Mango Chicken: "Simply Thai Cooking" by Wandee Young and Byron Ayanoglu

I have two recipes for mango chicken. This is not my favourite, but it let me work on the insane task of chopping vegetables and meat into properly-sized pieces. This stands in opposition to my slice-and-dice method that usually wins out for meals that are cooked in a wok. It's from a new cookbook (new to me) that I spent hours researching on the internet for a gift. When I buy a cookbook for someone else, it must be the best. Okay, when I buy a cookbook in general I want it to be the best. In this case, the best Thai. Is it? It's certainly not bad.

Simply Thai Cooking by Wandee Young & Byron Ayanoglu

Criteria:
1. Authenticity of recipes
2. Availability of ingredients
3. Facility of Instructions

There's no point getting a Thai cookbook where all the recipes are easy to make but you never once are supposed to use tamarind paste or fish sauce. Though some Thai cooks put ketchup in their pad thai, I was looking for the less-sweet rendition of the recipe. Success! I'm not a huge fan of the 1/4 cup of oil that Young calls for in her version, even if she does justify it as necessary to keep the noodles from sticking together. Young is actually the owner of Toronto-based Thai restaurants Young Thailand, and owned Toronto's first Thai restaurant in 1980. She scraped and saved and now runs multiple eateries in the downtown area. The cookbook's recipes are 'adjusted' to North American sensibilities by Young and her co-author to minimize oil, salt and heat, but the rest is just as it should be. An added plus of the cookbook is that all the recipes take under an hour (North American sensibility again? Or traditional Thai speed cooking?), including chopping time (as long as you're good at straining soaked tamarind) and they're generally very healthy, even if they're not low in fat. My personal favourite Thai cookbook will always be Hot Sour Salty Sweet, by the same authors of my Chinese cookbook Beyond the Great Wall, but it's much less accessible for the average cook. It's also very heavy, very expensive, but very beautiful. If I'd had fresh chiles instead of dried chiles I would have tried Young's "Young Thailand Chile Sauce", but Guizhou won out. Fortunately, these things come bottled for those who wish to purchase instead of cough up capsaicin (chile pepper heat) for an hour.

600g chicken breast
2 mangos, slightly under-ripe
2 tbsp oil
2 cloves garlic, chopped
8 tbsp water
4 tbsp soy sauce
2 tsp sugar
1 tbsp chile paste (REALLY depends on the heat of your chile paste. You may need anywhere from 1 tsp-4 tbsp)
4 tbsp lime juice
1 red pepper, cut into 1/4-inch strips
120g roasted unsalted cashews, optional
Fresh coriander, for garnish

The chopping was the only tricky thing about this recipe. Like I do for any wok (or Indian) recipe, I got all the ingredients chopped and ready to go before I turned on the heat for the frying pan. With my over-abundance of time, I decided to actually chop the chicken properly so it would fry evenly. The instructions for the chicken are clear:

"Strips that are 1/4 inch thick, 2 inches long and 1 inch wide"

Made sense, but chicken breasts do not come in rectangles, and the recipe said nothing about pounding the chicken to the correct thickness or trimming edges. So some of my chicken pieces were beautiful squares with the proper thickness, some were beautiful squares with beer bellies, and some were fit but a bit drunk (falling/leaning to one side...). Young did recommend freezing the chicken for 15 minutes because that would make it easier to slice, but my over-abundance of time made me feel like I could make a go of it without the freezing.

Then the mango. 1/4 inch thick, long strips. How long? Strips which way? How do you get the pit out and the skin removed perfectly before you slice it? Or do you slice it in the skin? What I decided to do was slice the mango into three pieces lengthwise (the middle held the pit, so I was really just removing the sides). Then cut slices 1/4 inch apart through the side pieces' flesh (again, lengthwise) to the skin, push the flesh out of the skin (turn the mango piece from concave to convex) and slice the strips off with a knife. That worked okay for the side pieces, but for the rest of the mango it turned into a massacre. All you can do is try to make strips instead of slivers or mango mush. There's no way to get all your strips the same, and I'm sure Young would have explained that if she'd had enough room on the recipe page. Not wanting to produce mango mush is why the recipe called for slightly under-ripe mangos. If you slice a fully ripe mango you'll end up with a smoothie instead of a stir-fry. Delicious, but probably not dinner. The under-ripe ones also are a bit more tangy, whereas ripe, sweet ones break down into the dish, losing their pungency.

I got the water ready and placed all the other ingredients next to the stove. Then I heated the vegetable oil on high until it almost started to smoke. The recipe originally called for 1/2 cup of oil! That's ridiculous. There are no noodles that need to remain separate, and 30 seconds after adding the garlic to the oil (the first ingredient) you add 1/2 cup of water, so it's not like you need the oil to prevent something from burning. It's not a salad dressing, so you're not really diluting the vinegars. Vegetable oil won't add more flavour than water, and it has to be vegetable oil because it's being heated as such a high heat (well, it doesn't have to be, but it can't be olive oil or other oils that burn. So nothing flavourful). So I cut back the oil substantially. No one complained, including the oil. The only thing to keep in mind is that the garlic is basically supposed to deep fry in the oil, so when you add the garlic you can get all the oil to one side of the pan and cook the garlic in it, trying to replicate the effect of having all the called-for oil in the pan.

When I added the water and chicken to the sauté-ing garlic, I didn't quite know what Young meant by "until the chicken is springy". Maybe a spring chicken?...Not exactly the same thing, I guess. Fortunately, she said "about 2 minutes", so I went with that, instead of making energy and lifestyle judgments for my chicken slices.

Then in went the soy sauce (I'd normally use tamari to get the preservatives and wheat out of the dish, but regular soy or reduced-sodium soy are fine) and sugar for 1 minute. Then the chili paste and lime juice for 1 minute more (I had made my Guizhou Chile Paste again using Thai Birds Eye chiles. More on that later, but suffice it to say that I shouldn't have added as much as I did - even 1 tsp).

Then the mango pieces and red pepper for one more minute, followed by the cashews for a final minute. Grand total cooking time of 6 minutes, 30 seconds! 7 minutes if it takes you time to actually pour things, which, of course, it does. This is why it's so important to have your ingredients ready. If you're spending time measuring things while your garlic cooks for an extra minute, it's going to over-brown, or burn if you reduced the oil content. The lime juice will lose its flavour and the red peppers will be soft, instead of still a little crunchy. If your mangos were not already mush, they will be by now. You could also turn down the heat after adding the chicken, to make everything cook more slowly, but then it's not a traditional Thai way of cooking. The goal is to cook everything as little as possible, not to stew it.

To serve the chicken put a heap of rice (steamed or boiled, thai, jasmine, sticky, basmati, whatever you want) on a plate and a scoop of the stir-fry to the side topped with fresh coriander leaves.