What Southeast Asian herbs are you growing?

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Permalink Reply by Gillian on May 24, 2009 at 10:16pm

HI Heather, Gillian from Tropical Australia here,
Actually a friend gave me some thai mint, and it has been growing like crazy - not sure what to do with it. I did float a few sprigs on some pumpkin soup I made the other day. maybe you can tell me what I can use it for? I got a tumeric plant from my neighbour, but it is in its dormant season now. what do you use the leaves for? we use the rhizomes here. I have had trouble starting ginger and want to get a rhizome from a friend, who also grows galangal. Oh, I also have a cardamon plant, but have since heard it wont create pods here for some reason. You can use the leaves to impart the same flavour though not as strong. I mostly focus on the Indian type of curries. Our neighbour had a very prolific chili bush that hung over onto our side, but then their chickens took a liking to it and decimated it overnight! I thought their clucking noises sounded a bit different!

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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on May 25, 2009 at 5:19pm

I have read about turmeric leaf being used to wrap grilled meats and fish, cooked with rice to impart some flavor rather the way pandanus leaf is used, and being slivered into salads. I haven't been able to get any, so I can't vouch for the taste, but these uses seem to be fairly common in Malaysia and other neighboring islands.
Re the thai mint, I'm not familiar with any strain of mint specific to Thailand, although all the common mints are used there. . Could it be Thai basil? What do the leaves and stem look like?

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Permalink Reply by Maggie on May 25, 2009 at 6:35pm

I shall try steaming some rice in the different leaves and see what flavor they impart.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on May 25, 2009 at 8:07pm

That's a great idea. It gives each herb a pleasant but neutral backdrop against which it can show its flavor.

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Permalink Reply by mei ling on August 27, 2009 at 3:17am

Thai mint (which in Singapore is known as Laksa leaves) is used widely in some curries.
Thai mint is a MUST HAVE in our Laksa in singapore. i have planted some in my balcony and just have lots of these leaves in laksa the other day.

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Permalink Reply by Maggie on May 25, 2009 at 7:38am

Hi Heather we grow a variety of Asian herbs and vegetables.
We have galangal, ginger, turmeric, cardamon, curry leaf trees, lemon grass, fenugreek, coriander, tulsi, Vietnamese mint, Asian greens, chillies and a baby cinnamon tree growing. We keep the plants under shade cloth in summer and they may die back in winter but we do not have frosts here on the Adelaide Plains.
Maybe we could have an Asian herb and vegetable group and encourage more Asian gardeners to give us some hints.
I have only limited knowledge of Asian herbs and I am always experimenting and trying new recipes.
I find that when you get to know an ingredient then you know how you can use it in cooking.
Well that's the plan!

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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on May 25, 2009 at 6:03pm

I think having a group is a great idea. I also wanted to let you know that one of my favorite books on the subject is from a cook living in Australia, Heavenly Fragrance by Carol Selva Rajah. I just recently learned from another book that the leaves of Chiles are cooked as a green vegetable in northern Thailand. My chiles are too small to cut on right now, but I plan to experiment with it later on in the season. I'm fascinated by multi-use plants. One of your fellow Adelaide residents, Kate, introduced me to eating sweet potato leaves and now they're one of my favorite greens.

I hope that any Asian gardeners on KGI will chime in with more info.

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Permalink Reply by Joy Williams on May 25, 2009 at 6:22pm

uh.... I would double check that. Because chiles and tomatoes and eggplant are all in the nightshade family, I would be cautious about eating the leaves of a chile plant. I think they are toxic. It may be some other thing they call a chile plant that isn't one.

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Permalink Reply by Maggie on May 25, 2009 at 6:40pm

I blanch things that are high in oxalic acid before use ie Warrigal spinach and some other older green leaves. We eat so many greens I figure we don't need too much oxalic acid.
A lot of people eat hardly any greens.

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Permalink Reply by Joy Williams on May 25, 2009 at 7:09pm

ya, but spinach isn't toxic. yes Oxalic acid can contribute to kidney stones and other conditions, like binding calcium, but I don't think that's the same as the stuff in Nightshade family leaves. The toxin in the nightshade family is Solanin, and can cause vomiting, stomach swelling, paralysis, coma, & not inconcievably death. Now you would probably have to eat an awful lot of them, but why would we want to anyway? The fruit is much more appealing than the leaves.

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Permalink Reply by Heather Wood on May 25, 2009 at 7:12pm

I appreciate the warning, but personally, when considering any new food I do a lot of research in botanical and ethnobotanical textbooks, then use a protocol which I found in one of the Army's survival guides for the first several exposures. Since I have not yet completed this process with chile leaves, and won't until I have plants big enough to cut, it would have been better if I hadn't mentioned it at all. So for public purposes I'll recant my prior remarks until I have more experience with those particular leaves. I'm very interested, though, in how frequently Western sources say that a plant is poisonous when it is in common use in the East. My favorite examples are cowpea leaves and sweet potato leaves. I grew up in the southern US where these were common crops, and it was gospel (repeated by our USDA extension agents) that the leaves were poisonous, so it was not until recently that I learned that both are staple green leaf crops growm commercially in other parts of the world. In fact, I've read with interest in a usually reliable US university datebase which state that the chile peppers themselves are poisonous.

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Permalink Reply by Joy Williams on May 25, 2009 at 7:22pm

probably there's a confusion between sweet potato and regular potato. They are both in different families though. Sweet potato are in the morning glory family.

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