Sawaddee ka welcome to the Halloween special of hot thai kitchen and if you're not watching
this on Halloween well ignore the costume anyways so people are carving pumpkins all over town so I
thought it would be appropriate for me to show you a traditional Thai dessert that involves a
little bit of a pumpkin carving skill and so we're making something called Sankaya faktong
here's the breakdown of the word sankaya is a coconut custard and faktong means pumpkin
and in Thailand it actually refers to a kabocha squash which is the only kind of pumpkin we have
so we're going to make the coconut custard fill the carve out the pumpkin I'm going to refer to
this as a pumpkin from now on and then cook the custard in this pumpkin all right so let's take
a look at our ingredients so we've got 1 kabocha squash 1 cup of coconut milk 300 grams of palm
sugar 6 eggs plus 1 egg yolk half a teaspoon plus 1/8 of a teaspoon of salt 1 tablespoon of
rice flour and 1 pandan leaf ok so first we're going to carve out our pumpkin here and I should
probably take off my Bunny gloves and we're going to carve out the lid the square on top just go in
you can also use a another kind of squash you can use a sugar pumpkin like the one they used to make
pumpkin pie or you can use a red kuri squash ok so now the hard part is getting the lid out and
make sure all the corners are loose that nothing is kind of still stuck and think about kabocha
squash is it often does not come with a handle for you to pull it off so it's a bit of a struggle so
what I do is I just kind of take my knife and wiggle it to try to get it to come up there we
go oh come on you can do this da we're going to clean this up because we're going to use the lid
well at least eat it so just cut this out and then you're going to do what you normally do with your
pumpkin is to take a spoon sharp edges so thin spoons would be nice and hollow out all the seeds
okay and now you want to make sure you scrape out as much of the furry stuff inside as you can and
then rinse the pumpkin just because there's often loose furry stuff inside so just rinse it out to
get rid of any of the loose stuff that's up and now just going to let this sit on paper towel or
on a towel of some sort and just so that it don't dry out and now that that's done we're going to
make the custard we're just going to cook the palm sugar with the coconut milk just so that the sugar
is dissolved and I'm not going to pour in all the coconut milk I'll save some you'll see why in a
minute and oh the pandan leaves are also going in to infuse now you're just going to cook this until
the sugar dissolve no more no need to bring it to a boil in fact traditionally they don't even cook
this mixture but in Thailand what they use is the kind of palm sugar that's soft and sticky
and wet and it dissolves quite easily in liquid so what they do is they put everything in a big bowl
and just use their hand scrunch scrunch and the sugar will eventually dissolve and in the act of
scrunching the pandan leaves get agitated enough that it extracts that you can extract the flavors
through the mechanical action but we are using the hard type of palm sugar and the scrunching doesn't
this would work trust me I've tried and meanwhile while this is cooking what you want to have setup
is a steamer so I've got this big steamer here and we're going to cook our pumpkin in here so
it's a good idea while your thing is cooking to get some water in there and get it get it started
so that when our pumpkin is ready you don't have to wait for it to boil and all that stuff so while
you're here you know just being efficient okay so just bring this over and letting it chill out
here for a second while we get our other parts ready and I'm doing one extra egg yolk because
traditionally this recipe uses duck eggs which has a higher yolk to white ratio so I'm adding
one extra yolk just to mimic that because I can't find duck eggs here so that little bit of coconut
milk that we saved I'm just going to add it to a rice flour so that it mixes it dissolves it a
little bit because adding rice flour directly to the eggs usually leave annoying clumps and
the rice flour will actually help stabilize the custard because we're using coconut milk and as
you know coconut milk has a tendency to like if you've opened a can of coconut milk the fat will
float to the top and the watery part will stay down below and adding a little bit of starch will
actually help minimize that separation it will still separate so your cusses will have like kind
of two layers going which is completely that's what you are expecting but adding a little bit
of starch will help minimize that you don't have to go out and buy a rice flour for this if all
you have is all-purpose flour you can add a little less perhaps two tea spoons of all-purpose flour
for this don't forget your salt desert you're never good without salt okay so now this more
or less mixed up we're going to go in with our palm sugar coconut mixture so this shouldn't be
that hot because we didn't we didn't boil it or anything just to the sugar was mostly dissolved
but just in case we're going to slowly pour it in anyway and that the procedure if you notice
is exactly the same as you would make any kind of western-style custard creme brulee flan creme
caramel now this makes this is going to make more than I need for one pumpkin but I'm giving you
this recipe just because some people have bigger pumpkins and some people have smaller and so it's
always good to have extra rather than not enough to fill a pumpkin right so now we're going to
strain it just to make sure there are no clumps lumps of any rice flour sugar or anything in it
or any gloopy bits of egg yolk I mean egg whites now if you want to test it like if you decide to
change or change up the recipe you want to see how sweet this is maybe you want it more sweet
or whatever you can take a little bit and steam just a little bit in the bowl to taste it and
see if you like how it tastes that would be a way to do it okay now we're going to fill our pumpkin
but before we do that we're going to set it up in our steaming container so I could steam the
pumpkin just on its own in a steamer but these things have been known to crack as it seems so
when that happens the custard will come running out so putting it in if you have a bowl that
exactly the size of this pumpkin that'll work or you can put it in something bigger and then
put foil all around it which is what I'm going to do and the soyal will kind of help access support
for the pumpkin so it's not so if it does split it's not going to collapse all over the place
and you're going to fill it not all the way up because it will fluff up a little just when it
reaches the base of the pumpkin and also I should mention that some pumpkins have thicker flesh than
others so when you are buying the heavier it feels for its size that means the thicker it
is and also you want to pick a pumpkin that is has orange is dark green and has orange patches
around it because that is a sign that it is right if it's all green and there's no sign of orange
that means the pumpkin will be very young and it won't be it won't have a lot of flavor to it will
be very just not good so so here we are and that's it we're going to steam this and don't forget the
lid we're going to steam the lid along with it because we want to use it to close go into the
steamer now we're going to see this for about an hour so make sure there is enough water in
your steamer or it'll dry out and you'll burn your pot which I have done before and you could
also I'm guessing it's possible to do this in the oven although I'm not sure how long or what
temperature but I'm probably thinking something 300 to 325 a low oven just like you would like
a cheesecake okay so the heat I'm putting it on medium heat not too high you want the the water
to be boiling but not so vigorously because the higher the heat the the custard will fluff up
too fast and it won't be as smooth so this the nature of this custard is not supposed to be
you know Burrell a smooth anyway but you want to kind of help it help it out a little bit by
not putting in too much heat so about 50 minutes to an hour and then we'll come and take it out
so I made this last night to show you because the the pumpkin needs to cool down and everything
before you cut it now I wanted to show you also that this one split usually it'll split if it
does at the natural groups of the pumpkin and that's why it's important that you support it
with something so when you bring this to a party you can bring it like this put the lid
back on and I already cut this yesterday and then the inside will look like that when you
serve it you just want to cut it into wedges and it's a good idea in between cuts to wipe
your knife this is standard also cake cutting procedure if you're cutting nice wedding cakes
or whatever it is it's always good to clean off your knife so that the next slice is nice and
clean and that's it this is our sang-hyuk tall you can also call it [ __ ] tong sleng - yeah
and reverse the order as you can see you can add there's a the top part is a little
different texture wise in the bottom part that's a natural separation if we didn't put the rice
flour in there to be a more distinct separation so a nice gradient like this is perfect and
also the skin is perfectly edible it's really soft and you don't have to eat it but you can
and it's probably really good for you too lots of nutrients so that's all for your Halloween
special I hope you enjoyed the show and if you did please subscribe and for the recipe you
can visit hot Thai kitchen calm and I will see you next time for your next delicious Thai meal
you