Bangkok Guac

This may sound a little crazy, but the Thai flavors of lemongrass, makrut lime and fish sauce complement avocado astonishingly well, which is the idea between this Thai-inspired spin on guacamole — which is delicious scooped up with shrimp chips. If it’s hard to find fresh Thai ingredients where you live, it might be a bit insane to try to gather them all to make this, but if you happen to be gathering them to make actual Thai dishes and have these ingredients on hand, it’s absolutely worth it.

If you have a convenient Asian supermarket, you can probably find lemongrass there, and maybe makrut lime leaves, and sometimes they even stock lemongrass at better conventional supermarkets. Makrut limes themselves can be much harder to find; they are available (along with the leaves and lemongrass) through several online purveyors, including Angkor Food website (which specializes in Cambodian foods). If you can’t find makrut limes, regular Persian or key lime zest will do, though it doesn’t have the same incredible perfume.

Don’t forget to source shrimp chips to dip in place of tortilla chips!

To make the Bangkok Guac, it helps to have a Mexican molcajete to grind the aromatics, but you could also use a large Thai or Western mortar and pestle. If you don’t have any of those, a spice grinder or mini-chop will do almost as well.

Serves 4-6.

Ingredients

1 stalk lemongrass

1 large shallot (about 1 1/2 ounces), finely diced

3-4 green Thai long chiles (depending how hot you like it), seeded and chopped