Happy New Year (Recipe: Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps)

Happy New Year!  I hope that everyone enjoyed the Holidays and I wish you all much peace, joy, and good food in 2010!

My husband and I opted to stay in for New Year's Eve and relax a little.  I did not want to make a big dinner as my eating choices over the past few weeks were not of the healthy nor low cal nature so I thought we could both use a break.  For Christmas I received lots of cooking related items so I decided to refer to some of those for our New Year's Eve menu.

First, I would like to share the titles of a few books I received that you may be interested in looking into.

• I am a big fan of Cooks Illustrated & America's Test Kitchen so I was thrilled to receive, The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook 2001-2010.  The book has over 650 recipes from all 10 seasons of the show.  It does not just provide recipes.  There is info on recipe development to the equipment segments and of course pictures.  I love pictures!  I don't always agree with Christopher Kimball or the team in regards to their rationale on how to do things or why they pick certain things, but I do enjoy both the shows and magazines and refer to their site and magazines often.
  
• Last year I made homemade bread for the first time.  I started out with the Jim Lahey No Knead bread recipe.  I was very thrilled with the results and have since made it a few times along with trying other recipes found here or here.  I personally think that the downfall with the No Knead recipe is that the dough has to sit 16 or so hours prior to baking.  This is fine if you plan, but if you are having dinner guests over and all of a sudden you want to make bread this recipe will not work for you.  So, along came Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.  In the upcoming week I will post more about the book and my experience making the basic dough recipe. 
  
• Two baking related books that I am really excited about are A Passion for Baking and How Baking Works:  Exploring the Fundamentals of Baking Science.  The science behind cooking and baking fascinates me.  I am intrigued by why things do what they do and how they do it so given my love for baking the second book will be a great learning experience.  It is much like a text book.  It offers material to learn, questions for review and discussion, and exercises and experiments.  It will be my way to attend baking/pastry school on a budget while working full time!

Our New Year's Eve menu consisted of Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps, slices of a homemade baguette with habanero cheese, and shrimp wrapped in soy wrappers.  I found the soy wrappers at Whole Foods in the aisle that has Asian related items (soy sauce, sushi making materials etc.)  They are made by Yamamotoyama and you can read more about them here.  I wanted to use them like a spring roll wrapper, though I was not overly creative nor neat in wrapping!  I will share the Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps in this post and have an upcoming post on my first experience with the basic bread dough recipe from the Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.

Have you ever made a recipe anticipating it would taste like something and then when you took the first bite you were utterly disappointed?  This is what happened to me with the Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps.  I had set my mind that these would taste like the ones I often order at a local restaurant.  The problem, though, the ingredients were much different.  What was I thinking?  The ingredients in this recipe include shallots, fresh mint and cilantro, and a tiny amount (per my taste buds:) ) of red pepper flakes.  The ending result is just that:  light and fresh with a hint of heat vs. some pork with hoisin sauce dumped in it!  I think that if the light and fresh taste is what you are looking for this recipe is a keeper.  After I adjusted my mindset I realized that I did actually like these.  The only thing I had a hard time with was the color of the pork.  I am sort of picky about the color of my food.  I love my meat to be browned and have a caramel to deep brown color.  My end result was a light colored meat.  I seemed to have a fair amount of liquid at the end of cooking the pork.  I think next time I will reduce the amount of fish sauce to 1 1/2 Tbsp and potentially reduce the amount of chicken broth as I am not totally convinced it was needed.  Also, for my taste, they needed a little extra red pepper flakes for heat!  Lastly, I was not able to pick up on the nutty flavor the rice powder was supposed to provide which was not earth shattering as the rice powder was easy to make, but it would have been nice to taste it.

Thai Pork Lettuce Wraps

adapted from America's Test Kitchen (the recipe is on their site or in the above book I mentioned)
Serves 4 for a main dish and 6 as an appetizer


Printable Recipe

1 lb pork tenderloin, trimmed of silver skin and fat, cut into 1-inch chunks, and frozen for 20 minutes

2 1/2 Tbsp fish sauce

1 Tbsp white rice

1/4 cup low-sodium chicken broth

3 medium shallots, peeled and sliced into thin rings (about 1/2 cup)

3 Tbsp roughly chopped mint leaves

3 Tbsp roughly chopped cilantro leaves

3 Tbsp juice from 2 limes

2 tsp sugar

1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

1 head Bibb lettuce, washed and dried, leaves separated and left whole

Place pork chunks on large plate in single layer. Freeze meat until firm and starting to harden around edges but still pliable, 15 to 20 minutes.

Place half of meat in food processor and pulse until coarsely chopped, 5 to six 1-second pulses. Transfer ground meat to medium bowl and repeat with remaining chunks. Stir 1 tablespoon fish sauce into ground meat and marinate, refrigerated, 15 minutes.

Heat rice in small skillet over medium-high heat; cook, stirring constantly, until deep golden brown, about 5 minutes. Transfer to small bowl and cool 5 minutes. Grind rice with spice grinder, mini food processor, or mortar and pestle until it resembles fine meal, 10 to 30 seconds (you should have about 1 tablespoon rice powder).

 

Bring broth to simmer in 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add pork and cook, stirring frequently, until about half of pork is no longer pink, about 2 minutes. Sprinkle 1 teaspoon rice powder over pork; continue to cook, stirring constantly, until remaining pork is no longer pink, 1 to 1½ minutes longer. Transfer pork to large bowl; let cool 10 minutes.

Add remaining 1½ tablespoons fish sauce, remaining 2 teaspoons rice powder, shallots, lime juice, sugar, red pepper flakes, mint, and cilantro to pork; toss to combine. Serve with lettuce leaves.  I also served with hoisin sauce topped with chopped peanuts.