It's a quite effortful dish to make. Ducks here are not easy to find and not fresh, usually frozen. After defrosting, they will have to properly roast it while in Thailand, you can source good roasted ducks from somewhere else. I also suspect that they use canned red curry instead of making it themselves.
If you have some expat Thai friends, they would sometimes make it. Befriend these people! Some good food would drop from time to time.
yes, that one! i even tried making it myself a couple of times (from bottled curry paste) but as you say it's quite an effort and i wasn't really satisfied with the results. i'll have to try making the curry paste from scratch at least once and see how it goes.
>Can agree but after spending some time learning thai dishes, there are a lot that are really not that healthy. There's a lot of sugar in dishes to offset the bitterness of fish sauce and other ingredients.
As a Thai, I can confirm this. Not really to offset, but make the dish more flavorful. They sometimes use a lot of palm sugar, but... maybe that's a tad healthier than cane.
A someone who enjoy the cuisine but isn’t deeply steeped in the methods, I would say it aims for balance in individual dishes in a way the some cuisines do not.
There are certainly other culinary traditions that look for balance but they may approach it across a multi course meal, and think of it in different terms. The balance of salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and fattiness in some Thai dishes is quite remarkable though.
That's because 98% of Thai restaurants in Thailand are not artisanal like Japanese or Italian. Most Thai restaurants there are family style, mass-produced ones. There is no even a formal recipe for a Thai dish. The most popular ones among people are more like taverns than classy restaurants, which are common elsewhere in the world.
The upper class citizens would find Western or Japanese food palatable so the market for really well made Thai food is limited. Because Nahm is owned by a westerner, who really dedicates himself perfecting the traditional Thai recipes (rumors say he went to study the old Thai recipes transcripted on leaf scrolls) is phenomenal. Only the elites of the society would be able to afford to eat there. It was possible for a guy of that profile, but would be really hard for a lay Thai person to have a business like that. To most Thai people, catering to students and the teenagers have proven far more profitable.
These are all good points. But it's still astonishing to me that she could not find someone INSIDE of Thailand who knew or studied the old Thai recipes. I would have figured there would be SOMEONE. Nobody could recommend anybody to her who would have been able to help her. Mind you, I have no idea how big her social and professional network was at the time, only that she went around asking Thai chefs and found nobody.
It's really nobody. That's the sad part. Also, like most Asian cultures, some recipes are kept secret and only passed down in the family, if ever at all. Knowledge like this is a competitive advantage, sometimes even in the same family.
I'm a big fan of David Thompson, but one difference between western food and Thai (and Southeast Asian) food is that western food is more technique based whereas Thai food is more skill based.
A traditional se asian kitchen is a wok and a rice cooker. Most thai dishes use a small number of techniques (curry pastes, deep frying, etc), but there is much skill in what ingredients the cook uses and what proportions. Change a few variables and you have yourself a whole new dish.
Western cooking delights in dishes that are technically unique, for example the dish ravioli refers not to any particular ingredient but to a technique. In this case, recipes are supremely important for preserving dishes.
For Thai food it is hard to reduce the skill and judgement of a cook down to a recipe.
I grew up in SEA and I have dishes that were only shown to me. Not that we still care about secrets or even have any. But that’s what was done so that’s how I learned it. My attempts at writing these down all failed. Never quite right.
I wonder if telling the story of the recipe, both it’s context, your account of learning it be it as it may, and a description of the experience of preparing the dish itself may be more efficient than writing the recipe down as a series of facts? What do you think?
Really fascinating point that I’ll admit I think is very valuable beyond just the realm of cooking.
I wouldn’t say so. I learned these by watching it get made and helping countless times. There’s nothing hard about them. They could be recipes if a more skilled cook was involved.
Padthai was newly developed in the past century as an internationalized quick dish and to unite people from different cultures: Chinese, Laotian, Indian, etc.
I did hear that the government in early 2000s did try to promote Thai cultures, but I highly doubt it's still being continued as it was ousted in 2006 while many people from the cabinet were branded as evils/enemies.
About the ingredients, that's so true. One notably example is most if not all Thai basil dishes aren't actually cooked with Thai basil leaves; they're cooked with holy basil leaves (in Thai, Thai basil leaves aren't even called basil). Holy basil leaves are in fact considered a rare item to be found in the states as most Asian markets don't carry them. Some Thai restaurants would sell them at a really high price like $8 for what you would buy $1 Thai basil leaves at an Asian market.
As for restaurants, it's kind of a trend, sometimes a social status, for a person to have graduated in a developed country. While studying, they usually work at these Thai restaurants to earn pocket money and also socialize with the local Thai community. I would attribute the growth of Thai restaurants in the US to the fact that these students find it easier to earn much more money than having to work in the field they have studied for their whole life, or to a Thai housewife who finds a business opportunity - the same food they cook in Thailand can be sold for 6+ times more in the US (a papaya salad is sold at around $1 and the companion sticky rice is around 30 cents). Most dishes sold here are also considered easy dishes, meaning can be cooked quickly or without much effort. A larb dish is a quicky, but compare that to layered pandan desert... that takes hours while sold for 50 cents on the street in Bangkok.
A tip from me, if you want cheap authentic Thai food, go to your local Thai temple on the weekend. The cooks usually bring their fresh cooked Thai food as offerings to the monks at lunch time. It's kinda Thai thing. Once the monks take parts of the offerings, the remaining food will be shared. You're expected to donate or participate during the prayer, but after that, we're talking about good Thai buffet here lol. $10 or $15 is already considered a lot for donation. If you're new, just tell you're interested in the rituals. Most of them are friendly and will try to guide you all the way through. You'll likely be fed as they want you to try their home dish.
> in Thai, Thai basil leaves aren't even called basil
In Thai there are completely separate words for different types of basil. There's no word that just means basil, so holy basil and other varieties aren't called basil either.
Yup, Thai basil (โหระพา, ho-ra-pa) is the kind of leaf you add to soups and Isaan salads. Holy basil (กะเพรา, ga-prao) is the kind you get in most stir fries. Lemon basil (แมงลัก, maeng-lak) the seeds are in deserts and and leaves used in some curries and soups but uncommon. Most words that were related in the sense would share the same noun before the adjective, but they look and sound like entire separate herbs.
That being said, from a taxonomic standpoint, Thai basil, lemon basil, and western Sweet Basil are both varieties of Ocimum basilicum, while Holy Basil or tulsi is a separate species Ocimum tenuiflorum
I'm sad... I used like their slogan Don't be evil. Now it's like when Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm relabels it to 4 legs are good, but 2 legs are better.
As a Thai person, the cooks know that if they have non Thai guests, especially "Farangs", they need to tone down their spicyness. You have to insist them or bring a local to have them make it hot.
Absolutely, the first argument is always the country is "free" (Thai means free) because of their heroic ancestors in the past. The freedom in this case means never being colonized by other countries. The irony is we have never been freed from them,and all the propagandas are made so that we must feel indebted. There's a song playing every Dec 5 whole day on almost every street saying our value is less than a speck of dust under their feet. Your kids are taught to sing these kind a songs every day as well in some schools.
Secondly you are not taught to question, and rather criticized for questioning. Not sure if any of you have been in a class with a Thai student, but I bet they all are quiet. In a family, you must never question your parents or you will be punished. These royal families (plural because there are many) have a pronoun like your royal father mother etc, so know your place.
3rd, they are very coupled to religious institutions and it's like a heresy to even talk about them. Any bad happened to those anti monarchy people are believed to have conducted bad karmas. It's stupid, but there are many stations that would revere them as the reincarnation of the Buddha.
Last for now but there are more, they have high influence on the military and Thai conglomerates. The king even has his own unit, brainwashed to just serve him. Thai conglomerates will marry their children with the royal families just to gain more power and respect.
It's a quite effortful dish to make. Ducks here are not easy to find and not fresh, usually frozen. After defrosting, they will have to properly roast it while in Thailand, you can source good roasted ducks from somewhere else. I also suspect that they use canned red curry instead of making it themselves.
If you have some expat Thai friends, they would sometimes make it. Befriend these people! Some good food would drop from time to time.