Thapthim krop
Diced water chestnut coated in tapioca flour and boiled, so each piece sets in a slippery shell.
Vegan.
Ingredients
- 300 g water chestnuts, in 1 cm dice
- 2 tablespoons red food colouring or beetroot juice
- 200 g tapioca flour
- 400 ml coconut milk
- 150 g caster sugar
- 200 ml water
- 0.5 teaspoon salt
- 2 pandan leaves
- crushed ice, to serve
Method
- THE SHELL IS TAPIOCA FLOUR AND IT MUST GO ON DRY. Dice the water chestnuts, colour them, then toss them in dry flour in a sieve and shake the excess off. Wet flour makes a paste that slides off in the water; a dry dusting hydrates into a clear slippery coat on contact.
- The crunch inside the shell is the whole dish. Water chestnuts stay crisp through boiling in a way almost nothing else does -- there is no substitute that behaves like this.
- Soak the dice in the colouring 15 minutes, then DRAIN AND PAT THEM DRY before the flour goes anywhere near them.
- Toss in the flour, shake hard in a sieve, and keep them separate -- they stick to each other the moment they touch.
- Drop them into plenty of fast-boiling water, a handful at a time. They sink, then rise.
- Give them 2 minutes after they float, no more. The coat should be clear with a red core showing through; overcooked, the coat goes thick and gluey.
- STRAIGHT INTO ICED WATER as they come out. That stops the cooking and sets the shell slippery rather than sticky, and skipping it fuses the lot into a single lump.
- Syrup: coconut milk, water, sugar, salt and pandan warmed until the sugar dissolves. Do not boil it. Cool, then chill it hard.
- Drain the rubies well and keep them in cold water until serving.
- Assemble in the glass: rubies, crushed ice, cold coconut syrup over. Not before -- the ice is part of it and this cannot be made ahead.
Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.
Filed under Thailand · All recipes