Preparing Thai Food
If you haven't brought Thai food into your kitchen yet you would be surprised how easy it is to prepare and how it can make a delicious addition to your recipe book. We have some great recipes to get you started cooking Thai food, but before you start perfecting your pad thai and shrimp satay take a minute to learn the basics of what goes into Thai food.
Much like American cuisine Thai food has its staple ingredients and dishes. But as you might expect they are not the salt and pepper that we usually grab for when we get into the kitchen. Most Thai food is shaped by 4 flavors which co-inside with 4 staple ingredients: fish sauce provides the salty flavors, sugar the sweet, lemons or limes provide the sour and chili provides the infamous Thai kick.
It is the balance of these four essential ingredients that is at the heart of most Thai dishes. Great Thai food has all of these flavors and allows you to balance them to your liking. So if you don’t like spicy food lay off the chili and your dish will be just as good and authentic, it just won’t leave you with a mouth of fire. Or if you like sour flavors and enjoy a little kick add some extra lemon and chili and enjoy.
One of the hardest thing about finding the balance of these ingredients is sometimes just finding them. Items like rice noodles for your pad thai, or white rice are usually readily available at your local super market. Items like fish sauce, chilies or chili powder may be harder to come by, but they can be found at your local Asian supermarket, or can be bought online if you don’t live in a city near an Asian market.
Most traditional Thai food is made with bite-sized pieces of chicken, pork, shrimp or beef and the four are generally substituted freely for one another freely. So your spicy basil chicken can easily be turned into spicy basil shrimp by simply swapping shrimp for chicken. It is traditionally made in a wok, but if you don’t have a wok don’t fret a large frying pan will work just fine.
When it gets to the table Thai food is usually served with rice, or a rice derivative (pad thai is made with rice noodles). A traditional Thai meal consists of 3 or 4 dishes served family style with rice and eaten with a fork and a spoon.
Those are the basics. But the fun thing about Thai food is that it is open to interpretation, so if you haven’t tried cooking it yet let us show you how in our recipe section.
