Bangkok Guac, flavored with lemongrass, shallots, Thai chiles, fish sauce and lime and garnished with makrut lime leaves and cilantro, is weirdly fabulous — especially scooped up with a shrimp chip.
A few years back, the New York Times enraged the internet by publishing recipe for guacamole that included fresh English peas.
I’ve done something much worse. I’ve compromised everyone’s favorite avocado dip by giving it a Thai aromatic treatment. And you know what? I’d do it again in a hot minute.
How would a sane person come up with such a crazy idea?
I was reading a Facebook post by Pati Jinich, in which the star of the PBS show Pati’s Mexican Table discussed the role of lime in guacamole.
Being from Mexico City, I was fully for having lime in my guacamole until I tried one with roasted Anaheim in Sonora...
Posted by Pati Jinich on Thursday, October 29, 2020
That led me, because I’ve been cooking a lot of Thai food (in which limes figure prominently), to start thinking about a few of the other flavors Thai food and Mexican food have in common. Chiles. Cilantro. And then I thought: What if you took Thai versions of those flavors, added them to other Thai flavors, and put them in a guacamole?
In Thai cooking, a large mortar and pestle is often used to grind together aromatics, just as the molcajete is used in Mexican cooking, so I’d start there.
Green Thai long chiles could stand in for serranos or jalapeños. Finely cut makrut lime leaves would add a gorgeous perfume, and makrut zest might add an enchanting underpinning. Shallots — which are important in Thai cooking, and often used raw — could replace white onion. Lime juice, cilantro and avocado would be the common thread, and hey — what about fish sauce instead of salt, to up the umami factor?
Instead of tortilla chips, we could scoop it up with shrimp chips — those light, airy, addictive, melt-on-the-tongue snacks that come in bags like potato chips.
Sliced lemongrass, minced shallot, chopped Thai green chiles, finely chopped makrut lime zest and cilantro leaves about to be ground in a molcajete — maybe for the first time anywhere!
Into the molcajete went sliced lemongrass, minced shallot, Thai green chiles, chopped makrut lime zest and cilantro leaves. I held my breath. Who had ever put such a combo in a molcajete before? Maybe no one ever?!
Grinding them to a paste, I was rewarding a gorgeous aroma — the high note of the lemongrass, the perfume of makrut lime. In went a trio of ripe avocados, a good dose of lime juice and a couple teaspoons of fish sauce.
Wowie kazowie! It was even better than I imagined — these ingredients indeed have an amazing affinity with the avocado, and the fish sauce underlined it all with a gentle soulful salty funk that added incredible dimension. The garnish: more minced shallot, cilantro leaves and — an essential flourish — julienned makrut lime leaves made it taste (and smell) even more deliciously Thai.
I love the Bangkok Guac with shrimp chips, and when you scoop up a bit of guac on one, you can hear the chip faintly sizzle and pop from the touch of the guac’s moisture. We tried them with cucumber chips, too — Persian cukes sliced diagonally into slices about 3/8 inch thick. The flavor combo with the cukes was beautiful, though the cuke chips are a bit slippery with the guac.
So, how good is this Bangkok Guac? Well, I’m not sure I’d turn myself upside down trying to find the ingredients just to make it. But if it’s not too much trouble to source them, I would absolutely highly recommend you give it a try. If you have a Thai grocery or an Asian supermarket with good supplies of Thai ingredients available, you should be able to find the makrut lime leaves and lemongrass, and sometimes you can even find lemongrass in well stocked Western supermarkets. Makrut limes for zesting is more of a challenge; they are available online (see the recipe for a great source). I think if you used regular Persian or key lime zest, you’d come close.
Meanwhile, we are working on a review of an awesome Thai cookbook, Simple Thai Food. If you wind up loving the book, and loving cooking Thai as much as we now do, you’ll want to stock up on these essential ingredients. Once you start stocking these ingredients, Bangkok Guac may sound like just the thing when you spot ripe avocados.
OK, enough talking. Here’s the recipe.
RECIPE: Bangkok Guac
Please let us know what you think — either of the recipe itself, or even of the idea.