Cape Town - Coconut cream is to cow’s milk cream what a poet is to a lecturer or a richly textured voice is to the bland mutterings of one who has no interest in communicating and engaging, only being heard and obeyed.
Coconut cream is the thinking person’s cream. It lingers on the palate yet never becomes cloying, unlike the bovine equivalent which, only seconds after you savour it, seems to oveflow with fattiness. You can feel the centimetres being added to your girth as you swallow.
I always think that if something is frequently eaten in Asian countries, it’s not likely to be overly fattening. Yet coconut cream is a fabulous ingredient and has a richness to it without it having conventional cream’s cloying aspect. Like cow’s milk cream, it is a great carrier for ingredients and flavour, yet coconut cream has its own flavour as well, so it is both carrier and flavourant.
The better chefs recommend using coconut cream rather than coconut milk as it has a great density, whereas coconut milk is weak and watery. There’s no point in it. The cream, however, can be heated to a simmer and will reduce and thicken, so that you end up with a delectable sauce that can be flavoured with anything from garlic and ginger to herbs, exotic spices and sweet things like honey or ponzu, a sweetly citrusy Japanese sauce sometimes mixed with soy sauce.
If you make a stir-fried dish of meat and vegetables in a wok, whether beef, chicken or pork, you can elevate the end result to another level if you remove the cooked ingredients and add a can of coconut cream to the wok, stirring and simmering until it’s become a thickened sauce flavoured with what’s just been cooked in the wok.
I did this the other day after having bought some eryngii mushrooms, fresh ginger, sweet pimento peppers, garlic, mint and coriander, with wok cooking in mind. But I wanted another essential element so headed off to the more exotic end of the supermarket and popped a can of coconut cream in the trolley.
Before we start, Daisy, eryngii mushrooms are also known as trumpets, French horns or king oysters. No, they’re not actual oysters, Daisy. They’re the long ones with a trim, neat cap at one end, right? Pimento peppers are those narrow, carrot-shaped ones which look like bell peppers but for their shape, and which are sweeter. Yes, yes, okay, just use bell peppers then. Ginger? Ginger is that bulbous stuff you find near the garlic at Pick n Pay – you know, near the onions? Thai fish sauce is… Daisy? Helloooo? Daisy? Okay, we seem to have lost Daisy.
Pan-Asian coconut chicken with peppers and mushrooms
For 4 servings:
2 fat cloves garlic, sliced into fine flakes
A thumb of ginger, peeled and sliced like the garlic
2 or 3 eryngii mushrooms, cut into slim strips lengthways
3 spring onions, sliced on the diagonal
3 sweet pimento peppers (one green, one red and one orange or yellow), in fine strips
2 red chillies, sliced thinly, with their seeds
Peanut oil
4 to 6 filleted chicken breasts, cut into thin strips
1 regular tin coconut cream (not milk)
2 tbs Thai fish sauce
1 or 2 tbs dark soy sauce
Handful of fresh coriander leaves, finely chopped
Handful of fresh mint leaves, broken into small pieces
This is a wok dish which is finished with coconut cream soon before serving with egg noodles. First prepare all the veg. Peel and finely slice the garlic and ginger. You want trim slivers of the eryngii, diagonal pieces of the spring onions, super-thin strips of peppers about 3cm long, and little rounds of chilli.
Pour a little cooking oil (peanut, sunflower or other, but not olive) into a wok and then heat the wok. You want a medium heat, not so hot that the food will burn. Add all the prepped veg and stir-fry for a couple of minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon, then remove to a bowl
Add more oil, heat, stir-fry the chicken strips in batches, and set aside. The next trick is to steal a little of the French cooking culture by adding the tin of coconut cream and stirring the bottom of the wok to get all of the flavour from what has just been cooked in it. Add a little fish sauce and soy sauce, stir, reduce heat and simmer for about five minutes to develop the flavours.
Follow packet instructions for Chinese egg noodles or other Asian noodles of your choice, and drain in a colander.
Add the cooked veg to the coconut sauce in the wok. Stir the coriander and mint into the sauce, toss with the drained noodles and serve.
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