Thai Cuisine

Thai cooking is the clearest example of balance as a cooking principle. Every good Thai dish carries four flavours working together: sour from lime, sweet from palm sugar, salty from fish sauce, and hot from chilli.

Fish sauce

Nam pla is the source of both salt and umami in Thai cooking, and it replaces salt in most dishes. Its smell is strong in the bottle but disappears entirely in cooking, leaving a savoury depth.

Lemongrass and galangal

The Thai trio: lemongrass, galangal (a relative of ginger but sharper and more resinous) and kaffir lime leaves. None of the three is eaten — they give their aroma to the broth and are lifted out.

Tom yum

A hot and sour prawn soup, and the best-known Thai dish after pad thai. It's ready in twenty minutes, and the trick is bruising the aromatics with the back of a knife before they go in.

Curry

Thai curry is built on a fresh chilli paste (not powder, as in India) and coconut milk. Green is hotter than red, contrary to expectation, and massaman is sweeter and closer to Indian curry.