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Aformentioned Peanut Sauce
Jul. 3rd, 2009 12:03 pmWhat I did:
Put one large spoonful of creamy organic peanut butter (y'know, the kind that just has peanuts) in a small bowl with perhaps twice as much water. Heated it in the microwave for about 45 seconds. Mixed. (It wasn't smooth after the first mixing.) Added a little maple syrup*, a little sambal oolek**, some french fried shallots, a little ground galangal***, and a little fish sauce. Heated another thirty seconds in the microwave, whisked with a fork until smooth.
I served it over steamed tofu and bok choy, tossed with some wheatberries**** and then garnished with a couple of leaves of thai basil cut into ribbons and a little bit of lime juice.
But generally speaking, my peanut sauces vary a lot according to my whim. At the core is x amount of peanut putter and 1-3x amount of liquid. A lot of people use coconut milk - it seems plenty rich enough to me without, so I generally don't. Flavor as desired - something spicey, something sweet, something salty, something sour... (Not necessarily all at once, there's a lot of virtue in simplicity.)
I'll also often use just a little peanut butter in other sauces to give them a creamier mouth-feel and that yummy fatty-proteinaceous peanut taste. (I was introduced to a couple of "country-style" Thai curries that seemed to use peanuts rather than coconut milk, and I kind of took the idea and ran with it.) I also have done a lot of working with cashew butter when I'm cooking for people with peanut sensitivities.
* Most commercial peanut sauces are very sweet. Mine usually aren't, particularly, but I wanted a little sweetness. I have tended to use a lot of palm sugar in Thai-ish cooking, but that's harder to get around here, and sometime last year I tried using maple syrup as a substitute, and liked the results enough I kept using it.
** Because everything is better with sambal oolek. One can probably substitute a similar chili preparation of you choice. Or skip it, I suppose.
*** Because Whole Foods stopped carrying fresh, drat them.
**** I'm eating wheatberries cooked in the pressure cooker instead of rice a lot, as I'd picked up soft white wheatberries by mistake (they were mislabeled) a bit ago, and this uses them up.
Put one large spoonful of creamy organic peanut butter (y'know, the kind that just has peanuts) in a small bowl with perhaps twice as much water. Heated it in the microwave for about 45 seconds. Mixed. (It wasn't smooth after the first mixing.) Added a little maple syrup*, a little sambal oolek**, some french fried shallots, a little ground galangal***, and a little fish sauce. Heated another thirty seconds in the microwave, whisked with a fork until smooth.
I served it over steamed tofu and bok choy, tossed with some wheatberries**** and then garnished with a couple of leaves of thai basil cut into ribbons and a little bit of lime juice.
But generally speaking, my peanut sauces vary a lot according to my whim. At the core is x amount of peanut putter and 1-3x amount of liquid. A lot of people use coconut milk - it seems plenty rich enough to me without, so I generally don't. Flavor as desired - something spicey, something sweet, something salty, something sour... (Not necessarily all at once, there's a lot of virtue in simplicity.)
I'll also often use just a little peanut butter in other sauces to give them a creamier mouth-feel and that yummy fatty-proteinaceous peanut taste. (I was introduced to a couple of "country-style" Thai curries that seemed to use peanuts rather than coconut milk, and I kind of took the idea and ran with it.) I also have done a lot of working with cashew butter when I'm cooking for people with peanut sensitivities.
* Most commercial peanut sauces are very sweet. Mine usually aren't, particularly, but I wanted a little sweetness. I have tended to use a lot of palm sugar in Thai-ish cooking, but that's harder to get around here, and sometime last year I tried using maple syrup as a substitute, and liked the results enough I kept using it.
** Because everything is better with sambal oolek. One can probably substitute a similar chili preparation of you choice. Or skip it, I suppose.
*** Because Whole Foods stopped carrying fresh, drat them.
**** I'm eating wheatberries cooked in the pressure cooker instead of rice a lot, as I'd picked up soft white wheatberries by mistake (they were mislabeled) a bit ago, and this uses them up.
