Just Like The Original, Sort Of

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Jealousy gripped my stomach and took hold of my taste buds when my boyfriend told me he was headed to Wild Ginger this past week. Memories of my last meal at this highly regarded Seattle eatery flooded my brain: the tang of tamarind in the hot and sour seafood soup, the palate cleansing acidity of the green papaya salad, the surprising harmony of Pacific Northwest salmon with the decidedly South East Asian combination of coconut milk and basil. John was in Seattle, eating there, and all I had was memories.

This memory, particularly of the salmon, lingered with me for days. Unable to take the hungry thoughts any longer, I broke down and decided that, since I couldn’t be at Wild Ginger myself, I’d just have to make something similar at home. The salmon dish that was keeping me up at night, Otak Otak, consists of chunks of the fish cooked with coconut milk and basil and wrapped up in banana leaf to form a neat pyramidal package. The package is then cooked on the grill so the salmon steams inside, keeping the fish moist while the flavors of coconut and basil concentrate to form a rich, delicious glaze.

Recreating this dish at home was going to be a challenge. To start with, the banana leaf was a problem. I knew they were out there but I didn’t really have time to drive all over town looking for them. So I changed the cooking method entirely: I’d barbecue the fish directly on the grill, imbuing it with a slightly smoky flavor and then, rather than cooking it with the coconut and basil, I’d add those in at the end as a sauce.

Ditching the banana leaf meant sacrificing some of the moisture from steaming, but on the plus side it added a layer of texture from the crispy salmon skin. It wouldn’t quite be Wild Ginger, but it would be close enough to make the jealousy pangs go away.

I feel this often happens with me and restaurants. I love a dish, want to make it at home, but the ingredients are too hard to come by. For a salsa I made recently I had to put the dish on hold for two months until I happened to be in a town about 15 miles away with a Latino market that stocked the certain kind of chili pepper required for the recipe. A duck ragu devoured at an Italian restaurant in Honolulu inspired me to recreate it at home only to find not one of the markets in the immediate vicinity of our house stocked uncooked duck legs or even whole duck.

Sometimes these ingredient searches work to heighten my commitment to the original, like with the salsa, where using a substitute would fundamentally change the desired outcome. Other times these scavenger hunts take me on a detour substituting different ingredients for a dish that becomes something new yet familiar. The lack of duck legs led me down a different ragu path, one involving braised short ribs. The taste was nothing like duck but the ragu made a different kind of rich and meaty pasta sauce that was just as satisfying.

In the case of the Otak Otak, at least the main ingredients--salmon, basil, coconut milk--were easy enough to come by that even if the technique changed, the flavors would stay true to the original. While a friend tended to the salmon and its crisping skin on the barbecue, I simmered a can of coconut milk with a handful of torn basil, pieces of ginger, and a clove of garlic until the mixture reduced down by about half, forming a thick, fragrant sauce. Each piece of salmon got a couple of spoonfuls of the sauce and sprinkling of basil at the end for color. The result might not have been quite Otak Otak but if I closed my eyes, the flavors were all there. I could sleep again.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 2 pounds salmon, cut into 1/2 lb. portions
• 1 can coconut milk
• 14 basil leaves, divided
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 piece (1.5 inch size) ginger
• salt and pepper
• 1/4 large green cabbage
• 1 small red bell pepper
• 1 medium carrot
• 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
• 1 serrano chili
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil