A common sauce where ever BBQ'd beef pork neck or whatever is being served is, "Naam Jim Jaow" a Tamarind based sauce with dried chili, garlic Soy sauce and salt/fishsauce. I like a variation on the theme it ain't 'xactly authentic, but I like it.
We start off with the main ingredients:
That's fish sauce, and some Sii eew Formula no 1 (Med soy sauce)and some thick, pulpy, unsweetened tamarind juice, in the back. Down in front we got a chunk of ginger, a few cloves of garlic ( I used about twice this amount, BTW) coriander root and soem dried and ground chili.
You need to scrape and clean the ginger and coriander root, peel the garlic don;t worry too much about mashin' it up cause you're gonna take car of that in a minute...
just chop everything up kind coarse and dump it in the old granite mortar.
I went ahead and tossed some chopped up fresh chilis at this point too.
Now, getcher Isaan lass to pummel the shit out o' this for 'bout 5 - 10 minutes till it looks something like this:
You can see I kinda jumped the gun here and tossed in a few herbs and green onions (scallions to you high falutin' folks).
'S OK, I got lots ore to add while that sweet young thing keeps grindin' the mixture down.
Up there we got minced cilantro, and a herb called "Pak Bai" in Thai dunno what it is, never saw it before moving here it's got an astringent flavor occasionally you'll get it in them plates of fresh herbs for garzin on while you eat, or wait for, the main meal. Moving along we got some minced sweet Basil some more chopped green onions and a few chilis just toss all that in the Mortar along with the dried chili and keep grindin at it 'til it looks llike this:
Man the smells comin outta that mortar 'bout now, you might be tempted to just take a taste as it sits, but wait a minute of three..
it's ready for the juice. I dumped about 3/4 of that bottle in there (all I had could do with a bit more) I added a large portion of fish sauce, say about 3:1 tamarind juice to fish sauce and about half the fish sauce volume of soy sauce. Looks kinda like this:
Typically folks'll add salt and sometimes even sugar the tamarind juice is sour The salt cuts that a bit and it is delicious adding more soy or fish sauce will tame that down quite a bit and I do not recommend sugar, but each 'is own.
Now the ribs're just 'bout finished think I heard the ol' lady come back from fetchin' some sticky rice If you try this I recommend you go easy on the other herbs a bit but definitely add a heapin' handful of sweet basil, just goes so well with the ginger and tamarind. Usually you'll get the basil on the side when eating dishes served with this sauce this way I got to use up what was left of my rapidly deteriorating basil in the back of the fridge.