Adventures in Thai Cooking & Travel
Kasma's Favorite Brands
Kasma's
Favorite Brands
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Favorite Brands
* Tips on other Thai
ingredients
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Best Thai Brands
To create great Thai food, start with the very best ingredients. The brands listed here are the brands that Kasma uses in her own cooking because she finds she gets better food with them. If you can't find the brands locally, try one of the online or mailorder markets listed on our site.
Your info on recommended brands has been a big help too. The right fish sauce, to my family, has made the difference between a form of forced torture and a meal that disappears so quickly that I have to time its existence in milliseconds.– A Thai cook in Los Angeles
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ingredients Tips
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  | Coconut milk (gkati) – Note: Since summer 2006 Chaokoh and Mae Ploy have become less consistently creamy. In addition, a student had some trouble with a metallic taste in some cans of Chaokoh. She is not quite ready to rescind her recommendation of these two brands – she is no longer buying the cans by the case, however, preferring to shake the can for sounds of too much liquid, a sign that there is not enough of the cream. The flavor has remained good in the two brands and there's a third brand we like, as well. Have a coconut milk taste session sometime to try all the locally available brands and discover the vast differences in different brands. Kasma recommends shaking each can to make sure it contains sufficient coconut cream. Chaokoh (14 oz.) – has a delicate, sweet, natural flavor. Beware of look-alike cans of inferior brands; make sure Chaokoh has an "a-ok" in it! Mae Ploy (19 oz.) – has a good flavor and usually the most cream (but shake!). An excellent brand but hard to find is Natural Value which is preservative free. It has an excellent flavor and a good amount of cream, generally better than Chaokoh these days (August 2007). Make sure you do not get the organic version – it's got guar gum. Note that Kasma does not recommend any product that contains guar gum. The first problem is that it changes the taste so that the flavor is unnatural. The second problem is that it homogenizes the coconut milk so that you don't get a separation between the cream and the lighter coconut milk, which is essential for Thai cooking. Kasma also does not recommend "lite" coconut milk. You're paying mostly for water and won't get enough of the fat, which is where the flavor and the nutrition is. If you think that coconut oil is bad for you, please read our article The Truth About Coconut Oil. |  |
 | Curry paste (gkaeng ped) – Mae Ploy brand curry paste. These curry pastes in the plastic containers are far superior to anything Kasma has found in a can: the taste is fresher and cleaner. When making Massaman Curry (only) Kasma also uses some Mae Anong paste combined with the Mae Ploy. |  |
 | Fish Sauce (nahm bplah) Good fish sauce has a pleasant aroma of the sea, not an overwhelming smelly fishiness, and it should not be overly salty. If the bottle you have been using makes the dishes you cook taste too fishy, try a new brand. My favorite brands from among those available near my home in California, are Tra Chang (meaning "weighing scale") and Golden Boy.The latter is favored by my students for its endearing label, showing a baby boy sitting on a globe, cradling a bottle on the left arm with right thumb up. Both are excellent, adding a superb flavor to Thai dishes. Reasonably good are the King Crab, Squid and Anchovy brands. Three Crabs Brand is not recommended. Taste several brands and choose your own favorite. This site also has Kasma's articles on How to Make Fish Sauce and Using Fish Sauce to Flavor Food . |
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 | Oyster
sauce (nahm man hoi) – Should be a Thai product, which is less salty
and more flavorful than the Chinese variety and also does not contain MSG. Kasma's current favorite is Dragonfly Super Premium Flavored brand (to the left); it is a bit more expensive but the taste is worth it. Also good are the Dragonfly brand Premium Oyster sauce – and "Mae Krua" – the front of the label depicts a plump woman stir-frying while shaking sauce from a bottle into the wok. The Dragonfly brand oyster sauces are preservative free. | |
 | Peanut oil (nahm man tua) – A good oil for Thai food.. The brand she uses is Lion and Globe from Hong Kong. | |
 | Rice: Jasmine rice (kao hom mali) – Should be Thai Jasmine rice. Preferred brand is Golden Phoenix. See Kasma's article on jasmine rice. | |
| Rice: White Sticky Rice (kao niow) – Usually labelled "glutinous rice" or "sweet rice." The following brands are all good: Golden Phoenix, Butterfly, and Sanpatong (Three Ladies Brand). See Kasma's Recipe for Coconut Flavored Sticky Rice with Mango. | |
 | Roasted chilli paste (nahm prik pow) – Often labeled as "chilli paste in soya bean oil." Preferred brand is Pantainorasingh in 8 oz. and 16 oz. jars. Mae Ploy brand is also good. | |
 | Shallots, Fried (hawng daeng tawd) – Nang Fah (Tue Kung) brand distributed by V. Thai Food Products is crispy and delicious – almost as good as fresh-fried shallots. | |
 | Shrimp paste (gkabpi) – Kasma's favorite is the Klong Kohn (or Klong Kon) brand. This can be hard to find in the US because the name is not translated from the Thai script. It may say "Packed & distributed by P. Prateepthong." Look for the big green shrimp. Pantainorasingh and Tra Chang (meaning "weighing scale" and showing a picture of a scale) are ok. |  |
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Soy bean sauce (dtow jiow) – Kasma has recently begun using Dragonfly brand "Salted Soybean Sauce" – she likes its flavor plus the fact that it's preservative free. She used to use "Healthy Boy" brand's "Soy Bean Paste Formula 1" but they have recently begun adding MSG so she no longer uses it. | |
 | Soy sauce (si-ew): dark soy sauce (hua si-ew) – "Naturally brewed" or "naturally fermented." An excellent brand imported from Taiwan and now widely available in Oriental markets is Kimlan, which comes in a number of grades with varying prices. Its premium "Super Special" soy sauce is superb. | |
 | Soy sauce (si-ew): black soy sauce (si-ew dam) –
A good black soy is made by the Kwong Hung Seng company
of Thailand, which uses the dragon fly logo on the front label.
Because this company makes three different kinds of soy sauces bottled in the same kind of
bottles, make 
sure the label in front or back identifies it as "black soy sauce." The other two soy sauces
they make are "thin soy sauce" and "sweet soy sauce," which is much
sweeter and thicker than "black soy sauce." | |
| Soy sauce (si-ew): light or thin soy sauce (si-ew kao) – Kasma is no longer able to recommend a light or thin soy sauce because they all have preservatives. Fish sauce is a good substitute. | ||
 | Sriracha chilli sauce (prik Siracha, sod prik) - In both "medium" and "strong" degree. This smooth, orangish red sauce, with a consistency similar to a light ketchup, originated in the seacoast province of Sriracha on the eastern seaboard of Thailand. Because the waters off Sriracha are known to be shark infested, a well-known brand of this imported sauce has a shark as its logo. There are many good Thai brands. A good California-made brand comes in a plastic squeeze bottle, labeled as "Tuong Ot Sriracha" and has a Chicken on it. The other brand pictured (to the right) is "Grand Mountain." |  |
On This Page: Favorite Brands | Tips on Other Thai Ingredients (below) | Return to top
Printable versions (take to market): HTML | Adobe Acrobat (PDF, 356k)
Also Available: Thai recipes | Articles on Thai food & culture | Markets with Thai ingredients | Thai Ingredients | Contact Kasma
See also: Index of Ingredients
Here are a few tips to help you when negotiating the aisles of Asian markets.
 | Coconut sugar (nahm dtahn maprao) or palm sugar (nahm dtahn bpeep/buk) – If you have a choice, select a soft, rich brown sugar; if not, any kind is better than none. A soft sugar is easier to spoon out. | |
Coriander seeds (loog pak chee) – The Thai seeds are small, more sweetly perfumed, and fuller flavored.
Cumin (mellet yira) – sometimes erroneously called "fennel" or "caraway" in Thailand (i.e., on Thai packaging).
Black Sticky Rice (kao niow dahm) – Labeled "black glutinous rice" or "black sweet rice," sometimes available as "Indonesian black rice." See Kasma's recipe for Black Sticky Rice Pudding.
Tamarind (makahm) – For most areas of the country, to get consistent results in cooking, it is best to purchase tamarind in compressed blocks wrapped in clear plastic wrap, labeled simply as "tamarind," or "wet tamarind" (direct translation of the Thai term for this form of cooking tamarind - makahm bpiak). Most already have seeds and strings removed. Sometimes you'll find compressed tamarind that is labeled as "candy" although the sole ingredient listed is tamarind; this is done to avoid the necessity of having to include nutritional analysis required of imported food products.
Vinegar (nahm som) – Kasma usually uses plain white, distilled vinegar from the supermarket. You may also use any unflavored white or rice.
On This Page: Favorite Brands | Tips on other Thai ingredients | Return to top
Printable versions (take to market): HTML | Adobe Acrobat (PDF, 356k)
Also Available: Thai recipes | Articles on Thai food & culture | Markets with Thai ingredients | Thai Ingredients | Contact Kasma
About this site
Photographs Copyright © 2002 Dave Bayer, used with permission. All rights reserved.
All material on this website is Copyright © 1995 to 2008 Kasma Loha-unchit. All rights reserved.
For comments, feedback or questions, contact Kasma.
Last Updated 14 March 2008.