Some thread titles are sufficiently clear that naught but a wisecrack is needed in the OP.
Well, that and a link to a recipe, per the new RhymerRule. I’m thinking Basque lamb stew, also known as what I’m planning to make for dinner next Sunday night, though of course I may opt for something Thai if I master it over the weekend.
We now have a dwarf kaffir lime tree. My gf has been doing some Thai cooking, but had trouble finding kaffir lime leaves. Through the wonders of the internet, UPS, and Visa, we now have more than we need.
Several friends of mine took courses in Thai cooking offered through a local Buddhist temple. They loved the experience and have folded Thai ingredients into their regular cooking repertoire.
I’d check for local availability of spices and such, but if they are to be had locally and cheaply, go for it. It is without a doubt one of my favorite “foreign” cuisines.
Just remember the fish sauce.
If you have an asian market nearby, you should be able to get galangal (looks like ginger). They also sell kaffir lime leaves in the freezer section.
If you’re feeling extra ambitious, you can make your own curry paste at home, but a lot of the store-bought pastes are great.
I’m no expert in Thai cooking, but it has been my experience that curry paste gets much hotter as you go along. A nice pan of chicken curry leftovers can go from sweat-inducing to licking-the-surface-of-the-sun in two days.
A lot of their curry dishes (as served in restaurants mind you) is crap (not literal) disguised with cococnut milk and curry. Observe basics in souteeing and simmering meat before applying the “make-up.”
I have a problem with the noodles. All noodles. The rice noodles sticking to the pan, and the wide drunken noodles being cooked to al dente.
pre-cooking your noodles is key.
for the rice noodles, make sure you have plenty of lube in the pan, and add them at the last minute, just to heat them through and coat in sauce.
with the drunken noodles, cook them to al dente, and then do the same thing i mentioned above.
My fave cookbook is True Thai by Victor Sodsook. Superb renditions of all your faves plus some special dishes.
My take is that Thai is ingredient-driven, meaning that if you have the ingredients (Thai basil, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, galangal, fish sauce et al) the rest is dead easy, unlike Chinese, which can be much more focused on technique as well as ingredients. If you don’t have the right ingredients, don’t try, subsitutions do not work.
The iconic book is Thai Food by David Thompson. PS if you make the curry paste yourself the awesomeness factor becomes expotential.
It’s been my experience that following the recipes creates Thai food that is SO MUCH BETTER than restaurant food. You and yer pals will be amazed I tell you.
I can’t spell today and can’t be arsed to fix it. Sorry folks.
Does this imply that most restaurants don’t use the authentic ingredients?
In my experience Thai food is significantly dumbed down in most restaurants. Go with someone from Thailand and you experience will be vastly different than walking in as a white guy.
What I think, Chronos, is that concentrating on a couple of dishes instead of cooking for 100 plus people seems to make a big difference when making Thai food. Haven’t experienced this kind of disparity in other cuisines… Chinese can sometimes be like that too, though. For me. Full disclosure: I cooked professionally for 20 years, so I do have chops.
This is the English language bible of Thai cooking. It’s exhaustive, not dumbed down, and doesn’t even get to the first recipe until a few hundred pages in. If you’re really really into a definitive book on the subject, that’s the one.
Placed the order last night after Soul Brother’s recommendation. Due to arrive Monday. Thanks!
I would say some substitutions or omissions are okay, as long as you have the bulk of the ingredients. It may not be 100% “authentic” Thai, but it’ll still be good. Like I’m fine with leaving out kaffir lime leaves if I don’t have them around, or I might substitute with a little bit of lime zest. It’s not the same thing, but it’s vaguely in the ballpark. Thai holy basil tastes quite different from Thai sweet basil, which is still different from Italian basil, but they all work fairly well. (My favorite Thai dish is holy basil chicken, but I almost always make it with Thai sweet basil or cinnamon basil. It is possible to find holy basil here, which has a bit of a camphor-like taste to it, but fairly difficult.) Ginger for galangal is also okay in my book. Once again, different flavor, same ballpark, but galangal is distinct and more “peppery,” for lack of better description. Luckily, galangal is not that difficult to find here. Coriander/cilantro root are difficult to find, so I substitute stems. And so on.
Drunken noodles should be made with fresh rice noodles, so there is no need to precook them. For rice stick noodles, it usually sufficient to soak them in cold water for sometime before using. Also make sure you’re using enough oil. At least this is how my Thai wife and MIL do these, ymmv. Agree on the just toss them in at the end part.
We have a local friend who complained he couldn’t get them to make the food spicy enough for him in the local restaurants. We suggested a couple of different places and my wife wrote him a “permission slip”, in Thai, that said something like “this farang is okay, please make him food as spicy as any Thai person can eat”. It seems kind of silly, but it actually worked. Now he’s got a place that knows him near his house. IME Thais find it quite amusing when they meet a non-Thai who can handle the full on spice.
I have Thompson’s book, and it is gorgeous and deep. But, it is a little daunting for the newcomer to Thai cooking—again, as pulykamell and others have noted, the recipes don’t start until well into the book. It’s sat, mostly unread, on my shelf. Probably time for me to dig it back out.
I don’t have a ‘Thai for Dummies’ recommendation though. For me, I just adapted techniques I knew from Indian cooking, only using Thai ingredients. Still trying to figure out just how to use shrimp paste, for example. And I’ll keep a look out for Thai holy basil. God knows we’ve enough Asian supermarkets here, that one of them should have it in their daunting produce sections. I have to tried to make my own curry pastes, with vastly differing results. The only constant was that I found it to be quite a bit of work. I do recommend the pre-made pastes from Mae Ploy though. The Panang curry is delicious, as is the Red. They keep awhile, not that they last that long here.
On the Thai restaurants differ between native Thais and Americans, I found the food at places like Lotus of Siam to taste much different than your run of the mill Thai restaurant. Not necessarily that much better, for my palate, just different. Though their chicken coconut soup [Edit: The shrimp coconut soup. Though I’m sure the chicken is great too.] is the finest rendition of this dish that I’ve ever had. Kind of like the difference between greasy spoon Cantonese (E.g., any place that still advertises ‘Chop Suey’,) and authentic Szechuan.
As for the spicy, I can’t do it, but my pick for the Houston area’s best Thai restaurant lists the available spiciness at the top of their menu, reserving the hottest range for “Thai Hot”, with all sorts of warnings that you’ll still be responsible for the charge if you order it and don’t eat it. I can barely get past “Warm”, but I’m a wimp. FWIW, the food at Lotus wasn’t aggressively spiced at all, at least as far as the heat goes.
Yep, it’s not exactly “Thai in Ten Easy Pieces” or anything like that. It’s an advanced cookbook, and perfect for the food geek types who want a deep understanding of the food. It’s the only Thai cookbook I have, but I’m fairly experienced in the kitchen, so I wanted something exhaustive in its approach.
That said, it really isn’t difficult to cook from. It’s not written as a doctoral dissertation, but it does require some scouting for ingredients (and Thompson does mention substitutions where applicable.)
I remember getting it around when it first came out. (And going, “It costs how much?! ($75, IIRC.) Well, O.K.?”) After all, we liked Thai food a lot, we thought we were acquainted with cooking, and this was supposed to be the gold standard Thai cookbook: time to save money by cooking more and not ordering out as much, right? Then we tried one or two of the recipes, (when I eventually found some). Those meals were bollixed up, with, importantly, me having no idea how I’d bollixed them up, and shortly thereafter I put the book back on the shelf. Kind of the same thing that happened when I bought Charlie Trotter’s eponymous cookbook, but there, I had an idea that sort of thing was going to happen. Now that I know a bit more about cooking—though nowhere near as much as pros and former pros, like yourself— and have played around with Thai cooking and Indian curries, I think I could understand more of the holistic concepts Thompson tries to convey in the book. It certainly seemed like the exhaustive text you said you were looking for.
Cooks Illustrated doesn’t do an offshoot cookbook for Thai food, do they? I think that’s more of what I was looking for, and what we originally thought “Thai Food” was going to be.