I often whine about how I go to restaurants with the promise of spicy foods, and end up disappointed because I didn't even break a glisten. Korean food is spicy, but I always hear stories about Thai and Indian foods being hot enough to put hair on my chest. I've given up on Thai, mostly because I think restaurants in the LA area are too scared to really give me the fire, but I still had hope for Indian food.
And thank goodness I did, because I finally found something that got me a little hot. At Bombay Cafe, the lamb frankie made me glisten. The frankie is an Indian street-type food made of a thin bread similar to a tortilla that is coated with egg and fried. The tortilla is filled with meat and/or vegetables, then rolled like a burrito.
I tried the lamb frankie at Bombay Cafe, which had nothing but enormous chunks of lamb meat straight out of Hades. Granted, I wasn't reaching for the fire extinguisher, but it was still spicy enough that on a breezy winter day in LA, I had to lightly dab my forehead. I felt awesome.
The strange thing is, the heat was very different from the type of heat I get from Korean food. The lamb meat in the frankie wasn't so much a burn on my tongue that I feel from things like red pepper and jalapeno. No, this heat was an overall heat that I felt after I swallowed my bite of the frankie. Like I said, it was awesome.
3-07-2006 @1:45PM Melissa said... Someone pls. send me the recipe for Frankie. As a teen, I used to have this in Bombay, went to Bombay recently, but didn't have the time, so.... if anyone has the recipe, please forward it to me.
Thanks
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3-07-2006 @1:46PM Melissa said... Someone pls. send me the recipe for Frankie. As a teen, I used to have this in Bombay, went to Bombay recently, but didn't have the time, so.... if anyone has the recipe, please forward it to me.
Thanks
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1-27-2006 @11:08PM Ed Fisher said... Sarah,
Are you going to thai restaurants in thai town or elsewhere in LA? If you haven't, check out Erik M's thai-town-related posts at lthforum.com. He's got tons of specific dishes at various restaurants. And I'm sure if you PM'd him, he'd give you tips on getting thai heat.
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1-27-2006 @11:41PM Devin Lussier said... L.A.'s version of "spicy" Thai food (at least outside of Thai-town) ended up biting me in the behind when I finally went on an Asian tour last summer. In the traditional restaraunt outside our hotel in Bangkok I decided to go with a curry that wasn't marked specifically on the menu as spicy (I believe it fell under the medium category). Personally, I think we should be less worried about North Korea with nukes and more worried about the items on the menu marked spicy.
I swear I've never eaten such a 9-alarm blow-your-head-clean-off dish in my life. It was so hot that I couldn't even finish it. I thought I was going to explode. I wish I had taken a picture to share as it was a really pleasant looking and very well camouflaged dish as to look at it you would think it were as mild as Sunday school.
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1-28-2006 @1:36PM Pat Perez said... The link to the restaurant's web site has a typo. The link should be http://www.bombaycafe-la.com/index2.html
Boy, that food pr0n photo looks good. I've got to try that place next time I escape the valley.
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1-28-2006 @3:58PM alan yamada said... If what you're looking for is just spicy-hot, how about Hell Ramen? As far as I can tell, Hell Ramen is one of those weird Japanese things that's just about suffering. The Hell Ramen I've had burned my lips and drenched me with sweat: I don't even remember what it tasted like. Not a first date meal.
I am not familiar with LA (I think that's where you are), but here is an example in Sacramento http://www.themenupage.com/newedokko/menu.html. They call it 'Challenge Ramen,' but I'm pretty sure it's the some sort of self-abuse. (Can't vouch for the New Edokko, but I plan on going there soon.)
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1-28-2006 @4:03PM alan yamada said... Sorry about the botched comment. I punctuated the URL. Here it is again:
http://www.themenupage.com/newedokko/menu.html
Oh yeah, it's the same sort of self-abuse (not some).
alan
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1-28-2006 @6:53PM Bruce Dearborn Walker said... I'm not all that familiar with Korean food, but all I see in the Korean section of the grocery store are those ubiquitous little red peppers.
Mexican and south Asian foods that I am familiar with (Indonesian, primarily, but some Punjabi and Gujarati)
use several types of chili in the same recipe.
Different chilis have different flavors. A complicated Mexican dish might use Poblano for a deep taste, and add a bit of bitter chocolate and pumpkin seed or peanut butter to help bring that out; a hotter but lighter tasting Chile Negro with ground raisins, a bright jalapeno or ripe red serrano with perhaps grated carrots, and a fruity, hot habanero with some raw sugar or orange juice. I might make a non-traditional mole sauce with all of those ingredients.
There are also the aromatic spices that go with these chilis: cumin, cinnomon, cloves, aniseseed, ginger, galangal,coriander seed, coriander leaves (cilantro),
dill seed, cardomom--any of these might go into a dish depending on what country you are in.
I use what is available and don't worry too much about "authenticity" most of the time, although it's fun sometimes to follow a complicated Diana Kennedy or Rick Bayless recipe just to see what I end up with. My parents live in Mexico so I can get a special order care package every once in a while, and there are now bodegas run by Mexican nationals locally that have a lot of Mexican specialties.
I think the range of aromatics and larger variety of chilis are what make the heat difference between Korean and South Asian food. I live close enough to NYC that I can go down and get Southeast Asian and Chinese specialties, plus there are a couple of small Indian grocery stores and a well stocked Chinese grocery in downtown New Haven that has most of what anyone would need to make pretty authentic South Asian or Chinese food. As opposed to Chinese-American restaurant food, but thats a different article.
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