Thailand, Part One

A brief introduction and a focus on pad (stir-fry)

Sawatdee Ka,

For those Westerners with little exposure to Thai food, it’s probably a cuisine you don’t think much about. You’d likely even have a little trouble pointing out Thailand on a map. For those more familiar, Thailand offers a cuisine deeply connected to the land and its people. There is an extreme focus on balance that creates dishes that sometimes overwhelm you with their perfection in the combination of ingredients. I’ve been lucky enough to visit Bangkok and have carried a love this food back with me for the last decade.

Thailand being centered in Southeast Asia, Thai food has been influenced by,  and has influenced many of the surrounding nations. The Chinese brought noodles and introduced stir-frying. India can be directly linked to the development of curries. Northern Thailand, especially toward the west, is heavily influenced by Burmese cuisine and the use of fermented ingredients. The list could go on for a while, and I will dive more into these these in future explorations of Thai food. The last influence I will mention today will be familiar to anyone who has been reading this newsletter, Portugal. Yet again, Portugal was responsible for the introduction of chiles from the Americas, now an essential ingredient in many Thai dishes.

Where I live, in Portland OR, Thai food is found in the corner takeout places, but it has also developed at the fine-dining level. Much started with Andy Ricker, of Pok Pok fame, but has also expanded into a killer tasting menu at Langbaan and upscale Thai-Chinatown at Yaowarat. Thai food has a way of getting into your soul. In my opinion, Thai food deserves the same respect that many give French and Japanese. 

The key ingredients of Thai cuisine are lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, basil (Thai and Holy), cilantro, chiles, fish sauce, palm sugar, rice, and noodles. You’ll also see the use of tropical fruits such as mango and limes. Dishes are a little different with regards to the protein in that you can make the same dish with a variety of proteins rather than the dish itself being associated with a specific protein. Variations may change some ingredients, but for the most part the type of protein seems less important. For instance, laab, a meat salad, can be made with any ground meat, including fish. I’ll also take a moment to point out something I consider a little unique to Thai cuisine;  they have many salads, but those salads don’t necessarily mean being based on greens. It means “dressed”. Serious Eats recently published a neat article on the different types of Thai salads, which focuses on the technique as much as the ingredients.

One of the ingredients I listed is arguably more important than any other. Can you guess which one? That’s right, it’s rice. In my quest to get a better understanding of what makes Thai food so special, I’ve started reading It Rains Fishes, by Karma Loha-Unchit. Rice is addressed right at the beginning of the book. There are five Thai goddesses who represent the five material elements of fire, earth wind, water, and RICE. You read that correctly, rice is so important to Thai people that it has its own goddess who is revered at the same level as the the core elements of life. Mae Pro Posop is the mother goddess of rice.

The final thing I will mention before we get to the pictures is the focus on balance. Many cuisines we have looked at focus on the balance of a single meal. Koreans use banchaan in this manner and the Japanese use many different dishes to create a balanced offering. Thai cuisine does this as well, but even more so balances everything about a recipe. A single dish of food will often hit sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and bitter at the same time. The ability for a dish to contain everything, completely in balance, is the thing that first grabbed me about Thai food and the thing that really makes me curious to explore this cuisine as far as I can go with it.

OK, onto the food. This week I focused on ‘pad’ dishes, meaning those that are stir-fried.

Eggplant with Thai basil. Admittedly, this looks a bit of a mess. I think a lot of it is the eggplant getting mushy and a high fat content in the ground beef, of which I used too much. I would like to try this again with ground pork and Thai eggplant. Regardless, it was delicious. I served it with prik nam pla, a condiment made from lime juice, fish sauce, chiles, garlic, and shallots. It makes everything it touches better with bit of heat and acid. It really helped cut through the richness of the dish.

The second dish is pad kra pao. Basically a stir fry if ground meat with chiles and holy basil. Holy basil is very hard to find here, so Palin of Hot Thai Kitchen suggests using Italian basil as a substitute; the flavors being much closer than Thai basil. It’s excellent with prik nam pla and a fried egg on the rice. This is easily one of my favorite Thai dishes, period. It’s simple to make and hits every part of the tongue.

Ohh that egg!

The last dish I made for the week (Deanna was out of town, so I only ended up cooking 3 things due to the amount of leftovers) was pad see ew, one of my favorite Thai noodle dishes. It translates directly as “fried with soy sauce”. While shopping for the ingredients, I was unable to find fresh wide rice noodles, so I had a super-chefy moment and decided to sub them for Korean rice cakes. In my head, I thought the chew that they offer a dish would be an interesting change up. I know it isn’t traditional by any means, but I will absolutely make it again this way. It was just perfect. It was also with this dish that I discovered that I have finally seasoned my wok enough that it can fry an egg without sticking. I consider that a personal success.

Ten years ago, my wife and I had the great opportunity to visit Bangkok. We have more pictures somewhere, but for this post I’ll show a handful highlighting some of the food we ate while we were there.