Looking to level up your Thai salads and desserts? Longrain creator Martin Boetz reckons you need this simple utensil.
Martin Boetz reckons Thai cooking is getting better in Australia. Or more sophisticated, at least.
“There are better restaurants around using proper ingredients,” Boetz says. “Even your local Thai restaurant is putting Thai basil in the curries, rather than nothing, like they used to.”
Boetz should know. He’s partly responsible, given his creation of Longrain in Sydney in 1999. It was such a hit it inspired a second restaurant in Melbourne (which is still a going concern, now under the stewardship of Scott Pickett) and went on to influence a raft of others, from Chin Chin in Melbourne to EP & LP in Los Angeles and Longtime (now Same Same) in Brisbane.
Often, it was Boetz’s former Longrain lieutenants heading up the kitchens in these venues, such as Louis Tikaram at EP & LP or Ben Bertei at Longtime.
And the effect has trickled down over time to smaller, more local venues, and now the home kitchen.
Plus, people are travelling to Thailand more.
“They have that deeper knowledge of Thai food,” says Boetz, who now owns Short Grain in Brisbane.
There are plenty of tools and techniques that can help elevate your Thai cooking, Boetz reckons, from learning to use a wok correctly, to cooking out your store-bought pastes with coconut oil, to mastering the balancing of your curries with the addition of acid or salt.
Still, there’s one small utensil that can be bought for as little as $5 that he reckons will make a big difference to your Thai cooking at home: the humble coconut scraper.
Before you ask, no, not a coconut shredder, which you may have seen cooks in Thailand use to shred fresh coconut to make coconut milk or cream. This is a smaller, simpler and cheaper handheld device used to scrape flesh from the inside of the coconut after it’s been split in two.
Boetz likes to use his to elevate his Thai salads and desserts.
“I have a whole stack of them in the cupboard because if you use them every day, they don’t tend to last long,” Boetz says. “But it’s something that it pays to be gentle with. If you get stuck into it too hard, it ends up being a real thick piece.
“It’s just a gentle scrape, but it’s easy for people to get the hang of.”
Boetz demonstrates on a fresh coconut and the result is thin white wafers that resemble a crinkle cut potato chip. To eat, it has more flavour and a more tender texture than store-bought dried coconut.
“You can take this and roast it and then use it on cakes,” Boetz says. “Because it’s pretty. It has that lovely curl to it.”
Its more immediate use, though, is as a fresh addition to Thai-style salads. Boetz likes to pound bird’s eye chillies (“scuds” in Thai cooking) and garlic and put them on a simmer with some coconut cream, fish sauce and a dash of white sugar.
He’ll then add some tuna, lightly poaching it, before taking it out, breaking it into pieces, and throwing it together with Thai basil, peanuts and the freshly scraped coconut. The poaching liquid is then used as a dressing, Boetz finishing the dish with a squeeze of fresh lime.
“It’s just a really simple dish with lots of flavour,” Boetz says, “and the coconut adds a lovely texture to that salad.”
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Matt Shea is Food and Culture Editor at Brisbane Times. He is a former editor and editor-at-large at Broadsheet Brisbane, and has written for Escape, Qantas Magazine, the Guardian, Jetstar Magazine and SilverKris, among many others.
