How To Make Khao Poon, A Spicy Lao Soup | Quarantine Cooking

Hello, everybody. My name is Donnie Sursavath. I'm the chef and owner of Cow Noodle Shop in Dallas, Texas. Today, we're going to be making kabun noodles. Those vermicelli noodles with galangal, clear lime leaf. The main focus on that is a lot of fresh herbs and spices. Nothing too hard about it. There's nothing too complex. It's just understanding time, temperature, and the smell of the dish. All right. Let's get started, guys. First off, what we're going to do is I'm going to get my galangal. It's a root in the ginger family. If you don't have galangal, you can actually kind of use ginger for a substitute. But, you know, you don't need to peel galangal like you do ginger. Usually, I use a meat cleaver. Just chop it in down. Around quarter size. I'll just set it off to the side for now. You can use yellow onion, red onion, but I prefer to use some shallots. Like so. My mom always taught me how to peel a shallot or onion. I actually use a knife and just use it to peel the skin off. Just like that. There's no wrong or right way. I usually just go ahead and dice it. Once you get a shallot, we'll just combine that with our onion right here. And then the next step, we'll just go ahead and use about six or seven clear lime leaves. We call it in Lao, bai ki hut. So, bai, it's like when you say bye-bye-bye, you know, like a song. So, bai is a leaf, and then ki hut is the actual lime leaf. One more ingredient, lemongrass, right? On the outer skin, it's pretty much like hay, grass, and very fibrous. So, we want to take that outer layer off. So, what I usually do is go ahead and cut the ends off. So, again, the tip as well. And then I'll get it smashed up. You just want to break that up. Get all the juices out from the lemongrass. You know, the majority of the flavor of lemongrass is actually inside here. Next one is actually garlic. So, I usually do about two to three cloves. Smash it. Just a rough chop. Cooking, especially this dish right here, it's just very rustic and no wrong or right way of doing things. So, I have all my ingredients here. Let's get started on the stock. I got my pan kind of hot already, so it's good. But, you know, quite a bit of oil. Got my onions, my shallots going into the pan. So, I'm just going to stir this around a little bit here. Once you get everything sweated out, we'll just go ahead and add our garlic. And then, of course, we'll just stir it out around as well, too. So, you just see everything steaming up right now. That's when you know that, you know, you're cooking things right. And, of course, the bottom is actually going to create this little brownness on the bottom. That's perfect. That's where all that richness and flavor goes into. Right now, I'm just going to add like a half cup of water. Just kind of deglaze the bottom of my pan a little bit at a time. See how that brownness is coming up right there? That's what you want. That's where the flavor is at from the onion and garlic. Keep on stirring around. Let it sweat again. And I'll go ahead and add the rest of my water. Next going in is actually your herbs right here. Next one is red curry paste. We're going to put it in there. So, once you add your curry paste in here, just stir it around. Yeah, like that. It's smelling good right now. I'm not going to lie. Turn down the heat to about medium-low. So, then we'll add our next ingredient. I have approximately two cans of coconut milk in here. I won't put everything in at once. I'll put maybe like a can, a can and a half at first, and then at the end, I'll finish off with a little bit more coconut milk. We want some creaminess, which is the coconut milk that we're going to use today to create that creaminess and giving us that nice sweetness and then sour, salty. So, it's an overall dish where it's a little sweet and sour, salty. And then next step, we're going to go ahead and add some more water. Two to three cups should do it. Our stock is simmering. It's medium-low right now. We'll have that simmer for about five to 10 minutes, depending on how much more work we have. There's no wrong or right on cooking it down. Cooking it down is going to be just more richer, so we just want to find a middle balance, which is going to be a little brothy, a little bit rich. So, in the meantime, let's go ahead and start on our mis. This is actually bamboo shoot. If you can't get fresh bamboo shoot, you can actually get canned bamboo shoot from the stores. In this case, we have a fresh one that's been washed and then boiled. So, what I'll do is just go ahead and cut this in half, cut it into quarters, and then just slice it down. There's actually quite a bit around riverbeds here in Dallas. Even when I grew up in Texas, my mom and my dad, they also actually go foraging for bamboo shoots. You just kind of see your parents out in the forest, just creeks bed, lakes, foraging for mushrooms, bamboo shoot as a child. It was kind of strange for them, but in a way, it was kind of like just fun time and play time outside with my parents. But those things I take for granted now, because then I lost my mom. That's part of the reason why I opened the restaurant. That's the reason why I'm cooking a dish that's actually familiar to me, and actually a dish that I cooked for her when I was starting to cook again. The thing is, she taught me how to cook, so everything that I learned was from her. So, this is one of those dishes that I actually enjoyed the most of cooking. I'm actually going to cut a little bit of carrots. This is actually just garnish. All right, let's check on our stock and see where we're at for now. Everything's kind of like binding together now. So, I got my fresh bamboo shoots I'm adding in there. Then what I'm going to actually do is pour some of my wet ingredients. Fish sauce, about half a cup. What I do is I'll just add a little bit at a time. The next one is unfiltered fish sauce, so badak. Badak is actually something that we use in a lot of culture quite a bit. It's that umami flavor, that saltiness, that richness that creates from anchovies being fermented for years upon years. And it's unfiltered, so you have all the gritty, the nitty chunks in there. But if you can't find badak at your grocery stores, then we'll just add a little bit more fish sauce. Next we have is oyster sauce, blended chili peppers. Sprinkle some in, just a little bit here, and I'll save some for the rest for later. And then also whole dried chili pepper as well, too. Just incorporate all that. And of course, you have to taste. Mom's like, how are you going to know your food is good if you don't taste, right? That's pretty damn good right now. Let's do some more garnish. All right. So next for our garnish, red cabbage. Real thin slices. You want to see just, you know, just real thin strips. I have my white cabbage that I'm going to cut, too. Like so. Salt. Water. Just rinse it off real quick. So next what we have, just a bunch of mints. Just pick the leaves off. Mints are an herb that we use quite a bit in Laotian cooking. And actually I'm going to combine that with our cabbage bowl. And then also with our carrots. Everything gets incorporated so it's easier to pick up once you garnish. So here's your pile of your garnish right here. It's going to look amazing and it's going to taste amazing. All right. So next cilantro and then a little bit of green onion. We pretty much have our garnish ready. We'll set it off to the side and now we're going to check our stock again. All right. As you can see, our stock kind of reduced a little bit. So I got my coconut milk. I'm going to go ahead and pour. I'm going to add a little bit more of my fish sauce. Unfiltered fish sauce. And then add shrimp paste. So what I do is just kind of like a half a teaspoon. Now we're going to add our tuna. Right now I just got one can of tuna. So I'll add that in. I'm going to give it a quick stir. And then the next one is going to be my quail eggs. These are actually already boiled from a can. If you don't have quail eggs, then just omit it. All right. And you can try and use big chicken eggs or duck egg. You know, the thing is, you can do whatever you want because you're cooking it. Not me. So this is approximately about one can of quail eggs. And it goes in. Get everything stirred up again. Just let that simmer for about another five minutes or so. And then while that's cooking, we'll go ahead and cook our vermicelli noodles. I recommend soaking them in water first to actually soften them up a little bit. This one I soaked for probably about three or four hours. Just get a pot of water. Get it boiling. And then once you have it boiling, just go ahead and add your noodles in here. Stir it around a little bit to make sure all the noodles will cook evenly. So just let that boil a little bit. And then we'll come here and check our stock. Yes. Nice. What I'll do next is actually add a little bit more chili because I love chili in mine. Just kind of stir everything around. And then once that's done, then you come to your noodles. Your noodles should be pretty much done. So that's pretty much the consistency that we want. And then next is just straighten out the noodles. Just really just rinse it off. Get some of that starch off. And let's let it sit and drain. Next, a little bit of sugar. A little bit more oil. So let's roll. So the key about rolling noodles, make sure you grab a good strand of noodles. Just like I said, probably about a handful. Roll the noodles in with your index finger. So you roll one finger and roll another. And then you grab your middle finger and you work them together. So you hold these noodles together with your fingers. And so it's perfectly sized and shaped like so. It really creates a beautiful shape. It's quite easy. It's all about your finger. Let's say we have a bunch of scraps. And that's the friend that you don't like. You might give that to him. No, don't do that. Everyone gets noodles, okay, guys? So we have our stock ready. Now we're about to plate. Just grab the scraps, put them on the bottom. And then, you know, grab one that you roll. See how when you roll it together, it just holds better like that? That's the reason why you want to roll. And then it's easier to just place on a bowl, right? So I just pour everything on here like so. A couple more eggs. I'm going to add a quail egg on top. Got some tuna on here. And then what I like to do is kind of drizzle some chili oil on top here. That contrast of color on the chili oil also makes it more spicy, gives it a little spice. And then, of course, we have our medley of garnish. Put along to the side like so. That looks pretty damn good. So, yeah, let's give this a try and see what it's all about. Love the spice, the richness of coconut. You got a little sour, a little sweet, even tangy from the bamboo shoot. You know, man, this mint really, really seals the deal right now. I need that extra bite. Can't beat this dish right here. You know, it's a simple dish. Anyone can do it at home. The recipe of this kapun dish is at below, so click on it. You can come visit us at Kalnoodle Shop. And thank you for having us. Ooh, that pepper got me good. My mom also told me to use my senses when I'm cooking. Your smell, your touch, your sight. Understanding time changes, temperature changes. You guide yourself when you cook.