Enjoy!
My Adventures with Thai Food
My first trip to Southeast Asia came at the relatively young age of nineteen, over 20 years ago, the year prior I had met Estrellita Leong, a beautiful Malaysian woman. We met while taking a cooking class in Los Angeles. We took a journey to visit her family in Malaysia and while we were in the region we visited Thailand. It was immediately apparent that Thailand had a very different food culture. Since then, Thailand’s unrestrained range of flavors have delighted my soul.
Once you arrived in the Land of Smiles (as Thailand is called), you know that this is an amazing place, a place where everyone feels welcome. There are endless offerings of food everywhere you look, the lively street corners are active with culinary exchanges, narrow alleyways are packed with people eating, chatting, and playfully laughing about the day’s happenings. Open air restaurants churn out plates of addictively spicy cuisine that can be traced to the colorful local markets that supply the country with a bounty of crisp vegetables, aromatic herbs, and fresh seafood.
In the past two decades I have dedicated my life to gaining a better understanding of this region’s culinary identity, immersing myself into the traditional food ways that have evolved over the last few thousand years. My first book, Southeast Asian Flavors was published with the goal to summarize this dynamic region and give the world a snapshot of the unique cultures of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. This book is different.
What makes this book different?
This book is about everyday cooking for the home cook. Traditional recipes? Not really. Authentic flavors? For sure! My wish is that these recipes become your “go to” recipes for when friends come over for a quick meal, or you need to whip up a weekday dinner, or for a party, or a sit-down meal with the family.
Easy Thai Cooking was created after numerous requests for me to write a book with simpler recipes than Southeast Asian Flavors. Frankly, at first I was hesitant to write an “Easy Thai Cookbook.” Fearful that I would over simplify recipes that had taken centuries to create. I have too much respect for Thai people and their food culture. Then I started to think about all the food I had eaten in Thailand that were not the iconic dishes that food writers have memorialized in thousands of Thai books, like the tom yum goong (hot and sour shrimp soup) and papaya salad (som tom), and saw that food evolves and that Thais cook just like us. Not all my meals at home are American classics. People across the US cook from a similar pantry. So I began to lighten up a bit and think of ways I could create a book with recipes that taste Thai but may not be the traditional versions that I have come to love. Rather, the food I eat when visiting a friend’s home in Koh Samui, attending a party in Chiang Mai, or walking down the street late one night in Bangkok discovering a vendor selling their version of fried ramen noodles
I spent countless hours recalling the food I cooked in my home; the recipes I created in my test kitchen; the flavors of Thailand that I fashioned from the condiments on my shelves and from my produce packed refrigerator. I began to realize that the cooking principles I employed in creating dishes that tasted Thai were not really Thai recipes per se. There is no one flavor profile that encompasses all of Thailand’s food but there are some complex flavors conjured by combining ingredients in balance and employing cooking techniques that produces tastes that are distinctively Thai. It was an “ah-ha” moment, excited that I figured out the focus of the book, I began to pour through my notes, recipe books, thousands of photos, hundreds of videos that I have compiled over the years. I did look at some classic dishes and constructed recipes that pay homage to them but don’t quite replicate them.
This was not a new process for me. I taught the culinary arts full time for many years, and while teaching at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, I had to figure out a way to teach authentic food without over simplifying it. I found myself saying “There are a lot of right ways to make a traditional dish…and there are a few ways to do it wrong.” For instance, using heavy cream instead of coconut milk in a Thai curry changes it all together and, in my opinion, it’s no longer Thai food. Now, what if I used a premixed curry paste instead? Well, if you go to local markets in Thailand you will see mounds of curry paste waiting to be scooped up and taken home to create an authentic curry. So I began to accept that selecting some key pre-made ingredients could save considerable time and get me closer to creating a simpler recipe for the home cook and still retain the taste of real Thai food.
Some of the recipes that follow I have enjoyed in Thailand, others are renditions of classics that are sure to satisfy, and then there are some recipes that I created. These began with the first step of what I like to call “Cooking on Paper.” Step one: decide on a flavor profile that is typically Thai: a salad with a sour-salty and sweet dressing, based on raw ingredients, tossed to order and accented with fresh herbs. Then I look back at the many times I have been to Thailand and try to recall dishes that match that description. Step two: read through the dozens of Thai books I have amassed looking for common threads that run through that style of recipe. Step three: formulate the resulting dish. Using my computer, I used a recipe template, “guesstimating” the ingredient amounts. I would do this for a few weeks, compiling enough recipes to fill a few days of intense cooking. Then I go to the kitchen to try it out, I prepare all the ingredients and keep them measured separately to get a feeling if they are in the right proportions.
I have even developed a technique for what I call “cooking like a chef.” Suppose I am making a stir-fry sauce that I can’t figure out the exact amount for the ingredients. I weigh each open container and enter this into one column of a spreadsheet, then cook like I normally would: using my heart, hands and mind. Then, after I get the right taste, I weigh these ingredients again and enter them in the next column and it calculates how much I used. Then I convert to volume measures and edit the recipe. I print out this recipe and get everything measured out ahead of time, prepare it as written, and make any necessary adjustments along the way. Even if it comes out perfectly, I always test it one more time. Every time I made the recipe I would ask the same very core question: “Does this taste Thai?”
So there you have it, simple recipes that have an authentic taste but may not be a traditional recipes.
A Snapshot of Traditional Thai Culture
Many factors influence and create the characteristics of a culture.