lemon grass
me give you some rules in terms of Thai cookery.1) You salt Thai savory dishes with fish sauce
2) You sweeten Thai dishes with palm sugar
3) You make your food sour with sour tropical fruits
4) All the oil that is used in Thai cookery does not have a smell in it. Therefore, sesame oil is chinese and not Thai.
5) Thais do not have emulsions in their cuisine. When we make dips or relishes, you can not blend it and make it into a mayonnaise ( emulsion ).
6) You can not cook Thai food without a paste; With one exception, that is when you make an infusion soup such as Tom Yum or Tom Kha which are both infusion soups.
7)In Thai culture we have to eat rice with everything, and the word for eating in Thai is “Kin Kao” which means, eating rice. Therefore, rice is central to our meals.
2) You sweeten Thai dishes with palm sugar
3) You make your food sour with sour tropical fruits
4) All the oil that is used in Thai cookery does not have a smell in it. Therefore, sesame oil is chinese and not Thai.
5) Thais do not have emulsions in their cuisine. When we make dips or relishes, you can not blend it and make it into a mayonnaise ( emulsion ).
6) You can not cook Thai food without a paste; With one exception, that is when you make an infusion soup such as Tom Yum or Tom Kha which are both infusion soups.
7)In Thai culture we have to eat rice with everything, and the word for eating in Thai is “Kin Kao” which means, eating rice. Therefore, rice is central to our meals.
So with this in mind, we can examine Sra Bua’s Kai/Moo Palo. This dish is braised pork belly with boiled eggs in a five-spice soy broth. It is Chinese and what makes it Thai is, when you make this dish, instead of using granulated sugar, we use palm sugar to make this stew sweet. Also, we added a Thai paste consisting of cilantro roots, garlic, and white pepper corns. So it is supposed to be slightly sweet and smelling of the paste with a hint of coconut from the sugar and not only five-spice powder. Thats why it is not Thai… and where’s the rice!I hope this is enough guidelines for beginners who are interested in Thai cuisine. Hopefully, in my next blog I will go into further details why Sra Bua’s food is not Thai but makes for an interesting experience; For me and probably for a lot of Thais who care about their own cuisine. It teaches us that we don’t have to think that Michelin guide is the “be all and end all” here since they know nothing about our food culture. How dare them give Michelin guide stars to any chefs that cook Thai food
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