Thai Cuisine

Our cooking class in Ko Lanta gave us a great insight into Thai cooking, as well as 30-odd recipes to try when we get home.

Thai cooking is based around sweet, salty, sour and spicy and you can change the proportions to suit your tastes. Before we left, we were really conscious to raise our spice tolerance as we knew Thai food was notoriously spicy. So for a month we had sriracha sauce with everything, although we only saw sriracha once when we were in Thailand! Whether this actually helped or whether they knew we were western and so reduced the spice levels, there was only one dish we ate that was pretty spicy and that was one where we’d chosen the spice level ourselves! We went medium which was 3 on a 5 scale, with Thai spicy being the top option. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to handle that!

There are many Thai restaurants in London so most of the food we came across here was recognisable, particularly pad thai, fried rice and massamam curry. Penang curry (apparently something that is more popular in Thailand than on Penang itself!) was also pretty tasty.

One thing we hadn’t had before was khao soi, a northern speciality curry which is more flavoursome than a red curry and is topped with deep fried egg noodles. Definitely something we’ll try to recreate at home.

One dish that stands out was a beef noodle soup dish we had for breakfast in Chumphon. It was a little street stall that was really busy all day and only served this one option. While a bit odd to have for breakfast, it was surprisingly tasty. The rest of the time we tended to have peanut butter on toast for breakfast.

Another favourite was our first meal in Thailand, from Tropical Cafe. I had deep fried cauliflower with broccoli and a lovely dipping sauce. It was so nice to have a plate of vegetables, even if some were deep fried!

Food can be super cheap in Thailand, with some dishes costing less than a pound.

However, we did splash out a bit more in Chiang Mai and had some incredible dishes, one being a mango flavoured sea bass, and another being a sharing starter platter with some great appetisers.

I did also have my first experiences of things I really didn’t like. The summer rolls on the sharing platter (top right under the purple flower) just weren’t for me, the combination of mint and coriander tasted just horrible. Not sure this bodes well for Vietnam! However this was not as bad as the durian ice cream that James had. It tasted as bad as durian smells and was absolutely disgusting.

Overall, I think I preferred Malaysian cuisine to Thai, which surprised me as I love Thai food at home! Maybe we just had more variety in Malaysia, or things were a bit more of a novelty. That said, I’m really pleased to have learnt more about Thai cooking and am excited to get home, stock up our kitchen and try out some new recipes.