It’s About My Cooking
My Recipes and
Thai Food
My recipes are made from
scratch. I would like Thai food lovers who love to cook to adventure with
authentic Thai food at home. Some recipes can consume a lot of time, but you
can make some parts of them (for example tamarind sauce or curry paste) in
advance and keep them in the fridge, or freeze them for weeks or months. You
will enjoy and value the result – real Thai food.
Thai cuisine has influences
from many different cultures. Through trade, religion and influences of
neighbouring countries and cultures, unique Thai flavours have developed. Among
these cultures, Chinese has had the biggest influence on Thai cooking.
Stir-frying was original a Chinese cooking technique and stir-fried dishes are
popular in Thailand today: from street food to dishes in high-end
restaurants. For example, ¨Pad Pak Bung
Fai Daeng (stir-fired morning glory) and Pad Khana Fai Daeng (stir-fried
Chinese broccoli) are two favourites.
In Thailand, we call this style of cooking, “Pad Fai Daeng”, which means
stir-frying in a very hot wok with flames coming up around it. You can see food
vendors cooking these dishes on the streets in Bangkok or in other big cities.
High heat is important for stir-frying vegetable dishes. While we cannot
stir-fry vegetable dishes with a flaming fire in our houses, a hot wok is still
important for making these dishes. The right method for stir-frying vegetables
is to cook them over high heat and for a short period of time. This produces a crisp and fresh texture. A
plain steel wok is the best.
How My Cooking
Starts
I am familiar with both Thai
and Chinese cooking, as I was born into a big Chinese-Thai family and grew up within
that cultural environment. My mother taught me to cook at a very young age and Hakka
Chinese cuisine was the first cuisine I learned. The first thing that kids have
to learn is how to cook rice, which is the most basic lesson. Even cooking
plain rice has a formula – knowing the right amount of water for the rice (we
don’t measure with a cup, but use our index finger to measure the depth of the
water instead. But, that alone will not
always be correct, because there is another factor: the rice. Is the rice from a new crop or an old
crop? Or, what type, or variety of rice
is it? New crops need less water than old crops and some varieties of rice need
more water and some less. When I was young, we used wood and charcoal to cook
food, so as well as knowing just how much water was enough for the rice, it was
important to learn when to take the burning wood out from under the rice pot
and leave only the charcoal for slow roasting until the rice was totally
cooked; can’t let it get too brown at the bottom of the pot!
Food Played a Big
Role in The Community.
We lived in a small suburban
town near a small city of 26,000 people, near the Thai-Malaysian border. Agriculture -- rubber plantations and rubber
plantation products -- is the mainstay of the economy in this region and, even though
this town is small, it is a multi-cultured place with ethnic Malay, Thai and
Chinese all represented, there. This small town also has one of the biggest
Chinese communities in Thailand. The first group of Chinese migrated to this
part of Thailand over 200 years ago, coming north from Malaysia. Over time, the Chinese who settled here came
and went and more of their fellows or families came, too. Most of them were
from Southern China, but there were many sub-groups of Chinese, each speaking a
different dialect and each sub-group had slightly different cultures. This difference was also reflected in their
food.
We lived in a Hakka Chinese
community.
We often had special events
in our community, like weddings, new house celebrations, senior people’s
birthday parties (Chinese people there don’t celebrate their birthday until
they are old), new born baby celebrations, etc. Some of these events, like
funerals, even lasted for days. Food would always play a big role at these
events and people would volunteer to do cooking. Every household had a big wood-burning stove
and ours was no exception. Often, I would hang around in the kitchen helping
the adults and it was a wonderful way to learn and develop an intimate
understanding of food and ingredients.
 |
| Wood-burning stove |
Life During My
Childhood
 |
| We used to grow vegetables here |
My mother was a good cook
and hard-working wife. Besides working and taking care of the family’s rubber
plantation, she also grew her own vegetables. She would bring us with her while
she worked and taught us about growing vegetables. We always had fresh
ingredients for our food and, even though our town was just a few kilometres
away from the city, we had two butcher shops, one grocery store, three coffee
shops and one noodle shop down the street. Everything was fresh – tofu and soy
milk freshly made every morning from the grocery shop; it was so good! I
haven’t had any really good tofu from anywhere since then.
I am the middle child in my
family. I always took the cooking duty while my older sisters or brothers were
helping my parents at the rubber plantation or, later, when they were away working
in Bangkok. I probably got to do the
cooking because my mother saw I was good at it and that I enjoyed it.
Because we couldn’t get
latex (sap) from the trees when they are wet (the trees are vulnerable to
infection if you tap them when they are wet), on rainy days we didn’t work. So,
besides cooking and eating at home, we also went often to the city for lunches
or for a fourth meal of the day, called “a leisure night meal”; especially in
rainy season. In the city, there were
many different kinds of food available from the different Thai, Chinese and
ethnic Malay cultures.
Life in Bangkok
In my teens, I moved to
Bangkok. This is Thailand’s biggest city and now has a population of about 10
million. There was a lot to explore there and, because I love food and love to
cook so much, I would experiment with all the different foods available; I had
a veritable restaurant in my kitchen!
During my life in Bangkok I
saw lots of movement and change in society; I witnessed deep changes in the economy,
in the people and in the food. I remember the incredibly busy traffic in the city
caused by the building of Bangkok’s first expressway, but also the amazing increase in the number of street food vendors
There were many waves of
people who migrated into Bangkok from upcountry (rural areas) and provincial
cities at that time. The group that I observed most significantly was those
Chinese-Thais from the Southern Thai provinces, where I came from. Partly due to the violence associated with
the communist insurgencies of the time (60s and 70s), many young Chinese-Thais,
like my brothers, sisters and neighbours, were sent to work in factories in
Bangkok and its neighbouring provinces, as soon as they were teens. They generally took jobs in garment and textile
factories, or small family run leather factories and the like. Later on, other
family and friends joined them: some came to attend college, some to join their
siblings in starting up small family factories of their own and others became
street vendors of various sorts, including, of course, food. These Chinese-Thai street
As Thailand grew and became semi-industrialized,
still other groups moved in as a cheap labour, taking the place of those
earlier migrants from the south. This is
particularly so of people from Isaan (North-East Thailand). Isaan is primarily
an agricultural area and is the most populous, the driest and the poorest
region of the country. When there’s not
enough water for farming, or often during the growing season, before harvest,
people from Isaan migrate to Bangkok as itinerant labour and, these days, even
to other parts of Thailand and abroad, as well.
They usually take jobs as taxi drivers, or as labourers in international
factories and small family run garment factories.
At the same time, they sell
their food to their fellow North Easterners on the streets, in corners of
factories and wherever else they are.
Isaan food has become popular all over Thailand and internationally,
this way. These days, I’m sure everyone knows of Som Tum!
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