Tips and tricks for cooking beautiful Thai food at home
Thai cuisine is renowned worldwide for its bold flavours, aromatic herbs, and vibrant colours. Mastering Thai cooking techniques allows you to recreate the authentic flavours of this rich culinary tradition in your own kitchen.
According to experts, the key to cooking any Thai dish is balancing the five key flavours – sour, bitter, salty, sweet and spicy, which takes skill to master.
Here are the best tips and tricks for cooking authentic Thai food at home.
Use coconut milk to make soups, stews and curries
Coconut milk is a great base cooking liquid for soups and stews. In a large pot with a little bit of oil, sauté onions, garlic, and whatever other aromatic vegetables you are using for about five minutes, then add spices and salt (and meat if you are using it), then pour in your coconut milk and let the mixture simmer for about an hour.
Coconut milk is thicker than regular dairy milk or cream, which makes dishes feel heartier.
Its high-fat content also tempers spicy things, which is why Thai cooks use it all the time in spicy curries. Plus, it is vegan and has a long shelf life.
Use garlic
Garlic is a healthy food used in many Thai cuisines as well as traditional medicine. Garlic can help reduce the risk of heart disease, lower your blood pressure and cholesterol, and improve your immune system. Garlic adds flavour, aroma, and depth to the dishes.
If you look closely or check Thai recipes, you will see many dishes containing garlic in them. Thai stir-fried dishes all start with garlic. Soup and curry are based on garlic. Thai people also use garlic in a mixture to marinate meat.
It is used in many types of dipping sauces and pastes. So, the secret lies in the garlic cloves.
Include broth
Thai cooking limits oil in stir-fry noodles by using a broth. Add a small amount of oil, in the beginning, to fry the garlic and extract the garlic flavour.
Turn up the heat and add your sauces to create your broth with the fried garlic to get perfectly cooked and delicious stir-fry noodles.
Understand your seasoning
The nice thing about Thai curries is that they can be tweaked and adjusted along the way using seasoning. The most common seasoning is palm sugar and fish sauce. These two ingredients need to be cooked to be incorporated into the dish.
The palm sugar needs heat for it to melt and marry into the liquid, and the fish sauce should be added to a boiling curry to mellow out its fishiness.
When you add this seasoning; it requires a bit of time. It will take a minute or two for the palm sugar to sweeten your dish.
With this added cooking time in mind, palm sugar and fish sauce might not always be the best options for your final seasoning adjustments.
Perhaps your pumpkin or protein or eggplant is on the verge of overcooking and you do not want to boil it more. In this case, you can add salt or sugar to replace the fish sauce or palm sugar.
They will add a touch of sweetness or saltiness and will melt right away to season your dish off the heat.