Steamed fish with lime sauce

For readers who like a tangy broth with their steamed fish

Several years ago, in a Thai restaurant somewhere in Pasig, my friends and I had a fish dish which I thought was absolutely heavenly.

The fish was laid over a simmering broth that was bewitchingly sour, spicy, sweet and savory all at the same time—a rare, perfect balance of flavors.

Made with limes, chilies, garlic and a touch of sugar, the broth was kept bubbly hot by a flame placed underneath the fish platter.

The restaurant has since closed, unfortunately, but I’ve never forgotten that dish. Whenever I dine in a Thai restaurant I look for it in the menu, hoping to recapture once more that enchanting tangy flavor.

Perhaps the best one I’ve tasted so far is the one at Tamarind—a Thai restaurant in SM Aura, where it’s listed on the menu as “pla manao.”

Other Thai restaurants also serve pla manao, but the taste of the broth is different. Maybe it’s because, lacking a supply of limes, these restaurants use lemon or calamansi instead, which isn’t the same at all.

Real limes have an emerald green interior, contain no seeds and have a unique flavor all their own. Even their fragrance is so inviting, their whiff hinting not of sourness but, strangely, of sweetness.

Limes are so enticing and can be used to enhance so many recipes that I wonder why nobody imports them to Manila. Or, for that matter, why we can’t grow our own limes here, like they do in Thailand. A substitute for lime would be dayap, but there doesn’t seem to be an abundance of dayap in Metro Manila, either.

To get my supply of limes, I buy them whenever I travel, or I cajole friends and relatives living overseas to bring me some whenever they come to visit (the limes from Australia are particularly good).

Recently, during a trip to Hong Kong, I swiped some limes from the breakfast buffet which were scattered nonchalantly around a bunch of fruits (if they knew how rare these are in the Philippines!).

As a result, I was able to cook pla manao at home, using those precious limes.

Here’s the recipe, for readers who like a tangy broth with their steamed fish. I hope they’ll be able to find their own source of limes like I did.

Steamed Fish with Lime Sauce
1 large whole apahap (seabass)
Coarse salt
1 whole head garlic, peeled and crushed
8-10 stems wansuy (coriander)
Water, for steaming

For the lime sauce:
1 tbsp finely chopped garlic
5 tbsp white sugar
5 tbsp patis (fish sauce)
½ c fresh lime juice (from 3 to 4 limes, see tips)
1/3 c water
1-2 siling labuyo (bird’s eye chilies), optional
For garnish:
Wansuy leaves
Chopped garlic
Bird’s eye or long chilies

Clean the apahap well, removing the gut and the scales (you can ask the fish monger to do this for you when you buy the fish). Cut two diagonal slits on both sides of the belly and near the tail of the fish. Rub the fish with coarse salt, then rinse well.

Insert some garlic cloves and wansuy leaves inside the fish. Prepare the steamer, making sure there’s enough water in it. Arrange the fish in a heat-proof plate and place it in the steamer. Cover the steamer tightly.

Steam the fish over medium heat for about 15 minutes (depending on the size of the fish). Check the fish after around 15 minutes.

The fish is cooked when the eyes have bulged and the flesh of the fish is white and flaky (should not be glassy). If it is not yet cooked, continue steaming for a few more minutes.

When the fish is cooked, take it out of the steamer and remove the garlic and wansuy leaves.

Transfer the fish to a clean plate. Pour half of the lime sauce over it and garnish with wansuy leaves, garlic and chilies. Serve the remaining lime sauce on the table. Serve immediately.

To make the lime sauce:
Combine the garlic, sugar, patis, lime juice, water and chilies (if desired) in a saucepan. Heat for one to two minutes. Pour half over the cooked fish and serve the remaining sauce on the table. Garnish the fish with wansuy leaves.

Cook’s tips:

Green lemons are not the same as limes, but they can be used in this recipe, too (though the taste will be slightly different). A better substitute would be dayap.

Make sure you use wansuy, not kinchay, which may look similar to wansuy but has a very different taste and aroma.

You can also cook this with lapulapu, mayamaya or any whole white fish.

source: lifestyle.inquirer.net

Mango Tree updates the meaning of ‘Modern Thai’

Mango Tree has amassed a loyal following in the two years it has been in the Philippines. Its secret is offering a healthy mix of the traditional and the modern along with a dose of good, old-fashioned Thai hospitality, Filipino style.

The first thing people notice is that the restaurant is modern, lacking any of the usual decor that marks the "usual" Thai restaurant. Modern interiors that focus on comfort and style reflect menu choices—dishes that have roots in Thai home cooking, but many of which have been updated for modern times, most of them recipes taken from the kitchen of the founders themselves.

Pitaya Phanphensophon, CEO of Coca Holding International Co. Ltd. is a second-generation restaurant owner. He started Mango Tree in Bangkok in 1994, later opening its first overseas location in London in 2001. “Growing up in a restaurant environment taught me how to please people, at least with hospitality, and obviously, we are a bit choosy and picky in food,” he says. “The first thing they taught me about the hospitality business is ‘you should give your customers the best value’ because we were taught that money is hard to make, hard to come by. When people spend, they want to make sure of its value.”

Pitaya, who is very active in menu development, takes great pains to say that he is not a chef. “I keep insisting on that because I think that chefs who have gone through proper training deserve recognition. It’s not like anyone who can cook well can call themselves a chef,” he explains. “I learned [how to cook] from my mother. My mother was a very good cook. She’s the eldest daughter and in the Chinese [household], she cooks for the family. She learned from my grandmother, that kind of thing. When you ask her for a recipe, she says, ‘A bit of this, a pinch of that,’ that’s how I learned how to cook.”




He takes great pride in Mango Tree’s menu, having tweaked the dishes to appeal to an international audience that is not afraid to spend for quality. “We always introduce what’s available locally…[In the Philippines], because you have good seafood, you have good beef, we introduced rock lobster to our menu. We listen to our customers, what they really want.

“We always start our Thai food a bit mild, entry-level. Having spicy food is like a drug addict. You have to go a bit, one notch up... We introduce different presentations, we introduce different plating, we introduce cuts of meat into our food. That makes us different from others, not to mention that we always use fresh ingredients. We never use frozen. We don’t cut corners.”

Mango Tree’s new menu items include their version of massaman curry, a Malaysian-influenced Thai dish that CNNGo listed as the number one in the article World’s 50 most delicious foods. “We introduced Massaman with short ribs and potato,” Pataya says. “If you look at it, there is no Thai dish with potatoes. That’s why when people ask me how authentic our Thai food is, I say, ‘We can’t claim that we are Thai a hundred years ago. We are modern, evolved.’”

The restaurant also plays with everyone’s favorite soup Tom Yum Gong, using locally available rock lobster in place of prawns.




Pitaya takes time to talk about how he draws on the soup’s history to create Mango Tree’s version, explaining that the soup originated as a dish for royalty, made with river prawns that gave the otherwise clear soup a bisque-like consistency. “As time passed, these dishes went from palaces to the countryside where you cannot find the prawns with big heads, so they added milk into it to thicken it,” he says. “This is why I keep on insisting that Tom Yum should have clear broth. That’s how we do it here, unless the customer requests otherwise.Obviously, rock lobster doesn’t have that kind of head, but it still gives you a different texture, a different experience.”

The Yam Pu Nim substitutes the catfish in the traditional catfish salad with crispy soft shell crab. “We decided to put it together to deliver something different in terms of texture and taste. They’re going through the elements, spicy with a bit of sour from the salad, but then you’ve got that bit of crispiness from the soft-shell crab,” Pitaya says. “For me, traveling the world and seeing different Thai restaurants, one thing I feel sets us apart is that we innovate this way—we’re always trying to introduce new things to our customers, and that comes primarily from [number] one, our passion. Number two, we have such a loyal following, we want to give them something else.”

Mango Tree’s forward thinking when it comes to Thai cuisine extends all the way to dessert. “You will see our dessert menu is not typical Thai desserts,” Pitaya says. “It’s obvious that traditional people would rather see Thai desserts on the plate, but our experience tells us that a lot of these Thai desserts are not palatable to many foreigners, so we introduced chocolates, panna cotta, cheesecake. I feel that desserts should be sweet to cleanse the palate. With Thai desserts, with sweet, you get salt, with savory, you get sugar, so you never know when your meal ends—that’s why we adopted  European desserts. At least when customers leave, they may not be happy with everything—you can’t be happy with everything—but at least they remember that Mango Tree gave them something different.”

This mindset of innovation and modernization has obviously been successful, with Mango Tree growing to 40 branches in 9 countries, the latest branch opening in India. According to Pitaya, the secret to Mango Tree’s success is no secret at all. “The things that we do that bring us success is being honest to our customers and delivering on what we promise,” he says. “When they come here, they find that the food is different from other Thai restaurants that they have experienced. They come back.” — BM, GMA News

source: gmanetwork.com