Thai Restaurant Flavours

If you’ve enjoyed a wonderful meal out at a good Thai restaurant, you may be wondering how to reproduce some of the dishes you’ve tasted at home. Thai cuisine is quite simple to prepare, without too many complicated cooking techniques, but you do have to have the right ingredients to make it taste authentic at home. You also have to learn the balance of flavours, sweet, sour, salt and spicy, but that will come with experience, the more you taste good Thai cooking.

Thai cuisine emphasizes good fresh ingredients and uses fresh herbs and spices rather than dried ones. To cook Thai cuisine at home, these are some of the essential basic ingredients you’ll need; obviously the fresh herbs and spices should be bought fresh on the day you will use them for the best possible flavour:

Fish sauce or nam pla is an essential ingredient in many Thai dishes. It provides the salty seasoning to counterbalance the sweet element of coconut milk and sweet herbs. Made of small salt-fermented fish, it should be clear and brownish in colour and provides minerals and vitamins as well as protein.

Thai chilli peppers are used in so many dishes and sauces that Thai cuisine would be unrecognizable without them. Used to give heat to curry paste, in soups and dipping sauces, there are hot varieties and milder ones but no meal is complete without some form of chilli.

Kaffir lime leaves add aromatic fragrance and astringency to soups and curries giving a clean citrus flavour.

Lemongrass is a key ingredient in much Thai cooking. Its woody stem adds a lemony flavour and more fragrance to curry pastes and other dishes.

Garlic is used to start off most Thai dishes providing a stabilizing base note to the aromatic herbs.

Galanga is the Thai version of ginger, slightly milder than the common ginger we use. It has medicinal qualities to aid digestion and adds a light acidic note to the Thai spice combinations.

Fresh coriander is used both in its leaf and root form. The leaf is frequently used as a garnish and the root to give a deeper note to the cooking of a dish.

Coconut milk is used in savoury dishes and desserts, whenever a creamy rich element is needed. It replaces the dairy ingredients that predominate in European cuisine, but which are rarely used at all in Thai cuisine. Coconut milk is made by grating the meat of a ripe coconut and mixing it with water then squeezing out the juice, but can be bought in a can for easy cooking.

Jasmine or fragrant rice is indigenous to Thailand and is used to accompany every main meal as the main starch as breads are rarely used.

Before you start cooking, refresh your taste memories by visiting a good Thai restaurant, so that you can remember the correct balance of flavours and produce your own authentic version at home.

Have you been to Thai Dusit in Derby?