Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 10: Sakhoo!

It's been a hard few weeks for the project. Well in fact, for two weeks I didn't even make an attempt to make noodles - noodle apathy! - and furthermore I suddenly got so busy I started to think about giving the whole thing up. I've had fun trying these different noodles, but it didn't seem so pressing anymore to keep going. Then this Saturday worked its habitual cooking magic and suddenly I was trying what's probably the weirdest one so far for the Western palate - sakhoo or Northeast Thai/Issaan-style tapioca dumplings.

Making the dough is very simple and yet was a little nervewracking. All you need to do is boil water, pour a packet of tapioca pearls into a bowl, and stir the water in bit by bit. That's it! But then the recipe (from Alford & Duguid's Hot Sour Salty Sweet) calls for "kneading to a smooth paste". Well. I wasn't sure if the pearls were supposed to dissolve or what, but all that happened was that I turned them out onto the counter and had a therapeutic hand massage pressing down on the pearls, while the liquid gradually thickened and got stickier - not so much of the smooth or the pasty. Eventually I gave up and returned as much as I could to the bowl, letting it rest for the prescribed hour. I figured if it proved impossible to work with I could do something else with the filling.

The filling. The recipe is for sakhoo sai moo, but of course my version would have to be mai moo since I don't eat pork. So, sakhoo sai phak. There were lots of things starting to look a bit sad in the vegetable drawer, so I ended up with a large pot of beet greens, red cabbage, carrot, oyster mushroom, tofu (pressed this time!), and flavoured with onion, garlic, ginger, green onion, fresh chile, rice vinegar and fish sauce. I wasn't entirely happy with the result but it wasn't bad either.

Moment of truth! I returned to the bowl of dough and to my surprise it was a cohesive entity, albeit a frail-ly bonded one of separate little white balls. Still, I was able to turn it out onto an oiled surface, divide it in two, roll it out to a tube and slice it up into 32 rounds. From there, the assembly: each slice is patted out to a disk between oiled palms, then stuffed with a small teaspoon of cooled filling and sealed into a little round ball.

It's a good thing that the recipe urges patience, saying that little cracks will seal up in the pot, because my dough was cracking and falling apart all over the place. I only managed a few dumplings that were fully sealed with no filling on the outside, but somehow each dumpling managed to stick to itself as a little unit.

I lined a steamer tray with cabbage leaves and put the first 8 dumplings into a pot, and hoped for the best. And, miraculously, it all worked! In about 15 minutes, the dumplings turned translucent and though some did fall apart a bit, I was able to pry them all off the cabbage leaves and cook the remaining three batches.

The result was one of the weirdest things I've cooked in some ways, and it was also really yummy. The tapioca was a dense chewy outer layer that set off the strongly flavoured filling very well. Though I didn't actually serve them in any formal sense, just brought one upstairs to be sampled and otherwise ate at the counter while cooking and cleaning up, I did eat them South-East Asian style in method at least. I got some ginger mint from the garden, wrapped each dumpling in a lettuce leaf and sprinkled it with the mint and some nam pla prik, fish sauce with chile. Oh man. I'm a little homesick for South-East Asia right now.

Anyhow, weird and wriggly they may be, but I feel revitalised by sakhoo, and whether I catch up on the three weeks I'm behind on, or just sally on, the project isn't dead yet.