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Cooking According To Region
Regional Thai Cuisine Thailand can be divided into five main culinary regions, the north, the northeast, the south (including the Gulf of Thailand), the central plains, and of course, Bangkok. Each region has its own cooking style according to available ingredients and local tastes. Try sampling recipes from the various regions to get a feeling for Thai cooking as a whole. If you’re like me, you will find your culinary instincts relate best to some areas more than others. This, in turn, will give you a clue as to where you might like to travel if ever you have a chance to visit Thailand and taste Thai food at its magnificent source. The North (including ...
Northern Thai Food
Thai Food & Cooking : "Thai food offers a variety of flavours and tastes. The subtle mixing of herbs and spices and market-fresh ingredients makes dining a special culinary experience." Eating ranks high on the Thai scale of pleasures, and meals are informal affairs. The staple is rice, either ordinary or glutinous, accompanied by a variety of dishes that can be eaten in almost any order, and seasoned to individual taste with several condiments such as fish sauce and chilli peppers. Most often there will be a soup of some kind, a curry, a steamed or fried dish, a salad, and one or more basic sauces. Desserts may consist of fresh fruit or one of the ...
Get To Know Thai Food
When you think of Thai food, you would think of the 'Hot and Spicy’ taste and probably believe that all Thai food are very hot and spicy. That is a misunderstanding. And you may also think that we eat everything by chopsticks. That is also not true. More than 50% of Thai food are not hot and spicy at all. And chopsticks will be use when we eat noodle only. We are not Chinese or Japanese who like to eat almost everything by chopsticks. If you have been to Thailand, you may have a question that why the taste and the texture of Thai food in Thailand are different from Thai food you have eaten in Thai ...
Benefits of Chilies
Eating chillies regularly could help people get a good night's sleep and keep their hearts healthy, an Australian university study has found. Researchers at the University of Tasmania spent the past 18 months studying the potential health benefits of chillies on a group of 10 volunteers, national radio reported Monday. Some in the group were given 15 grams of chilli each day, while others did not have any, and Associate Professor at the School of Life Sciences Dominic Geraghty said the results were promising. "Chilli consumption may improve your sleep and, of course, the quality of your sleep very much also influences your cardiovascular health," he said. "Chilli might be a neutroceutical, in other words a ...
Health Benefits of Thai Soup Under Study
For years, zesty Tom Yum Gung soup has been a mainstay of Thai cooking. And now researchers are thinking it just might have cancer-fighting ingredients as well as good taste. "Tom Yum Gung is Thailand's most favorite soup," according to Chef Rolf Schmitz of the Regent Hotel's Spice Market restaurant. "It's a shrimp soup with herbal ingredients like coriander, lemon grass, lime leaves and even galangal roots." Also called hot-and-sour soup, the dish often includes straw mushrooms and a variety of chilies. A recent joint study by Thailand's Kasetsart University and Japan's Kyoto and Kinki Universities has found that the ingredients in Tom Yum Gung soup are 100 times more effective in inhibiting cancerous tumor growth ...
What to do with all your Chili Peppers
One of the questions that we received from our readers is ‘What to do with the over-abundance of hot peppers I grew in my garden?’ This is a great problem to have. Chilis are great to grow, but it's easy to grow far more than you can eat when they're ripe. They can be dried, preserved and turned into delicious condiments. First, let’s start from fresh to dry. Fresh Peppers Frozen: Fortunately, Thai chili peppers freeze really well. I wash the peppers and air dry (or even wipe with soft cloth) to get rid of the moisture. Freeze with stem intact in a freezer bag. It’s good for a year. After a year, they seem to lose the ...
The tale of 2 red curry pastes
Red Curry Paste: how well do you really know your red curry paste? The name “Red Curry Paste” has actually been put, by different food suppliers, on two very different pastes, Basic Red Curry Paste (prig gang kua) and Red Curry Paste (prig gang ped). Basic Red Curry Paste is made of dried chili peppers, salt, galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime zest, garlic,cilantro roots, shallots and shrimp paste while Red Curry Paste, takes the Basic Red Curry Paste and adds toasted peppercorns, cumin andcoriander. How are the pastes used? The Basic Red Curry Paste is used in making Basic Red Curries or Gang Kua. Gang kua is a type of curry that often has added grilled fish or dried ...
Why coconut milk curdles?
I often hear the instruction to stir often when cooking coconut milk otherwise it’ll turn into curds. I never questioned the common wisdom, just accepted that that is what we do when we cook with coconut milk. Recently, I met with a ThaiTable reader who asked why her coconut milk curdles. I promised her I’d find out why. Then I took the question straight to my biochemist sister who gave me a scientific paper to read. Roughly, raw coconut milk consists of coconut oil, protein and water. In its natural state and at room temperature (think tropical island), the protein acts as an emulsifier, keeping the coconut milk looking homogenous. An emulsifier bonds oil with a protein ...
Best Thai Food
Thai food - as exotic as it is - needs no introduction. Nowadays you can find at least one Thai restaurant in most western towns but Thai food in Thailand itself is a whole new experience. The juxtaposition of sweet, sour, hot and salty flavours is what makes Thai cuisine so distinct and nowhere is it more noticeable than in the Thai national soup tom yam. Thai chefs are extremely talented in appropriating foreign dishes and making them their own - such as in a typical noodle dish. Forget green salad for a while - enjoy a hearty papaya salad, otherwise known as som tam, while Thai green curry is as distinct a dish as they ...
Eating Thai Food
The History of Thai Food Thai food is internationally famous. Whether chilli-hot or comparatively bland, harmony is the guiding principle behind each dish. Thai cuisine is essentially a marriage of centuries-old Eastern and Western influences harmoniously combined into something uniquely Thai. Characteristics of Thai food depend on who cooks it, for whom it is cooked, for what occasion, and where it is cooked. Dishes can be refined and adjusted to suit all palates. Originally, Thai cooking reflected the characteristics of a waterborne lifestyle. Aquatic animals, plant and herbs were major ingredients. Large chunks of meat were eschewed. Subsequent influences introduced the use of sizable chunks to Thai cooking. With their Buddhist background, Thais shunned the use of ...
