Name: Chicken Aloo (Gaeng Gai Sai Aloo)
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Myanmar (Burma)
Ingredients: ¼ cup peanut oil or vegetable oil; ½ cup chopped coriander leaves and stems; 3½ to 4 cups 1-inch cubes peeled potatoes; 1 cup small shallots; 1 small (2½-pound) whole chicken, chopped into 1½-inch pieces, or about 2 pounds chicken legs and/or breasts, chopped (see A Note on Chopped Chicken), rinsed; 5 cups water; 1 tablespoon toasted and ground Soybean Disk ( and see Cooking with Tua Nao), or substitute 1 teaspoon brown miso paste; About 4 medium Roma (plum) or other fleshy tomatoes, cut into thin wedges (1½ to 2 cups); 1 tablespoon salt, or to taste; 1 teaspoon turmeric; 2 stalks lemongrass, trimmed and smashed; ½ teaspoon cayenne; ½ cup minced scallion greens

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Burma

By Naomi Duguid

Published 2012

About

The potato is a staple in the Shan hills, where it’s known as aloo, the Hindi and Urdu word for potato. The same word is used for potato in Burmese. (The potato, of course, is native to the Americas, and it traveled to Asia sometime after 1500.) Interestingly, the word for potato in neighboring Thailand is not a variant of aloo, but man farang, which translates, literally, as “foreign tuber.”

I ate this welcoming stew sitting outside under the stars at the farm