Adventures in Thai Cooking & Travel
Notes on Thai Cooking
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Roasted Chilli Paste (Nahm Prik Pow)
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Notes on Thai Cooking
Thai cooking, as you may already have discovered, is more than simply following a recipe. It involves having an intimate knowledge of all the ingredients and, most importantly, knowing how to combine them in order to harmonize and balance all the flavors just the way you want. Kasma's book, It Rains Fishes is really a Thai cooking course which will introduce all the ingredients and teach you how to use them.
As the popularity of Thai cuisine has soared worldwide, so has the proliferation of Thai cookbooks. Many simplify the recipes for Western kitchens and alter spice flavors to suit milder Western palates. Others present recipes truer to their original form. Then there are those written by chefs in Thailand who have little idea of the availability and degree of potency of the herbs grown and sold in Western markets. Americans who frequent Thai restaurants at home or have visited Thailand and have grown used to the full scale of spicy flavors may have a difficult time trying to duplicate their favorite dishes from recipes in a cookbook.
Often, it is not the recipes in these cookbooks that are inadequate, but the Western habit of taking recipes at face value, using precisely the quantities specified, renders them unremarkable. For those who do experiment, their unfamiliarity with the fundamental principles of Asian cooking limits the range of their creative endeavors. Most cookbooks are largely "recipe books" and assume a basic knowledge of how to work with food; a basic "food sense" is something difficult to communicate with words and is usually acquired from years of experience in working with various kinds of food in a particular style of cooking.
Whether cooking Thai food in an American kitchen or in Thailand, adjustments in recommended specifications are frequently necessary. The batch of herbs today may not be as fresh as a week ago or were grown locally under milder conditions compared to imported ones from hotter, tropical climes. Or, the herbs called for are not available fresh and require you to substitute with dried forms. There are other variables, too; one brand of fish sauce may be saltier or fishier than another, one batch of palm sugar sweeter than the next, and so on. In addition, when making substitutions for ingredients that aren't available, knowing the potential effects of such substitutions on the remaining ingredients is essential in order to avoid major sacrifices in flavor. Ingredients do not work in isolation; rather, they interact with one another to produce results that may be totally unexpected.
You may also enjoy Kasma's articles The Spirit of Thai Cooking and Cooking "to Taste"
Recipes Index of Thai recipes | The Spirit of Thai Cooking | Cooking "to Taste"
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Drawings Copyright © 1995 Margaret DeJong. 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 18 June 2007.