Cooking Blossoms

Cooking Blossoms

At Ban Rang Krathai School

Returning to the theme of cooking lessons at our school, this post describes only one dish made with actual blossoms. However, another recipe calls for making flower-shaped kanom and, as our students’ knowledge of traditional Thai recipes is continuing to blossom, I couldn’t resist the word play.

Banana Blossom Fritters (glua tawt hua pee)

Banana trees produce not only flowers that turn into bananas, but also a big pinkish purple blossom that doesn’t yield a fruit. Those blossoms are used as a vegetable in quite a variety of recipes. Here is a link to a site with pictures of banana blossoms and other information.

http://thaifoodandtravel.com/blog/banana-blossom/

Our students made banana blossom fritters a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, I was late getting to the lesson so I didn’t get pictures of all the steps. The blossoms are sliced, mixed with a spicy batter, and deep-fried.

Fritter frying

Student sampling fritter

The fritters are spicy and yummy. The blossoms are light and crisp in texture. I can’t think of a way to describe the taste. The younger children, who don’t take part in preparing the food, do their part by showing up with 5 baht apiece to buy a serving of fritters for a welcome afternoon snack.

Kanom chaw muang

These beautiful little snacks (kanom), made in the shape of a rose, are a dish for royalty. The Thai name refers to the shape (chaw means cluster or bouquet) and the color (muang means purple). The kanom are made, however, in several colors besides purple. They are a kind of dumpling with either a savory filling of minced pork, chicken, fish, or shrimp, or a sweet filling of coconut, nuts, and sugar.

Here you see students preparing ingredients for the fillings.

Here a student is kneading the dough, coached by Kruu Yu Pin, science teacher at Ban Rang Krathai School. The dough (like the dough for bua loy, floating lotus) reminds me of play doh in texture, but is a little stiffer.

The dough is formed into little balls, and filling is inserted into each ball of dough.

Each rose is painstakingly shaped with tweezers.

And here is a perfectly shaped rose.

The finished roses are steamed, then cooled on banana leaves and arranged attractively on a plate to be served.

Kai nok grataa (deep-fried sweet potato balls)

These cute little kanom are a type of donut. Their Thai name means quail egg (kai=egg, nok=bird, grataa=quail),; presumably this refers to the size and shape of the kanom rather than the ingredients. Again I was late to the lesson so missed the ingredients for the dough, but here is a link to a recipe if you are interested.

http://allrecipes.asia/recipe/3428/kai-nok-grataa--fried-sweet-potato-balls-.aspx

This recipe seems to be quite easy to make. Here is a picture of students making the dough.

And here are students making balls of dough for frying.

Here you see a student pushing the balls down into the hot oil so they will puff up while frying and be hollow inside.

The hollow inside is a nice surprise when you eat the kanom. There is nothing unusual about the taste -- as noted above, similar to donuts, only cuter.

Khaao kriab pak maw (steamed rice flour dumplings)

These are trickier to make. The so-called dumplings, which to me look like thin, stretchy pancakes or crepes, are made one at a time from a runny rice flour batter that is poured onto a hot cooking surface and covered with a lid, as you see in the video below.

When the dumpling or crepe is sufficiently steamed, a spoonful of filling is plopped in the middle and the sheet of dough is wrapped around it.  You can see that the crepe is both stretchy and sticky, but Kruu Thanchanok has the moves down perfectly.  

As with many other Thai kanom recipes, the filling can be either sweet or savory. Our students made both kinds and were generous in handing out samples. Kanom khaao kriab pak maw are delicious, but the texture of the dumpling “skin” takes a little getting used to – it’s chewy and a bit tough, with not much flavor of its own. These snacks are widely sold in open-air markets and by street vendors in Thailand.

I hope you enjoy these recipes half as much as our students enjoy making them – and I enjoy taking the pictures. For future blog posts about recipes our students make, I’ll take more still images as well as videos, so you won’t have to open so many videos to see what’s going on. The students of course love to see themselves on video, which is one reason why I take so many. The other reason is, I’m saving all the photos and videos as slide shows for my colleague Kruu Bussara, who is in charge of the cooking classes. At the end of the term, I’ll give them to her on a flash drive to show the committee that funded the cooking program – in the hope that they’ll want to fund it again next year.