How Andy Ricker Changed the Way I Cook

Let me start by saying this: I’m sorry, Andy Ricker. I never meant to hurt you.

When I started working with Andy on his first cookbook,Pok Pok: Food and Stories from the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants of Thailand, here’s how our first conversation went.

Me: OK, so you’re going to provide home cook–friendly versions of the dishes at Pok Pok?

Andy: No.

Me: OK, but obviously you want to simplify your recipes, right?

Andy: No.

Andy Ricker stir-frying in a wok, looking very dramatic.

Photo by JJ Goode

What I didn’t quite get then is how serious Andy is about the food he cooks, and how much he respects the people who taught him to cook it. What Andy serves at his restaurants inL.A.,Brooklyn, andPortland, Oregon, I soon learned, aren’t creative riffs on Thai dishes. He serves painstaking recreations of the dishes on his personal highlight reel, accumulated over more than 20 years traveling in Thailand.

I still cook from the book frequently, continually shocked that I can actually make ducklaap(a bright, fiery sort of minced-meat salad from the Northeast of Thailand) andkhao soi(curried noodles beloved in Chiang Mai) for my friends. But I also steal the tricks embedded in his recipes to make, well, anything I cook taste better.

This is what Andy Ricker looked like after a day of recipe testing.

Photo by JJ Goode

And that's why I'm sorry, Andy. I'm sorry you have to read this, sorry that you're going to see all the ways I abuse your hard-fought food to make my quick, easy dinners taste better.

Andy, look away. The rest of you, read on.

Andy finishes a shocking number of dishes with a sprinkling of this wonder-condiment. Bits of thinly sliced, golden-brown fried garlic or shallots add a sweet, slightly bitter touch to everything from curries and noodle dishes to soups and salads. Bonus: You’re also left with the frying oil, now infused with caramelized shallot/garlic flavor and perfect for cooking and drizzling.

Here’s my recipe: Finely chop about 40 garlic cloves or very thinly slice ¼ pound of peeled shallots. Heat about ¾ inch of vegetable oil in a medium pan over medium-high heat. When you add a piece of garlic or shallot to the oil and it bubbles immediately, add the rest. Reduce the heat to medium and cook, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is light golden brown and crisp, 3 to 5 minutes (or the shallots are deep golden brown and crisp, 12 to 15 minutes). Strain the oil through a fine-mesh sieve into a heatproof container, and spread the crispy bits on paper towels to drain.

Photo by Chelsea Kyle

Almost as striking as the heaps of spiced minced buffalo and plates of frog that Andy and I ate on trips to Northern Thailand were the piles of raw herbs and vegetables that accompanied just about every meal. At first, I ignored the flora—why nibble leaves when there’s frog?—until Andy set me straight. Turns out that bites of raw green stuff amidst all that flesh are welcome, not to mention delicious. At home, I often pair a meaty Thai-ish meal with a plate of cucumber spears, cabbage wedges, long beans, and whatever Thai-friendly herbs I've picked up, like cilantro, Thai basil, and and Vietnamese mint. It’s a great way to add some vegetation to the table without cooking another dish, and the fresh, bright bites make grilled meat, sautéed shrimp, or stir-fry taste even better.

If you want your Thai food hotter, don’t reach for the hot sauce. I’m hooked onphrik naam plaa,我看过许多圣安迪勺子ir-fry. Now I use the condiment—a mixture of thinly-sliced fresh Thai chiles and Asian fish sauce—to add heat, umami, and salty funk to takeout Thai, which too often lacks those very three qualities. It’s so simple it barely deserves a recipe, but here goes: Put the chiles in a bowl and cover with fish sauce. Done.

*And definitely don’t reach for the Sriracha. The ubiquitous Rooster brand is a tasty American product made by a Vietnamese immigrant that should only be squirted on Thai food in the most desperate circumstances. There is, however, an awesome Thai chile sauce, the O.G. version from the seaside town of Sri Racha, but you’re about 500 times more likely to see a Thai person straight up bite into a fresh chile than douse food in this Sriracha.

Andy actually approves of this one! Before I met him, cooking Thai food always began with a fun but time-consuming adventure to Chinatown to stock up on fresh ingredients. Nowadays, I just open my freezer. Beside the bags of frozen peas (yum) and containers of ancient duck fat (yum?), I keep fresh Thai chiles, pandan leaves, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, turmeric root, and krachai (a spindly relative of ginger). Chiles and lime leaves I often buy fresh, then store in Ziplocs. The rest are often sold already frozen at Asian grocery stores. Not only does this make your life easier, but sometimes frozen products are actually superior to their fresh counterparts. Take galangal, for instance. The kind sold vacuum-packed from the freezer case is young and thin-skinned—just what you want for pounding pastes—while the stuff sold fresh is usually more mature and more fibrous.

Bonus: Sometimes when I have a free afternoon, I’ll pound acurry paste—this, I’ve been told, is a weird way to spend a free afternoon—then freeze it. I’ll pull it out and makeThai curry for friends. On a weeknight. Like a boss.

Double bonus: You don’t even have to defrost the ingredients! Chiles and kaffir lime leaves essentially thaw the moment you handle them and stuff like galangal and turmeric leaks water when they defrost, so better to peel and slice them straight from the freezer.

Everyone loves Thai salads, even though the form they typically take—a pile of, say, beef or squid scattered with herbs and sliced shallots—is very unsalad-like. It turns out what we call “salads” are actually members of the Thai culinary category called yam. We probably translate them as “salads,” because we are obsessed with the saucy dressing. And oh that dressing! The oil-free concoction embodies the spicy-sour-sweet-salty flavor profile—common in Central Thai food—that made us fall for the cuisine in the first place. Because Andy’s aim is to recreate dishes that already exist, his recipes for yam have highly specific ingredient lists and his dressing are calibrated for the particular constituents. But after making countless yams with him, I've come to the conclusion that you can just make one dressing, season it to your taste, and toss anything in it—from poached shrimp to roast chicken to cucumber to roasted mushrooms.

• 3 tablespoons lime juice
• 2 tablespoons Asian fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
• 2 fresh Thai chiles, thinly sliced

Combine and stir until the sugar dissolves. Season to taste. It makes enough to dress 3 to 4 cups of whatever you like.

安迪的职业生涯中最伟大的讽刺是,虽然he has devoted decades to Thai cooking, he’s perhaps best known for those @$#*ing incredible wings. The sweet-salty umami bombs are the most popular dish at Pok Pok and are 100% Vietnamese. The recipe in his cookbook is dangerously dead-on: If you’re willing to marinate the wings, deep-fry garlic, and deep-fry the wings, then you can make a replica so perfect that you might never again leave your apartment. Or you can make my lazy man’s version, which is vastly inferior but still completely amazing.