Tom Yum Fried Rice - HISTORY AND RECIPE
HELLO everyone :) we are insanely pleased to have finally started Serious Bites - a food review and a rating blog for foodie monsters like y’all. This blog - we have been longing to write since many many years ago. And, Serious Bites and its posts will be all about -you guessed it- FOOD and only about FOOD.
A little background about us - My name is Andrew, a Burmese national who works and studies in Thailand. Me and my best mate Fred have been talking about food blogging for years but never actually had time to start one. But I finally quit my full-time job and for what it’s worth, I am back to writing full time again. Besides going back to pursue my aerospace degree, this is what I will be doing every week in my free time - rate, review and share our ideas on all types of Asian cuisine we have tried out and will try out.
On Serious Bites, our readers can also expect posts of us going on wild food adventures and trying out all kinds of Asian street food plus interview videos with the shop owners, restaurant chefs and customers alike. We want to shower our readers with all kinds of details, background history of the dishes - and also Fred happens to be a food PhD (meaning he eats a lot and he’s also a chef, also runs a cafe and had a service industry background since his college days.) And, on top of that he’s Asian. Yep, that’s right, so he will be providing recipe videos for all of us on how to cook a certain dish that I happen to review.
So, the adventure of food porn begins!
100 Asian Dishes
Dish # 1
Tom-yum Fried Rice
(Thai Cuisine)
“Tom-Yummmmmm” - notice it’s ‘yum’, not ‘yam’? Yep, because you can’t wander around the streets of Bangkok saying Tom yAAAAm with thick American accent to the E-sarn lady who sells amazing Thai food on the roadside but happens to have a bad day not having many customers. Nope, she will give you a hard stare then go “haah, arai wa?” Go figure :)
Kidding aside, let me give you a little background on this full-on traditional Thai dish. Many westerners associate Thailand with Tom Yum (and other things ;)) and how spicy all dishes that are made with it. And, trust me Tom Yum IS super spicy but it’s not even on par with other “stomachache for dayzz” spicy food that Thailand has to offer.
So, Tom Yum is usually cooked with shrimp and it can be served in many ways which we will cover later in this post. The most popular among the Tom Yum family is the infamous “Tom Yum Kung”: the spicy soup with prawns. Tom Yum’s broth is made of stock and fresh ingredients such as lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, lime juice, fish sauce, and crushed chili peppers. ‘Tom’ means to boil in Thai and “Yum” means usually a spicy salad. The Tom Yum soup is characterized by its distinct hot and sour flavors, with fragrant spices and herbs GENEROUSLY used in the broth.
I have tried numerous times to look up the history of Tom Yum and failed. But it wasn’t all in vain as I came across Mark Wiens; one of the best food bloggers of our century who’s the guru of Asian cuisine said and to quote him: “There’s little information about the history of Tom Yum, but many say that it’s a central Thai soup that developed due to an abundance of freshwater shrimp. Boiled in water as a soup, the shrimp gave the broth a real fishy flavor, so cooks started experimenting by adding local Thai herbs into the boiling water to balance the fishy flavor. The trio of herbs that worked so well to infuse the broth with a beautiful aroma were kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, and galangal, which are still the three most important ingredients in any bowl of Tom Yum.” So, there you have it.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are many Tom yum dishes :
- Tom yum goong/kung (Tom yum soup with prawns > prawns only)
- Tom yum Talay (Tom yum soup with seafood > prawns, squid, and sometimes mussels)
- Tom yum plaa or Tom yum hua plaa (Tom yum soup with fish or fish head)
- Tom yum gai (Tom yum soup with chicken)
- Tom yum nam sai (Clear Tom yum soup)
- Tom yum nam khon (Tom yum soup with coconut milk)
- Tom yum plao (Plain Tom yum soup - suitable for vegetarians)
- Bami Tom yum (Tom yum noodles)
- Khao Pad Tom yum (Tom yum fried rice - finally! this is what we are going to talk about.)
In fact there are several more Tom yum side dishes but we should talk about them in the next episode. For now, let’s take a look at “KHAO PAD TOM YUM - TOM YUM FRIED RICE”
Khao Pad Tom yum is not exactly a Thai cuisine, although there’s the word “Tom yum” in it. Because it’s a crossover dish. Thais made Tom yum soup and also Tom yum paste. So Malaysians, and a few other South East Asian countries said “Oh, if there’s that paste…we can make fried rice with it because duh we Asians love fried rice.”
So although, Tom yum is commonly known as a soup originating from Thailand, you can have your fried rice that is infused with tom yum flavors too - characterized by the distinct hot and sour flavors of fragrant herbs. You could get commercial tom yum paste (usually made by crushing all the herb ingredients, stir-fried in oil, then bottled) to make the soup, or like what I did - to make a one-dish meal. Now enough for the history..let’s take a look at how to actually cook it. Here’s what you will need for a nice bowl of tom yum fried rice.
Recipe
The most important ingredient would be the “Tom Yam Paste”, and to make that you will need -
(i) Making Tom Yam Paste
Lemongrass (3 inches)
Galangal or Ginger (3 slices)
Kaffir lime leaves or normal lime leaves (3 leaves)
Thai red chilies (2 to 3)
Sugar (1 tsp)
Thai Chili paste (2 Tbsp)
Fish sauce (1 Tbsp)
Soy Sauce (1 Tbsp)
Lime Juice (2 Tbsp)
- Pound or grind sliced lemongrass, galangal, lime leaves and Thai red chilies until smooth.
- Then put sugar, Thai chili paste, fish sauce, soy sauce and lime juice for seasoning. Taste the paste and adjust anyway you like.
After making the paste, you will need the general ingredients for the fried rice -
(ii) Actual Cooking
Shrimp or Chicken
Rice (300 g)
Tomato (1)
Chinese broccoli (2 Stalks)
Onion (Half)
Garlic (2 gloves)
Oil (2 and half Tbsp)
And here’s how you cook it -
- Cook rice as per normal
- Heat some oil in frying pan, sauté the prawns/shrimps on both sides till cooked. Dish out and set aside.
- Fry all the long beans, red chilli, jalopeno peppers, corn in the same oil, add Tom Yum Paste and some water(adjust according) and fry for 5-8mins.
- Add in the prawns and mix well. Make sure there is some gravy but not too wet since you do not want the rice to be too soggy.
- Add in the mixture into the rice while in the rice cooker. Mix the rice well with the Tom Yum mixture of long beans, chilis, peppers and shrimps.
The recipe credit goes to:
How to make a Tom Yum Fried Rice Video:
I do not own this video, all credit goes to: Pailin’s kitchen
Good Restaurants for T.Y Fried Rice for our readers in Myanmar and Thailand:
Yangon
(i) Spicy Forest:
Website:
https://www.facebook.com/SpicyForest/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf
Phone: 8600111 - ext: 1151
Address: Room No. 051/052 Basement 1(B1), Taw Win Center, Pyay Road, Yangon
(ii) Mai Tai (Yangon)
(iii) Bangkok Kitchen:
Website:
https://www.facebook.com/BangkokKitchenThaiRestaurant/
Bangkok
(i) Tom Yum Goong Banglamphu:
Address: Soi Kraisi, Khwaeng Talat Yot, Khet Phra Nakhon, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon 10200
(ii) Peeps Thai Eatery:
Address: 60 Pera Arthit Road, Chanasongkram, Phra Nakhorn, Bangkok
Phone: +66 89 674 6309
There are a ton of good restaurants that serve Tom Yum Fried rice and all the other Tom Yum goodies in both Myanmar and Thailand. The restaurants mentioned above are just the ones we tried out and loved. If you live in Bangkok, the chances are you will come to realize that Tom Yum fried rice can be served even in your next door Thai restaurant for only 60 baht. But in Yangon, the Thai meals are usually pricey.
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