Cookbook Club – Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen

To take advantage of the remaining summer weather, we decided to do our September Cookbook Club event at the beach, and chose the thematically appropriate Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen as our cookbook. I made the Green Papaya Chanpuru. You can see the whole beach bonfire feast on my Cookbook Club site. For now – my dish!

I’ve always loved the green papaya salad I’ve had at Thai restaurants, but I’ve never eaten green papaya prepared in any other way. So I was interested to try out a new green papaya dish.

I browned hand-broken tofu in canola oil with a bit of salt. The recipe didn’t specify what kind of tofu to use (there are many!), so I went with extra firm as I figured that would be best for not having the tofu completely dissolve during browning and combining with the other ingredients.

Then I added the grated papaya, sliced carrots and onions, tuna, and chicken broth, stir-frying just until the broth came to a rapid boil.

After transferring the mixture to a bowl, I seasoned with mirin, shoyu, and sesame oil.

I stirred together and that was it!

Very easy to make, but also disappointingly bland. I think a contributing factor may have been that the recipe calls for 1/2 of a green papaya, but green papayas vary dramatically in size from fairly small to quite large. I chose one of the smallest papayas at the store, but it still resulted in a large portion of grated papaya relative to the other ingredients. After tasting, I ended up quadrupling the amount of seasoning that the recipe specified, and even then it was only passable. I feel that it needed more acidity – some vinegar or lemon juice would have helped. At the party, I ended up sprinkling on some of the dipping sauce that accompanied the spring rolls, and that definitely spruced up this Green Papaya Chanpuru. But I won’t be making this dish again. Bummer, because the rest of the food from the cookbook was quite good.