Moh Hin Gha

Southeast Asian cuisine is very intriguing to me. Mainly because I have not cooked it, and I have not eaten much of it. My go-to Thai food order is shrimp Pad Thai, and that's where my experience ends.

The national dish of Burma is called Moh Hin Gha. It is a one dish meal of noodles and fish stew. Moh Hin Gha is served commonly for large gatherings, and is also a snack for the Burmans, sold by roadside vendors.

The ingredients alone made me wince. I knew this was going to be tough one - dried shrimp paste, banana heart, fish sauce (which I once swore I would never cook with again, I was so repulsed by the odor). Banana heart is apparently impossible to find in the states, but was easy to replace with bamboo shoots. Fish sauce is widely available, just one of my least favorite ingredients. And the dried shrimp paste I thought for sure I would be able to find at a chain grocer in Boston, but I checked three stores before giving up and purchasing anchovy paste as a substitution. The main ingredient, strong flavored fish, probably should have been mackerel or herring with the heads still in tact. I don't think my giant belly could have handled that, so I went with some catfish filets instead. The texture of the catfish was just fine for the stew.

I blended onions, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and chili powder until it was smooth and then fried it with chopped red chili peppers. When I added the coconut milk and bamboo shoots, I realized by the color and smell that I was making a curry! Many steps followed, including mixing the anchovy paste with fish sauce, and making and adding a roux to the stew. I also baked the fish and placed it in the stew in large chunks. When I tasted the final product, I was excited! It had such a robust flavor, I couldn't wait to dig in.

As the recipe instructed, I placed cooked rice vermicelli noodles in the bottom of two bowls, and poured the stew on top. I took my first bite of Moh Hin Gha, and.... was SO disappointed. The noodles were like that one uptight friend who refuses to dress in costume for your Halloween party - they totally sucked all of the fun out of the curried stew. The flavor I had sampled right out of the saucepan was no where to be found. If you can believe it, I wished the stew was served over rice - I think the end product would have been so much tastier.

In the end, all the effort seemed fruitless. We scored Burma a 2.25.