine from the same company. The point is that there are ways to get very close to authentic flavors, but you must be persistent in trying to source the ingredients.

Laotai Arui

Enter Liziqi, Laotai Arui, Dianxi Xiaoge, and WocomoCook, who are inspiring followers with their style of traditional cooking methods where we are viewing the gardens, tools, and environment where these foods are being made. There’s little attention given to the recipes and often there is little spoken, but the slow nature of bringing food into becoming a meal is an art unto itself. Now I find myself wanting a slab of tree trunk for my next cutting board; I’ve already bought a Chinese cleaver and have a Korean butane stove on the way so I can stop trying to use a wok on an electric stove.

Bring all of this together and add a generation of people from around the globe who are being inspired to move outside the bland versions of cuisine that hardly resemble its origins, and I find a new view of what ethnic dishes are being born. American renditions of German, French, Chinese, Korean, Thai, and Japanese foods are nothing short of sad atrocities using a set of homogeneous ingredients that have no variations from coast to coast here in the United States. Fortunately, there are still ethnic restaurants that won’t attract many Westerners anyway and so they have no choice but to maintain authenticity in order to be appealing to recent immigrants from those countries. As time goes on, I’d like to imagine that more people will be inspired by and start demanding these foods that, while exotic today, could become commonplace in the future.

Does anybody have some good tips on Icelandic, Iranian, Peruvian, Namibian, and Russian cuisines on YouTube? I’m also searching for Portuguese, Scandinavian, and Guinean streamers. By the way, as I was finishing up this blog entry, Caroline and I came across canned mutton at a local Vietnamese grocery and found a recipe from Guyana that we’ll be trying in the coming weeks. Another benefit of living in the age we are in.

** Note – not 10 minutes after this was published, I stumbled upon The Lime Tree on YouTube. My wish for Persian cooking examples has been found with this person yet another example of the influence Liziqi is having on cultural content surrounding food. I still need a person who walks me through the specifics of the popular recipes found in Iran.

I Just Don’t Know

JWise Thoughts

Frog in the fog

Why do I feel so disconnected from this old routine of taking up a spot in a coffee shop and turning on the word spigot? Maybe my mask is interfering with the neural pathway that allows thoughts to form and find an uninterrupted flow to my fingers. This being Thursday and the 4th day of a 5-day fast, maybe starvation is having an impact as it’s typically been this day that is the foggiest. Or could the entire planet experiencing this collective moment of uncertainty be a contributing factor? On one hand, I can almost see 22-year-old John floundering in what is the meaning of everything, but that version of me I thought was mostly out of sight. One might then suggest this is my long overdue midlife crisis, but I’d argue that that is like thinking I might enter a second puberty. I’m not worried about my own value in this world but have this nagging feeling that something is amiss, and this return to what had been normal is some strange facade that isn’t real.

Beyond the veil of delusion is our new normal that’s not been defined yet as it’s still rapidly or maybe glacially evolving. Thrusting myself forward, I’m out here grasping at any emergent signs I might gather in order to interpret if an order of things is observable. Tentative and uncertain is how I see much of this current situation, while the holdouts from the previous age are determined to march forward as though nothing has changed. Maybe they have it figured out somehow?

So now what? I don’t know, I just don’t know. I’ll continue sitting here in the clouds, pondering these bigger questions.

200 Days

JWise Moments

Bumble Bee

Two hundred days later, over 200,000 deaths, new spikes of COVID with some countries locking down again, on the verge of a national crisis due to wildly nonsensical B.S. about our election, it really does feel that 2020 is the year that all the wheels came off the cart.

For the bumblebees that are feasting on a burst of yellow flowers throughout our neighborhood, life is good. The lizards that were tiny babies a couple of months ago are scurrying about acting as though they are absolutely unconcerned about who did well or not in last night’s un-presidential debate. While the air carries away the toxins and smoke that are flooding into it, no air molecules are being paid off for salacious acts; there is no hydrogen being accused of Epstein’ing oxygen, no calls to lock up pollution or threats to imprison the worst offenders who toss that stuff into our atmosphere. The birds gave up paying taxes long ago, so they just fly about laughing at their poop-targets that wrestle with arcane forms so they can stress out at the beginning of spring instead of focusing on fornication as birds do.

So I’m making an October 1st resolution that I’m going to start pollinating flowers with my proboscis (wink, wink!). I’ll be crawling up vertical walls to sun myself, which is believed to help in fighting off COVID due to the abundant vitamin D that is somehow still able to reach organisms here on the surface of the earth. But why should I restrict myself to being a terrestrial being when part of my resolution could be to join the mockingbirds in shitting on those below? While up in the soiled air, I’ll soar into the freedom only known to the birds who seemingly defy gravity and sing delightful tax protest songs such as I’ve been listening to my whole life. And should a quick-moving foot, some pesticide, or windshield snuff out my life, feed me to the ants and let what remains rot on the side of the road with the pigeons as I become one with the land I came from.

So, where do I go from here? I’ve already clocked over 1,320 miles walking through my plague-infested neighborhood. I still shop like it’s a minute before midnight, and I’m Cinderella. Our president is threatening that he’ll organize the Big Bad Wolf to huff and puff at our front doors should we not pledge loyalty to our Holy Leader (the leader in German is Führer!). QAnon should have never even been typed out on this blog – EVER, so I’ll just let that go. Oh, I almost forgot: California never had the chance to fall into the ocean due to an earthquake as it just burned to a crisp, and its ashes blew into the Pacific.

This leaves me with giving in to the insanity, realizing I was never strong enough to fight the gaslighting, or I could continue living like a hermit and walking into an uncertain future. Of course, I’m well aware that no future is ever certain, but the idea of a hopeful one was something to look forward to. A future where people were at least pretending to want something better instead of preying on ignorance with psychopathic dreams of some dystopian zombie apocalypse driven by a bunch of armed militia with tightly coifed beards – yeah, I’m referring to the Proud Boys.

Then again, this is all up to my perspective. Maybe all I need do is strip down and run outside with my junk, swinging in the breeze as I try to pollinate the first flower I find. Seriously, what issues do you think that the bumblebee above is concerned about? The answer can only be: I’m an idiot.