Thai Cooking Tips – For the Thai Foodie

Thai cuisine is all about finding the right balance of flavours, hence, one needs to be careful with the ingredients and make sure you have exactly what it takes to create the right balance of flavours. Quality matters with Thai cooking so do make sure you have the best of ingredients too. Head over to a good Asian grocer and arm yourself with good Thai limes, Thai basil and a recommended brand of fish sauce.

The balance of taste is a very important aspect of Thai cuisine. As such a variety of dishes are chosen per meal to offer salty, sweet, sour, bitter and spicy to the meal. When planning a Thai meal, make sure to incorporate dishes that offer this balance. If you are staying at Phuket luxury villas Thailand is famous for, check out one of the cooking schools located in the area. Some villa properties such as Kata Rocks, even have their own Thai cooking schools where, participants are taught to cook from scratch, replicating a number of popular Thai dishes.

Not every dish must contain all of the flavours; you can plan individual dishes, each offering a flavour. For example, one dish should be salty, another spicy and so on. However, if you are cooking noodles, which are a popular street food, no other dishes should accompany it. Noodles are usually balanced out with all the essential flavours, such as a helping of chilli flakes, a dash of ground peanuts and a wedge of lime. Thai food is never insipid; it is packed with flavours and often cooked in lashings of thick coconut milk with loads of inspiring flavours.

A proper Thai meal should always contain rice. Thai Jasmine rice is the common favourite and is used to eat a variety of dishes. There are the red curries, green curries, thick seafood curries etc. The rice is often boiled or steamed sans any flavour as it is eaten with curries that offer a variety of tastes. Rice is merely the base which absorbs all the marvellous flavours. On the other hand, fried rice, a popular street food often eaten for lunch or dinner, is never eaten with other curries, as it is cooked similar to noodles, with other ingredients, such as meats and vegetables.

Not the marble variety, but a good old stone mortar and pestle of a large size, will be very handy when making Thai cuisine. Thais use this for grinding pastes, milling rice, creating relishes and a host of other handy uses. A mortar and pestle let you mix curry pastes without water, as opposed to a grinder, to which one needs to add water to bind the paste, thus making it more watery and less flavoursome. Try to make your ingredients from scratch, such as the curry pastes and such as, the curry pastes and coconut cream, and you will be a raved about 'Thai' cook at home.