Our two-day masterclass with Chef Ying at Somrom Space on Samui started inauspiciously, to say the least. Having taken a taxi from our hotel, we found ourselves — driver included — stumped on where exactly the cooking space was located. Having turned down a dirt road, we were faced with a sharply steep slope that our intrepid driver, replete with Burmese-style sunscreen and enormous sun visor, had serious reservations about driving down, but did so anyway.
What turned into a slight patter of rain turned into an all-out downpour. Trapped on a muddy dirt road at the bottom of a hill, our little white Honda became inundated with mud. Before long, its wheels were stuck in like Moo Deng in her mother’s food bowl. By the time we had finally reached Ying on the phone, we were trying to push our car backwards out of a big, juicy hole as the wheels spattered mud onto our pants.
Needless to say, we extricated ourselves, just as I was getting nightmare visions of having to buy this woman a new Honda. We even found our way to Ying, whose place was just beyond the muddy road, right on the main road. We were greeted by a platterful of ingredients that we would be using that day, some lovely pandan-scented water, and the baleful glares of three improbably fluffy cats. It ended up being a great start to two days and seven new (to us) dishes.
Now, those of you who know me, know that I’m not really much of a cook. That is because I am incredibly lazy. I like to throw things into the oven as my main method of providing food for a crowd. Sometimes I will make pasta.
Thai food is not the kind of cuisine meant for that kind of cook. When done correctly (as Ying does), it’s painstaking, laborious, and detailed. You don’t just throw a bunch of torn-up makrut lime leaves into a stewing pot, willy-nilly; you select the best ones (not too old and green, and not too young and yellow), remove their spines, and then throw them willy-nilly into your soup. You don’t just dump coconut milk and curry paste together; you break your coconut cream, making sure it looks like a white doily before adding your paste (needless to say, this paste is hand-pounded) to mix carefully before adding the thinner coconut milk later on. Clams are opened and their meat pried out for use, but not the raggedy ones that are torn at the edges. Ying is as exacting as any 3-Michelin-starred chef.
We started with a yum of local Samuian seaweed (rai kor), crunchy and salty like samphire. This would be blanched and added to slices of fresh fish cured with lime juice, then mixed with quality shrimp paste and not one, but two local green leaves (tree basil and sea paracress (bai sab suea)), both of which resemble each other and almost every other leaf hanging from a tree in Thailand (I am not a tree person). The leaves added a nice bitter counterpoint to the deep, earthy flavors of the seaweed, fish and shrimp paste. Needless to say, we thought it was a hit, and I even mustered up enough courage to try a hand at my own (too much lime juice).
We then made a Southern Thai-Muslim-style chili dip (nam chup) made of flaked fresh coconut toasted until it turns a deep, later-stage-Donald-Trump-at-a-rally dark chestnut (greesae). Greesae is an ingredient that we encountered before with Mon on Koh Lanta where it was used to add a subtly sweet, nutty flavor to curries. The truth is that you can find this in many dishes throughout the South, where it usually ends up as a supporting player to other ingredients, but rarely takes center stage.
The greesae is mixed with dried chilies, garlic, shallots and more shrimp paste, deep-fried in oil before they are pounded (a Malay technique). The result in salty, fatty, sour and slightly sweet-and-spicy, a combo that Ying says is perfectly offset by fresh produce like guava, sator and Thai eggplants as well as something bold and meaty like prawns grilled with turmeric, garlic and peppercorns.
We finished with a Southern Thai-Muslim curry called “gang dtomae“, which boasts many different variations throughout the South. Even so, it’s a disappearing dish, pushed aside in favor of more “glamorous” dishes like massaman and penang. This is a mistake, because this dish — particularly Ying’s version — is a revelation for me personally. Not only did I get over my fear of cracking coconut cream (look, everyone has to start somewhere) but I also got to stuff my face with the result: unctuous and rich like butter chicken but so much better, festooned with a fat tranche of giant trevally, okra, and curry leaves from Ying’s garden. I am ashamed to say I do not have a good photo of this dish, because I ate it all, coupled with rice steamed over a charcoal brazier in an earthenware pot as the flames were fanned by hand (because of course).
The next day, we did not get lost, and there weren’t even any sudden downpours. We got to work washing our hoy klang (blood cockles) with the leftover dried remnants of yesterday’s rice, putting new meaning into the phrase “leaving nothing to waste”. From the coconut trees in the yard Ying cut some fronds and we fashioned skewers out of the frond’s spines. Then we made a marinade out of coriander seeds, dried red chilies, ginger, shallots, garlic, salt and brandy (it was Thai Regency brand and no, I didn’t drink from the bottle) before lightly blanching the cockles, threading them on the skewers and coating them in the sauce. After marinating for a couple of hours, they were grilled in the yard as Thumee the cat watched nearby, jealously.
We then did a local variation on the soup “tom som” using toddy palm vinegar and honey from Songkhla province. Although toddy palm is an ingredient very much associated with Petchburi, it can be found throughout the southern half of the kingdom, likely brought via migrating elephants who pooped half-digested toddy palms everywhere they went, fertilizing the land as they traveled.
I’ve always thought of “tom som” as a sweeter version of “tom yum“, but Ying says it’s closer to “tom kloang”, a positively ancient soup flavored with tamarind juice and leaves that some argue predates tom yum. Here, it features the very Chinese addition of vinegar alongside tamarind, as well as honey instead of palm sugar. There’s also plenty of turmeric (this is the South, after all), which turns the broth and fish a lovely golden color.
We then moved onto a dish that I’d been eyeing since the beginning of this year, the reason why I contacted Ying in the first place. It’s called “pad lorgor” (“lorgor” is the Southern Thai word for papaya) and I can’t really explain exactly what made me so eager to learn how to make it (so that I could eat it). It features half-ripe papaya, glass noodles (“sen nohm“) and pork belly; the mix seemed so incongruous when I first saw it (kind of like cleaning out the refrigerator) that I had to taste all of those things together.
All of which is to say, it is utterly delicious. There are also wood ear mushrooms and garlic, palm sugar, dark soy sauce, fish sauce and ground black pepper, and it’s typically served at big events like funerals or house warmings alongside water buffalo curry (which we did not learn how to do).
Finally, we ended our class with another soup that Ying learned only last year while shopping for ingredients at her local market, where many of the vendors are Thai-Muslim. They taught her their version of “tom yum”, made with dried chilies, shallots and garlic that are deep-fried in coconut oil before they are pounded into a paste. The soup also includes greesae and holy basil, plus what you’d expect from tom yum (lemongrass, galangal, makrut lime leaves, chilies, lime juice, fish sauce). The featured protein was a super-fresh barracuda that Ying had found in the market only that morning. The result knocked our socks off in more ways than one: big on dried chilies and holy basil, sour and salty, with a spicy kick. I called it “assertive”, but Ying preferred “fiery” because “assertive” sounded like Jane Fonda playing a put-upon secretary in the movie “9 to 5”.
All in all, we had a really great time at Somrom Space, if only because our efforts immediately yielded the chance to try all of these incredible dishes. If you are interested (and I mean really interested) in Southern Thai food, I’d suggest you find your way to Samui as well.
