Basic Thai Cooking

If you want to get into Asian cooking, I think Thai food is a great "gateway" cuisine.
When it comes to Asian cooking in general, be it Thai, Japanese, Chinese, or Vietnamese, it's all about the balance of sweet, salty, sour, and sometimes, hot. Once you master differentiating these flavours on our palate, you are ahead of the pack. Combine that with being familiar with some of the key Thai ingredients, you will be a master Thai chef. That's why this book, Basic Thai Cooking is a must have for beginners. Like the title says, it's a basic overview of Thai techniques and ingredients, with all your favorite dishes.
Here is what we made:

Tom Yum Goong
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Green Papaya Salad
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Duck and Pineapple Curry
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Sweet and Sour Vegetables
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Coconut Custard

When I do Thai classes I love to incorporate this soup. It's a favorite among customers and and mine. The reason I like teaching about this soup is because it incorporates most of the most common Thai herbs. It's like the one stop lesson in Thai ingredients.
It is a seafood type soup using all the Thai herbs. Lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime, tamarind, and fish sauce. We first made a simple shrimp stock by simmering the shells of the shrimp we put into the soup for 5 minutes. Then simmered all the herbs along with tomato and mushrooms. Season with some fish sauce, sugar and lime juice and it was done. I beautiful clear broth, hopping with flavour, and a great way to get the taste buds jump started.

Next is the salad. Buying green papaya may not be that easy. You would have to go to a good Asian store to pick one up. Essentially it's an unripe papaya. It has to get shredded either by cutting it or on a mandolin. If you have time, I would recommend go to Marche Hawaii on Marcel Laurin. It's a huge Asian grocery store that sells already shredded green papaya for salad. Very convenient.

The dressing was pretty cool in this. It's important that you have a mortar and pestle. Garlic and chili is mashed up to a paste, then peanuts and dried shrimp were added and mashed to a paste. Then some lime juice, fish sauce and sugar is added along with some cherry tomato. The mixture is mashed together to a paste/dressing and then mixed with the shredded papaya. It's garnished with some very fragrant Thai basil, cherry tomatoes and coriander. Very fresh and again, a well balanced salad with the fish sauce, lime and sugar. The papaya was nice and crunchy with a very mild sweetness to it. I'm not a fan of regular papaya, but green papaya is great used this way. A simple salad that is very typical Thai.

The main course was Duck and Pineapple curry. I think this was my favorite of the night. The great thing about Thai curry is it takes only 20 minutes to make. That is if you have a curry paste already made. In this case we did. I'm not really one to make curry paste from scratch. The grinding in the mortar takes a long time. I buy a good quality paste with no additives or preservatives. Everything that you would put in a proper Thai curry paste is in there. Nothing more, nothing less.
First we started by frying the paste in a bit of oil in a wok. The herbs and spices in the paste are all raw, so in order to bring out the most of it, it needs to be fried a bit. Be careful though, because it can burn and become bitter.
The paste is fried on medium heat for about 2 minutes until very aromatic. Then the coconut milk was added and brought to a simmer. At this point we begin to reduce the coconut milk in order for the milk to sort of separate. This is what gives a Thai curry it's sheen of spicy oil on top that we all love!!
The Duck used for this was from Chinatown. Chinese BBQ duck is needed. It's impossible to get the same flavours without it. Just drop by a good Chinese BBQ place and pick one up. It's what makes the dish. It was chopped and added to the sauce, along with some chicken stock, kaffir lime and the pineapple. After simmering for 15 minutes it was done. Seasoned with fish sauce, lime, and sugar, and Thai basil to finish. We served this on rice and it was so great. There was a HUGE bowl of it and we finished off every drop.

The vegetables on the side were very simple. Peppers, cucumber, pineapple onion and garlic were tossed with a sweet and sour mixture of tamarind, sweet chili sauce and fish sauce. A very simple concoction that took no time. It's important to cook at high temperature though to ensure the vegetables warm through without releasing too much liquid which results in soggy veg.
I realized i don't have a picture, but it was colourful and really tied together well with the curry.

Finally, the dessert. I'm not a fan of Asian desserts in general. I find them either way too gelatinous or heavy. This steamed coconut pudding seemed like it could be OK, but it reassured me, Asian desserts are not the greatest.
3 ingredients. Coconut milk, sugar, eggs. Whisk them together and steam. The recipe said 30 minutes, but it took only 15. It tasted like steamed egg with a little sweet coconut. Not my thing. Maybe with a little more sugar and less egg, this could work. But if you follow this recipe, it's not the greatest. That recipe needs some work.

so to sum up, Basic Thai Cooking is just that, basic Thai cooking. It has all the favorites people love. They use simple techniques and flavours. Nothing overly complicated and there are a lot of pictures to compliment each recipe. For those wanting to start off cooking some Thai, this is the book for you.

Next Class: Basic Japanese Cooking