In this edition of Street Eats chef Lucas Sin is in Bangkok, Thailand to visit a noodle stand that's been in operation for 4 decades, ordering up their legendary glass noodles with crab.
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00:03 It's a rainy day in Bangkok,
00:04 and we're here to see the master at work.
00:06 We're here to get some crab with glass noodles.
00:10 This stall has been here for 38 years,
00:12 and they've been making this stellar, well-awarded dish.
00:16 So, here is the setup.
00:18 Four burners going on at once.
00:20 These modern iterations of the clay pot,
00:22 stainless steel pots, loaded with aromatics.
00:25 And chef has a very zen-like approach to the cooking.
00:28 This is one of my favorite places to stand
00:30 because you get to watch a master at work.
00:33 I mean, he's cooking with one fork.
00:34 This is maybe the coolest thing I've ever seen.
00:36 And he's slowly watching the doneness of the glass noodles.
00:40 It's a really simple dish,
00:41 which means that every single ingredient needs to be perfect.
00:46 A lot of people have this idea of what street eats are supposed to be.
00:48 It's frenetic. It's a middle of the street. It's crazy.
00:50 It's, like, all sorts of things going on. It's chaotic.
00:52 But this is one of the most serene, clean,
00:55 and beautiful places to eat street food in Bangkok.
00:59 Look at how polished these pots are.
01:02 Like, there's no drippy, droppy anything anywhere.
01:05 Like, look at these, like, live crabs.
01:08 They're sorted.
01:09 By the way, they have a limited number of every day.
01:12 That's when you know the ingredients are good.
01:15 And they're rare.
01:16 These are what I know to be flesh crabs.
01:18 They're known for their big, juicy, sweet claws.
01:21 And because they're female,
01:23 these crabs are also juicy, filled with roe.
01:26 Come over here.
01:28 In each of these clay pots is layered aromatics.
01:33 On the bottom is the lard to keep things from sticking,
01:36 white pepper, and Sichuan peppercorn.
01:39 There's little cloves of Thai garlic,
01:41 trimmed scallion, and a little bit of cilantro,
01:44 and importantly, cilantro roots.
01:46 And when an order comes in,
01:47 a butcher will kill the crab,
01:50 get rid of all the parts that he doesn't want,
01:53 cleaves it in half one more time,
01:55 takes off the claw.
01:57 He's cracking it so that it cooks quickly,
02:00 but also that it eats quickly,
02:03 layering it precisely over the aromatics.
02:07 One entire crab per clay pot.
02:11 That's the roe, orange.
02:13 The green, that's the tamale, or crab fat.
02:15 But this is all going to cook quite consistently.
02:18 This stack here next to Chef,
02:20 that's how he knows what to make.
02:22 So the beginning of the cooking process
02:24 is all about dry heat.
02:25 As the heat comes up from the bottom,
02:27 the lard starts to render,
02:28 and the aromatics start to activate.
02:30 If it were to be wet, you wouldn't get the same aromas,
02:32 and you wouldn't get the same flavors.
02:34 That's important.
02:35 Baking in the Chinese or Asian sense of the word
02:37 means putting a lid on top of a pot
02:39 so that it cooks by convection inside.
02:41 Once that lid goes over the top of the clay pot,
02:43 the baking process begins.
02:46 Come look at this.
02:48 That's the basic seasoning for the glass noodle.
02:50 First, a heaping scoop of oyster sauce,
02:53 Thai-style oyster sauce, a little bit lighter in color.
02:55 A dash of maggi, a squirt of oil,
02:58 a little bit of white pepper, and a little bit of water.
03:01 That's when he adds glass noodles
03:03 that are soaked in a little bit of water
03:05 that he tears to the specific length
03:07 that he needs them to be.
03:08 You have to measure the amount of moisture that's going in
03:10 because too much, you dilute the flavor.
03:12 Too little, and your food burns.
03:15 Sizzle, lid.
03:17 And he's slowly watching the doneness of the glass noodles.
03:20 He's flipping it to put the less-cooked noodles on the bottom,
03:23 not only to make sure that the noodles themselves are fully cooked,
03:26 but to use it as a cover for the different parts of the seafood
03:30 to encourage them to cook at a faster rate.
03:33 The noodles are the lid, right?
03:35 They're also literally the conducting heat
03:39 up through hot liquid, through this lid,
03:41 through this noodle, on top of the crab
03:44 so that the crab itself cooks.
03:46 Also see that that liquid on the bottom
03:48 is getting thicker and thicker and thicker.
03:50 That's good for a couple of reasons.
03:52 For one, when it's thicker, it means that water is evaporating.
03:54 The stuff that is left behind
03:56 is therefore more condensed in flavor and more flavorful.
04:00 Second, as it's getting thicker and thicker,
04:02 it's going to start coating the noodles
04:04 and coating that seafood.
04:06 What's causing it to coat is not an addition of cornstarch
04:09 or any, like, slurry,
04:11 but rather the things that are coming off the crab
04:14 and the seafood itself.
04:16 Look at those scallions.
04:18 It's only the center of the scallion.
04:20 Young scallions at that.
04:22 Scallions are a very Thai-Chinese way of seasoning seafood.
04:27 Chef's got an internal clock.
04:29 He knows which pot went on first.
04:31 He knows which pot to take off first.
04:33 He knows when to add the noodles.
04:35 He has a sixth sense for when to add the scallions.
04:38 The scallions will begin to wilt.
04:40 They'll become bright green,
04:42 and at that point, the noodles should be fully translucent,
04:45 and it should be done.
04:46 So pretty.
04:48 When people think about street food in Bangkok,
04:52 people think about chaos.
04:53 They think about, like, these streets bustling,
04:56 all that energy, all these things happening at once.
04:58 But this place is not like that at all.
05:01 Here at Somsak, the cleanliness and the meticulousness of that chef
05:05 seems to permeate as energy throughout the street.
05:09 It's just you and the food.
05:11 Oh, gorgeous.
05:16 Crab has really given a lot of itself to this broth.
05:22 They give you two forks because all the noodles are here,
05:25 translucent and brown all together.
05:28 And to divide them up,
05:30 you're going to have to split them up like this.
05:34 There you go.
05:36 And then the broth is going to be the broth.
05:39 So you're going to have to mix it up.
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08:23 It always comes down to culinary technique.
08:25 Chef here is a legend for a good reason.
08:27 The dish itself is so simple.
08:29 But when the ingredients are this good,
08:31 and when the chef is this thoughtful about the cooking,
08:33 you can't go wrong.
08:35 By the way, you can get takeout here
08:39 in classic Thai fashion,
08:41 in heat-resistant plastic bags.
08:43 You can get the entire dish, packaged to go,
08:45 delivered to you in a buffet.