Just Desserts

Lately my Thai cooking skills have taken a turn towards the sweeter side. Bay has recently taught me how to make two Thai deserts, and I’m going to pass a bit of my recently acquired knowledge on to you. Too bad you can’t taste over the internet because both were amazing. If you want to try to make them yourself or are more curious about exactly how they were made, I've included the recipes below.

The first is bau loy, tiny balls made of sticky rice flour, colored with veggies, and served in coconut cream. It’s extremely rich and probably very unhealthy for you, but that’s ok because it’s hard to eat more than a little. Here are some pictures from our cooking session.

We used four vegetables to color our bau loy: taro root (silver), carrots (orange), pumpkin (yellow), and pandam leaves (green). This is me using a mortar and pestle to make sure that all the little bits of pumpkin are pounded to a pulp.

The four colors of dough before we form them into tiny balls.

The tiny balls before they are boiled (this takes forever!)

After boiling

Added to the coconut milk

And the final product!

The second dessert, Tab Tim Grob, Bay made for me a few weeks ago. It is actually small cubes of water chestnuts soaked in sugar syrup and then served in coconut milk on ice. It’s less heavy than the bua loy, but still quite rich. I was not present for the entire preparation of this one, so there are only two pictures.

The first is after the pieces have been boiled and are cooling off in the cold water.

The second is the finished product.

Here are the recipes translated by Bay. Of course when we made them there weren’t measurements for the different ingredients. As Bay put it Thai cooking is more experiment than measurement, but she found measurements for me since experimenting is not my forte.

Bau Loy

1. Coconut milk 2 cups

2. Sugar ½ cup

3. Salt ¼ teaspoon

4. Glutinous flour ½ cup

5. Boiled veggies 1/3 cup

6. Warm water ¼ cup

1. Boil veggies until soft and blend.
2. Mix glutinous flour with blended veggies and water.
3. Make small balls.
4. Heat a saucepan of water to a rolling boil.
5. Put the balls in the water.
6. Take the balls out of the water when they come up to the surface.
7. Boil half of coconut milk with sugar and salt.
8. Put the cooked balls into the pot.
9. Before serving, add the rest of coconut milk to the bau loy.

Tab Tim Grob

1. Water chestnuts (cut in small cubes) 1 cup

2. Tapioca flour ½ cup

3. Sugar 150 grams

4. Water ¾ cup

5. Coconut milk ¾ cup

6. Syrup (for color) ½ cup

1. Soak water chestnuts in syrup for at least 10 minutes.
2. Coat the water chestnuts with tapioca flour (Tab Tim).
3. Heat water to a rolling boil.
4. Put Tab Tim into the pot.
5. Get Tab Tim out of water when they come up on the surface and put them in cold water immediately.
6. Boil water with sugar to make syrup. If you have Bai Toey (pandam leaves), you can put it in to improve the aroma.
7. Serve Tab Tim with syrup, coconut milk, and ice.