Shallots, fried shallots & shallot oil

Where much of the West builds on the yellow onion, the Burmese kitchen builds on the shallot — kyet thun ni, "red onion," small, purple-skinned, sweeter and more perfumed than a storage onion. Pounded raw with garlic and ginger, it is the base paste of nearly every curry; sliced thin and soaked, it is the sharp crunch in salads; and fried, it becomes two ingredients at once, which is where the real economy of the thing lives.

Fry sliced shallots slowly in peanut oil until they turn gold and crisp, and you are left with crispy fried shallots — the finishing scatter on mohinga, on noodles, on rice, on practically everything — and shallot oil, the fragrant oil they cooked in. That oil is not a byproduct; it is half the point. It dresses salads, seasons noodles, and gets spooned into soups, carrying the shallots’ sweetness everywhere it goes. Buy a jar of fried shallots and you get the crunch but forfeit the oil; fry your own once a week and both halves come back to you. Around here we call that rule "the oil must return."

Shallots grow readily across Myanmar’s dry zone, and markets sell them by the basketful in a way that makes their centrality obvious. The pounded shallot base is common grammar across Southeast Asia — Thai, Indonesian, and Malaysian cooking all share it — and asking who did it first is not a question with a documented answer. The Burmese answer is simply to keep pounding.