MeXO Sauce - XO Sauce with Chipotle, Ancho and Guajillo Chillies

  

One of my earliest posts on the Jarhead blog was about XO sauce, the decadent condiment from Hong Kong, which can give a regular stir fry a really good hit of umami.  I made some really tasty dishes from my first batch of XO – chicken and okra stir fry with XO sauce, pippies with XO sauce, and fried eggs with XO sauce on rice.  All really simple, but supremely delicious. 

Last time I used a recipe from chef Danny Bowien, but this time I decided to make a few changes and put my own spin on it.  I still had a lot of Mexican dried chillies lying around. I originally used them for my Chipotle Ketchup recipe, but I figured that the complex flavours of the ancho chilli, the spicy kick of the guajillo chilli, and the smokiness of the chipotle chilli, would all enhance an XO sauce. The dried chillies really added a layer of complexity to the flavour, but next time I would add in some extra chillies (fresh or dried) for stronger chilli hit. 

Dried scallops and shrimp form the basis of XO sauce.  Previously, I bought them from a Chinese supermarket in Haymarket.  But since my first batch of XO, I had walked past some stores in Sydney Chinatown that sold dried seafood, mostly dried abalone that tourists buy to bring home with them from Sydney.  I went to one of these stores on Sussex Street and found three different varieties of dried scallop and two types of dried shrimp.  The store was full of so many random types of dried seafood, but somehow I resisted buying any of the delectable-looking dried sea cucumbers.

One item that I omitted from my new recipe was a type of cured pork I found at a Chinese butcher shop.  I thought that it tasted pretty similar to the Chinese sausage and overwhelmed the flavour of the seafood.  A lot of the XO sauce recipes on the internet include Jinhua ham, which is a type of cured ham from the Chinese city of Jinhua.  Apparently prosciutto is a good substitute, so I sourced some good quality prosciutto from Harris Farm butcher at Potts Point to add to my sauce. 

Soaking the scallops and shrimp overnight to rehydrate them yields some flavourful cooking water.  Some recipes online call for the cooking water to be included, so I figured I’d take their advice and add some in when cooking the aromatics – I'm sure it enhanced the taste of the sauce.

Overall, I think the MeXO sauce tastes fantastic – actually a bit subtler than my first batch and more balanced.  My girlfriend preferred the first batch because it was spicier and had a stronger flavour – but perhaps I just need to spoon more of my new MeXO sauce into my next stir fry!

MeXO Sauce Recipe

What you need:

• 4 Guajillo chillies
• 6 small chipotle chillies
• 3 ancho chillies
• 150g of dried shrimp
• 150g of dried scallops
• 4 fresh long red chillies, roughly chopped
• 4 shallots, peeled
• 1 bulb of garlic, broken into cloves and peeled
• ¼ cup of sliced ginger
• 2 small chinese sausages sliced (approx ¼ of a cup)
• 5 slices of prosciutto, sliced
• 2 cups of canola oil
• 3 tablespoons of shaoxing rice wine
• 2 tablespoons of dark soy
• 3 tablespoons of fish sauce
• 2 teaspoons of sugar
• 1 teaspoon of sea salt
• ½ stick of cinnamon
• 2 star anise
• 1 teaspoon and a half of chilli flakes

Making the MeXO sauce:

1. Soak dried shrimp in a bowl with enough water to submerge. Similarly, soak the dried scallops in a separate bowl.  Leave both overnight to soften and rehydrate. 
2. The next morning, drain the shrimp and scallops, reserving  about a quarter of a cup of the soaking water from each (1/4 cup of scallop soaking water, ¼ cup of prawn soaking water).
3. Now prepare your dried chillies.  Cut the chillies open and scrape out the seeds and any pith (this is important, it will be horribly bitter if you leave them in).  Wipe off any dust on the surface of the chillies.
4. Heat a small pan, and toast the chillies on a low heat until they become fragrant and start to release their essential oils.  You don’t want to colour or burn them, just heat them up for a couple of minutes.
5. Place these toasted chillies into a bowl and cover with boiling water for about 30 minutes, until they have softened.  Drain and discard the water (again, important, bitterness awaits if you don't discard). 
6. Add your ginger, garlic, shallots and fresh chillies into a food processor and blitz until very finely chopped. 
7. In a large pot, heat about a third of the canola oil and slowly fry the processed aromatics. 
8. While these aromatics are frying, blitz your soaked shrimp and scallops in the food processor until they are very finely chopped.  Set aside.
9. When the aromatics have start to soften, add in the rice wine and cook off the alcohol for a couple of minutes. 
10. Now add in your reserved prawn and scallop water, and simmer on a high heat for about 5 minutes to reduce the mixture.  Pour the aromatics into a bowl and set aside.
11. Add the rest of the canola oil into the now empty pot, and then add in your finely chopped shrimp and scallops.  Fry this on a low heat until the shrimp and scallops look golden. 
12. In the meantime, add your soaked dried chillies from earlier, and the sliced Chinese sausage and prosciutto into the food processor and blitz. It should form a brown paste. 
13. Add this paste into the pot with the shrimp and scallops, and fry for another 5 minutes. 
14. Return the aromatic mixture you set aside earlier into the pot and stir to combine.  Drop in the cinnamon stick and star anise.
15. Add in the soy sauce, fish sauce and salt and simmer for 45 minutes on a low heat, stirring regularly to ensure none of the ingredients are sticking to the bottom of the pot or burning.
16. Remove whole spices.
17. Pour into sterilised jars.  

Lampries

My girlfriend's dad used to live next door to a Sri Lankan family.  He would often smell some really delicious and interesting fragrances coming from next door.  So he would go over and visit so he could taste whatever was being cooked.

One of his favourite Sri Lankan dishes is actually a combination of several dishes.  It's called Lampries.  So when we last visited him, he decided to use as kitchen hands to make a big batch of the dish.

The guru of Asian cuisine and writer of several quintessential books, Charmaine Solomon, describes Lampries as a 'festive meal' which is made for special occasions.  Essentially, it's like a Sri Lankan TV dinner, featuring a fragrant curry, rich ghee rice, sambals and pickles and some fried meatballs. Traditionally they are wrapped up in banana leaves but its easier and more practical to use foil.

With so many components in the Lampries we cooked them all over two days.   The recipes were very detailed.  Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook seems to be a bit of an institution in Australian kitchens.  For some reason, this cook book must have been given to all housewives in the 1970s as a standard issue book - but it keeps getting re-released in newer editions.  Here's a photo of my mum's version, which is at least four decades old (it smells like a school library book!)

The recipes in the Sri Lankan section of the book are, in my view, the best - probably because Charmaine Solomon is actually of Sri Lankan background.

I was really blown away by two of the pickles in particular so I've included some recipes below.  Each are adapted from The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon.  I've also included some descriptions and photos of the other components.

The Eggplant Pickle

A pickle featuring fried eggplant! You just can't go wrong!

This is the first of the three preserves/sambals that were included,  and is probably the most involved of the three.  The salting of the eggplant draws out all of the moisture and any bitterness from the flesh.

This pickle would go fantastically with all types of curries, and would add a good flavour hit to an ordinary sandwich.

Eggplant Pickle Recipe

(Inspired an adapted from The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon)

What you need:

• 2 teaspoons of sugar;
• 1 teaspoon of chilli powder;
• a stick of cinnamon;
• 3 green chillies, with seeds, sliced;
• 3/4 cup of hot water;
• 1/2 cup of tamarind pulp;
• 1 teaspoon of ground fennel;
• 2 teaspoons of ground cumin;
• 1 tablespoon of ground coriander;
• 1 tablespoon of grated ginger;
• 5 garlic cloves, sliced;
• 1 medium brown onion, finely chopped;
• 1/2 cup of malt vinegar;
• 1 tablespoon of black mustard seeds;
• 2 teaspoons of ground turmeric;
• Vegetable oil for frying;
• 2 teaspoons of salt;
• 2 large eggplants, sliced into discs.

The pickling process:

1. Salting the eggplant:  Sprinkle salt on all of the discs of eggplant along with some turmeric.  This will draw the moisture out of the eggplants.  Set aside in a colander for an hour.
2. Making the paste:  Put mustard seeds and vinegar into a food processor and blitz until the seeds are ground.  Then add in the onions, garlic and ginger and blitz the mixture again until you get a thick paste.  Set aside.  
3. Frying the eggplant:  Heat about an inch of oil in a pan and fry the eggplant discs in batches until they are brown on both sides.  Reserve half a cup of the cooking oil for later.  Place the cooked eggplant on some paper towel to drain excess oil. 
4. Toasting spices:  Place the coriander, cumin and fennel into a dry small pan and toast on a low heat until fragrant. 
5. Tamarind pulp:  Put the tamarind pulp into the 3/4 cup of hot water.  Strain and discard the seeds.  Reserve the liquid.  (You can also buy tamarind liquid from some Asian food stores.  This would eliminate this step).  
6. Frying the paste:  Place the reserved oil into a pan, and fry the blended paste for five minutes.  
7. Adding the rest into the mix:  Then add in the toasted spices, chillies, cinnamon, chilli powder and tamarind liquid.  Also add in the fried eggplant.  Mix everything up and allow to simmer (covered) for 15 minutes.
8. Sugar:  Remove the pot from the heat and stir in the sugar.  
9. Storage:  Place the eggplant pickle into sterilised jars.  This should keep for several weeks in the fridge.  

Chilli Sambal

This is probably my favourite part of the Lampries.  On the face of it, the sambal seems a bit strange.  It uses an ingredient that, prior to making the Lampries, I had never used before - 'prawns in spices'.  Check out the can below.  But having now used it, I'm tempted to put it into everything to see if it makes everything taste amazing! It's essentially prawns that have been blended up with garlic and chilli and onions (and god knows what else).

This sambal is extremely versatile and I think it would be great with a lot of other asian foods - like on the side of a Hainanese chicken rice, or as a sauce for some roti or shallot pancakes.

Chilli Sambal Recipe

(Inspired an adapted from The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon)

What you need:

• 4 medium brown onions, finely chopped;
• 1/2 cup of peanut oil;
• 2 teaspoons of chilli powder;
• 200g of 'prawns in spices';
• 2 tablespoons of malt vinegar;
• a pinch of salt
• 2 teaspoons of sugar.  

Making the sambal:

1. Slowly fry the onions in the oil for about 10 minutes until soft and golden brown.  Ensure that hte onions don't burn.
2. Once the onions are brown, add in the chilli powder, the malt vinegar and the 'prawns in spices'.  Cover and simmer for 10 minutes.  
3. Uncover the pan and then reduce the sambal until the liquid evaporates and the oil starts to separate from the other ingredients.  
4. Season to taste and then store in a jar. 

Lampries Curry

Four types of meat in one curry - this is my dream curry, it's almost as if I had written the recipe!  We made the curry a couple of nights before we ate the lampries.  The base flavour of the curry is a Sri Lankan curry powder which made the curry unbelievably fragrant.

The meats are boiled first - which I found a bit unusual, but then the stock that is left over after the boiling is used for the ghee rice, which makes the rice intensely rich and savoury.  The meats are then chopped up into small pieces and mixed together - in the end it's hard to determine what kind of meat you're eating, but after all of the cooking, all of the meats are really very tender.

Prawn Blanchan

This is the most unusual feature of the Lampries.  The prawn blanchan is made up of shrimp flakes (which was another ingredient unknown to me before I made Lampries), toasted dessicated coconut, chilli powder, tumeric and lime juice.  First you toast the flakes and the coconut to intensify their flavour.  These dry ingredients form a thick paste when blended together with the other ingredients and you put a teaspoon of it in each Lampries parcel.  It imparts a fishy fragrance throughout the parcel and is the saltiest condiement in the Lampries.  I thought it was really delicious, but I was told that a lot of other people find it overpowering.

Frikkadels

Crumbed, fried meatballs - spiced heavily with clove, and Worcestershire sauce.  These tasty morsels are a leftover from the Dutch rule of Sri Lanka.  They're described in Charmaine Solomon's book as "Dutch Forcemeat Balls".  I'm not entirely sure what 'forcemeat' is, but it's delicious!

Ghee Rice
The ghee rice is actually one of my favourite parts of the Lampries.  I've never had rice so flavourful, but I guess that's what happens when you cook rice in clarified butter and a stock made from four types of meat.  The cloves, cardamom and cinnamon make this rice pleasantly fragrant too, and then the spoon of coconut milk over the rice before you wrap the Lampries, makes the rice nice and creamy.

Serving the Lampries
To serve, you can reheat the Lampries parcels (which could have been in the fridge or freezer) in an oven at about 180 degrees Celsius for about 20-30 minutes, until heated right through.

In terms of side dishes, we had some mango chutney, some sliced tomato and cucumber, a cooling raita using homemade yoghurt (stay tuned for a recipe), some sliced banana with lemon juice and
coconut, (weird but actually works!) and a dish called Mallung, which is a vegetable dish consisting of wilted shredded green leaves with coconut and other spices.  We used beetroot leaves in the Mallung, which were delicious.

It really is a great meal, and luckily I've got a few parcels in the freezer, which we're saving up for the next time we get a Lampries craving...