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  • 2 days ago
This tasty new dish captures the main four dimensions to Asian Food: sweet, sour, salty and hot. To best accompany the mix of flavours, John recommends having a nice glass of chilled Rosé.

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00:16For me, growing up in Australia, it was all about Asia, and I love the flavours of Asia.
00:20Spicy, but there's really four dimensions to Asian food.
00:23Sweet, sour, salty and hot.
00:25This is my salt and pepper, sweet and sweet cheese sauce.
00:34Where do you start?
00:35Well, of course, the most important thing with most Thai food is chilli.
00:40Chilli gives you heat, but this one for me is very, very special because it really only has four ingredients.
00:46Those sweet, sour, salty and hot notes.
00:48So in here, in my fry pan, I've got some roasted chillies.
00:52And I've roasted the chillies until they're just a little bit darker,
00:55and they really start to become more sort of smoky.
00:59Palm sugar, complex sugar, and you grind the whole thing together to make a sweet chilli jam paste.
01:10Now we add our sour, fresh lime juice.
01:14And then, last but not least, the smelliest but most delicious ingredient in the whole Thai cupboard, fish sauce.
01:24Mix that together.
01:28I'm going to put that to one side, because I'm going to need my little water and pestle.
01:32This great thing, this piece of garlic, has a way of becoming something really interesting in Thai food,
01:38because I'm going to make it really sticky and really sweet.
01:42Bash it.
01:48Drop the garlic in, and then turn the heat down a little bit.
01:55The reason I'm turning the heat down a little bit is I don't want the garlic to burn, I want
01:58it to brown.
01:59And I want it to go really fragrant and really sweet and really sticky.
02:08It wasn't until the discovery in the South Americas was there such thing as a chilli that came into anywhere
02:14like Asia.
02:15So before that, how you made food hot and spicy?
02:18The white peppercorn.
02:19So this is why we've got salt and pepper squid.
02:23And add to that same amount of salt.
02:26Take a bowl, some flour, add the mix of your salt and pepper.
02:34If you want to guarantee your squid to be wonderful and tender, there is a secret way of cutting it.
02:39Take the squid tube as it is, and you'll open it up.
02:45So that on the inside of that squid, we store it.
02:49Squid's tough not because of the outside of the squid, that's the tender bit.
02:53It's the inside of the squid because it shrinks and it shrinks very quickly, making it into a sort of
02:58rubber band quite texture.
03:10So now we see what's happening.
03:12It's all curled up and turned lovely into little flowers.
03:15Take them out of the oil and then into our boiled and fried garlic.
03:31So there you have it, salt and pepper squid, sweet chilli sauce.
03:34And my mate Neil suggested that I should drink with it a classic Huggigan Rose.
03:40I'm going to say this time Neil, you've actually got it right.
03:50So let's take a shot.
03:52And do I have it.
03:52I'm coming on.
03:52This is my day.
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