As part of my Christmas gift, Chris got me a bunch of ingredients, some ready to eat, some raw, to make Burmese food. Though we love Burmese food and are particularly obsessed with Burmese tea leaf salad, also known as lahpet thoke, I’ve never made any Burmese food ever. Although we are surrounded by endless high quality Asian supermarkets in New York City, most Burmese ingredients, other than standard things like rice/egg noodles, chickpea flour, fish sauce, etc., still seem obscure. I guess that makes sense when you realize that the number of Burmese restaurants in the city can be counted on a single hand.

The tea leaf salad is actually really simple to make with everyday ingredients like peanuts, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumber, onion… but the catch is that the dressing has one key ingredient that tends to elude most of us, and that’s fermented tea leaves. Technically, any high quality tea leaf can be fermented after being spent, but the fermentation process for optimal funk and complexity of taste is two to three years long. As much as I love the idea of not wasting my spent tea leaves and repurposing them into a tea leaf dressing, I have zero desire to have a jar of fermenting tea leaves in my apartment for the next 2-3 years. So, with the package that Chris got me, it included fermented tea leaves in multiple forms: straight up fermented tea leaves, tea leaf salad dressing (all ready to eat, maybe with just some added lime juice and garlic, and individual portions of tea leaf salad dressing for one serving of salad.

So today, I finally opened the ready-made packet and created my salad mise en place: I added minced red onion, chopped cucumber, diced tomatoes, shredded baby gem lettuce, fried garlic chips (from the Burmese package), roasted chana dal I made this morning, roasted peanuts, roasted sesame seeds, and the tea leaf salad. I added some minced garlic and drizzled freshly squeezed lime juice on top. And it was delicious – just like in the restaurants!

I guess this means that more Burmese tea leaf salads are to come at home!