Salting eggs in brine is a way of preserving eggs, Thailand is very hot and eggs could only be kept for a short time unless salted. As with many cultures, the Thai's acquired a taste for the salted product, and created recipes around it. It's common in Thailand to east rice soup with salty egg, the egg adds the salty taste to the dish! The salt concentrates in the yolk of the egg, the longer they are kept in the brine, the saltier they get, 14-20 days is best, if you leave the eggs too long in the brine, they will be too salty to eat. If you're unsure how salty they are, remove one, boil it and taste it.

Ingredients
12 Raw Large Eggs
500gms Salt
4 Litres Water
Large Boiling Pan
Big Glass Jar

Preparation
1. The eggs are salted in a saturated brine solution. This means the maximum amount of salt you can dissolve in the water!
2. Boil water in a large pan.
3. Add the salt to the water and dissolve it. Add more salt until the salt can no longer dissolve.
4. Leave to cool, as the water cools, salt crystals should form. If they do not, heat it up and add more salt.
5. Put the cold brine and eggs into a jar, the eggs must be submerged in the brine.
6. After 14-20 day take it out of the jar. They can be kept for a long time in that salted condition.
7. They can be used boiled or fried or to add salt to a dish.

This dish is seasoned minced pork. When you want to add meat to a soup or noodle dish, you can take spoonfuls of the pork and drop them into the noodle mix to cook. It is not suitable for freezing, it needs to be prepared fresh and its main use is for the Suki-Yaki recipe in the 'Main Courses' section.

Ingredients
100 gms Pork Mince
1 Tablespoon Chopped Coriander Leaves
1 Teaspoon Salt
1/4 Teaspoon Sugar
3 Garlic Cloves
1 Teaspoon White Pepper
1 Teaspoon Sesame Seeds (optional)

Preparation
1. In a food blender, mix the pork mince with the garlic, salt, white pepper, sugar and chopped coriander.
2. Blend the mixture until it is smooth.
3. Place it into a flat dish and chill in the fridge.
4. Toast the sesame seeds in a dry frying pan for 20 seconds until just browned and nutty and add them to the top of the meat.
5. For suki-yaki this is normally served as a single flat patty of meat, but you can serve it however you like.

Serve With
Suki-Yaki
Noodle Soup
Rice Soup

Sardines are a common ingredient in Thai cooking. Normally we eat them fresh rather than tinner, they are steamed, grilled or deep fried.

Deep Frying
The easiest way to cook them is to deep fry. Heat the oil to 190 degree Celsius, then put the fish into the oil. The moisture in the fish will cause the oil to spit. Listen for the noise to die down (as the water is cooked off) you can remove them. It only takes 2 minutes or so to cook a small fish like this.

When I was a child we would catch river fish and barbecue them over a charcoal fire. If we were lucky, when the fish was opened it would have eggs, and I would eat the delicious barbecued roe.

A roe is a sack of eggs from a fish. Common types are cod roe, hake roe (as in this photograph) and salmon roe, but as a child it was always fresh water fish roe we ate. Caviar is the salted eggs from the roe of a fish (with the outer sack removed).

You can commonly find fish roe fresh in fishmongers and larger supermarkets, it is not something special to Thailand, it's eaten in many countries across the world.

Duck eggs are slightly larger than chicken eggs and are often used to make salty eggs, because they have a bigger yolk. They are also used in Thai cooking to make 'Kanom' (snacks and sweets) because they have less of a sulfurous smell than chicken eggs.
To make salty ducks eggs, use the same technique I used for salting chicken eggs. You can see the yellowness of the eggs at the front - that is the yolk showing through.

These small crabs are only about 5cms across. We use these tiny crabs a lot in Thai cuisine, unlike larger crabs you cannot crack them open and eat the meat because they're just too small. Instead they are eaten whole, including the shells. Today I will show you how to eat them deep fried in batter, the shell fries to form a crunchy snack. There is another dish we use them for, 'chilli papaya salad' (also known as Thai pok pok), it's very common to pound very fresh raw small crabs into that salad to spread the crabs flavours into the papaya.

Century? Thousand years old? More like 90 day old preserved eggs. These eggs are used as a garnish or ingredient, or just eaten cooked. They are eggs preserved in sodium carbonate and clay, a chemical reaction causes the colour change. The taste is very similar to an unpreserved egg, but the colours and look make them a spectactular show food.

In the photograph you can see a duck egg in it's shell at the top right, below that a peeled egg , and the eggs sliced open on the left. Notice that the preserving process makes the egg solidify.

This is 'Mu Yong', literally frizzy pork, also known as pork hair, or pork fibers. You may have seen it in the snacks section of Asian grocers and wondered whether it's food or for scrubbing plates clean!
It's made from oven dried pork, the pork is rubbed into fibres or hairs. It has a very savoury taste, similar in taste to barbecue flavour crisps/chips, but without the artificial flavourings. It's often eaten just as a snack, but it's also used to add a savoury flavour to some Thai dishes.

These dried tiny shrimp are used to add a strong shrimp taste to dishes. If you imagine all the flavour of a large prawn concentrated into a tiny package, thats the flavour these have.

You can buy these either frozen, or more commonly dried in the sunshine and fried with a little garlic or sauce. They are also used to add crunchiness to Tom Yum soup.

Above you can see the drying process, I place them out in the hot sun for 1-2 days and the sun-drying process concentrates the flavours.

In this photograph you can see the deep fried baby squid. They can be eaten like this with rice, or added to soups or noodle dishes to add a fish taste and crunch.

This, pretty gruesome, jar is the result of a day spent beach combing. Those are tiny crabs we use in papaya salads, we crush them into the salad and they form a seafood sauce that flavours the salad. In cases like this, when I've collected too many to use immediately, I preserve them like this in fish sauce. The saltiness of the sauce will keep them for months.

I don't quite know what this is. In Thai we call it fish or even star fish but I believe it's dried squid. It has a salty flavour that makes it perfect to use as a salty crunch on salads.

Mangda are large insects about 8 cms long, that live in rice fields in Northern Thailand. During the evening they fly around lights and are easily netted and eaten. Mang-da is also the name given to boyfriends who live off their girlfriends. They get the name because they flit from light to light. Similar to the English phrase 'bar-fly'. Someone is said to be a mang-da if their girlfriends work and they don't.
They're really difficult to photograph, I had to include some leaves in the photo to get them to calm down, so forgive the rather badly composed photograph.

Uses
They're are pounded and used as a popular flavouring in many dishes, a very common Thai ingredient is Mang-da flavour Nam Prik (spicy chilli paste used to add flavour and spice to dishes). You can even get this is from Asian grocers, look for Mang-da flavoured chilli pastes.
They are also dry fried or grilled and eaten as is, removing the shell and legs.

They say the Chinese eat every part of the pig except for the squeek. The Thai's are the same, we eat almost everything from almost every animal! Lets start with the head, it's steamed and cooked with spices like cinnamon and star anise to make soft fatty pork in soup.

The blood is left to congeal in a pot (above is chunks of congealed pigs blood), then sliced and added to glass noodle soup, and other forms of soup.

These lungs are cooked until almost dissolved into the water, and again used for soups and noodles.

Pigs intestines are cleaned carefully, boiled until soft, then sliced and made into a salad, or fried, or sliced thin for dipping into chilli sauce.

Liver is used in lap-mu, or sliced and fried, or used as in suki yaki, or even barbecued.

These tongues are nice barbecued (grilled), till browned on the outside, then sliced thinly and eaten with a spicy sauce as a gop-gam dish (a snack to eat with alcoholic drinks).