Welcome to my Traditional Thai Food Recipes

Salim is sweet coloured mung bean noodles flavoured with jasmin. A traditional favourite of Thailand, although not very photogenic! There is a shortcut you can use if you don't want to make the noodle, you can simply buy it and add colour it.

Ingredients
120 gms Mung Bean Flour
236 ml Water
1-2 Drops Of Jasmin Flavour
Food Color

Preparation
1. Mix the ming bean, water and color together (For each colour you make you need to start with fresh water to avoid the colour spreading).
2. Heat in a pan, stirring until the flour is cooked and has gone clear.
3. Press the gloopy mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl of icewater. It will set to form fine noodles.
4. Drain, then add the jasmin flavour.
5. Serve with coconut milk, sugar syrup and crushed ice.

These pancakes are a Thai favorite and very very rich. There are many types of fillings, for the photograph I've made two, taro filled ones at the back and cream filled ones at the front. Another common fillings is shredded young coconut. Prepare the filling before you start the pancakes, as you make each pancake you will fill them and roll them up.

Ingredients
100 gms Wheat Flour
3 Teaspoons Bicarbonate of Soda
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Egg
4 Tablespoons Sugar
300 ml Evaporated Milk
2 Tablespoons Melted Butter
1 Teaspoon Vanilla Essence

Preparation
1. Sift the flour mix and bicarbonate of soda together.
2. Whip an egg until fluffy, add the sugar, salt and blend. Add the evaporated milk, flour, butter, and vanilla essence and continue blending. Leave 20 minutes to rest.
3. You will need a good clean flat non stick frying pan for this, a little butter while frying can help, but these pancakes are very soft and need to be fried carefully.
4. Heat the frying pan. Pour a small amount of the mixture onto the pan and use a spoon to shape it into a circle and fill any holes. For this recipe you want small pancakes, no more than 8cms across.
5. Fry gently until the pancake is brown, then turn it over. While the other side is cooking, spread some of the filling onto the pancake, then roll it up and set it on a serving plate. Serve warm.

Ingredients for Cream Filling
1 Egg
3 Tablespoons Sugar
1 Teaspoon Salt
100 ml Water
100 ml Evaporated Milk
5 Tablespoons Butter
2 Tablespoons Corn Flour

Preparation for Cream Filling
1. Whip the egg with the sugar and salt.
2. Add the water, evaporated milk, butter, and corn flour and put into a saucepan and cook over a low heat until the cream is mixed and thick, then leave to cool.

Ingredients Taro Filling
50 gms Taro
2 Tablespoons Sugar
1 Tablespoon Oil

Preparation for Taro Filling
1. Steam the taro until cooked.
2. Purée the taro in a blender together with the sugar.
3. Heat the taro in a saucepan over a low heat, to drive off excess water and thicken it. Once it's thickened, leave it to cool.

Mangos are a popular fruit that grows all over Thailand. When they are unripe they are green and very sour and we eat them with chilli and sugar and something salty, like this Fish Hair and Mango recipe.

When they ripen they become soft and yellow and suitable for desserts. The most widely know dessert that uses mangos is Mango with Stick Rice and Coconut Sauce, see the picture below.

And two more recipes with mango's you'll find on this site, the ever popular Mango Ice Cream:

And mango syrup, a mango smoothy, diluted to make it more drinkable with sugar syrup.

This dessert is strands of sugary cooked egg yolk,flavored with rose water (or vanilla essence in water also works). It's difficult to make. I've tried many times and this is the first time I've managed to get the strands to work.
The strands are streams of egg yolk drizzled through a fine sieve into a large pan of hot sugar syrup. The strands cook immediately and you end up with sweet golden strands of egg. For this to work, you needs lots and lots of egg yolk, the more egg yolks the better, so don't reduce the quantity of eggs. Use the largest flattest pan you can find, the more spread out the strands the nicer they look. The duck eggs yolks in the recipe are larger and more yellow than the chicken, and help you achieve the golden colour.
In Thailand they use a piping bag with a special nozzle with many fine holes especially for this. But I don't have one, what I found works is a large sugar shaker, filled with the egg mixture, you tip it upside down and the egg runs as streams through the holes, which I slowly moved forwards and backwards, left to right over the pan until all the mixture had gone through.
As with many Thai desserts, we flavour them with flower essence, using rose water or jasmin flower essence in water. However you can use vanilla essence in water or similar flavouring of your choice if you prefer.

Ingredients
10 Duck Egg Yolks
5 Chicken Egg Yolks
1 Teaspoon Oil
950 ml Rose Water
900 gms Sugar
1-2 teaspoons flavoring (Jasmin Essence, or Vanilla)

Preparation
1. Mix all the egg yolks together, add the oil, sieve to remove any lumps. It is important to remove any lumps of thick parts so the yolk runs freely.
2. Mix water and sugar, bring to the boil and simmer. You want a slightly thick sugar syrup.
3. Add the flavouring to the hot syrup, turn off the heat so the syrup isn't boiling.
4. Fill you piping bag (or sugar shaker in my case) and pipe the egg yolk into the hot syrup making strands, forwards and backwards until all the mixture has been used.
5. Remove the strands using a pasta tong or similar. You can also put a fork in, and twist the fork so the strands form around the fork into a ball and serve them like that.

Each fruit above is about 10-12cm across, they have inside a fibrous jelly like texture, this is the flesh you eat. They taste slightly sweet, but no strong flavours.
You can also find toddy palm juice, which is a sweet palm sugar drink made from tree sap. That is drunk warm and fresh.
Then there's toddy palm seeds, you'll see these sold in cans at your asian grocer and used as a side fruit with icecream and desserts.
Finally, toddy palm trees are one of the sources of unrefined palm sugar, the dark sugar with the complex flavours we use to produce a lot of Thai dishes.

These are similar to sour plums, and eaten in Thailand as a snack with sugar and chilli. They come from the center of Thailand. As you often find with Thai food it is a mixture of 3 flavours, the sourness of the plums, eaten with a mixture of sugar and chilli with a pinch of salt.

Just as England has its own version of French and Italian dishes, so Thailand has its own version of Japanese dishes. This is Thai Suki-Yaki, a self assembly dish consisting of a wok of boiling chicken stock, into which you cook your own ingredients at the table, and eat them with a Thai spicy chilli sauce. It's entertainment and a meal all in one. In Thailand, we prefer to drop the egg into the stock to make a poached egg, rather than eat it raw like the Japanese. If you have Thai salty eggs ready, try cracking one into the stock to make a salty poached egg, the flavour combination of extremely salty egg yolk, Thai chilli and Suki sauce may cause your brain to overload when you eat it, but it's not fatal!
You will need an electric wok to cook this at the table, alternatively you can cook it on a stove and bring it ready-cooked to the table, but it's just not as much fun. The sauce is known as Suki-yaki sauce and is available in Asian grocers, if you cannot locate it, Teriyaki dipping sauce is a passable substitute, or there is a recipe in the ingredients section to make it.

Lets start with the Suki Meat plate, the recipes for each of these can be found on this site. This plate consists of Fish Balls, Pork Balls, Raw Pork Meat Patty, and Seaweed Fish Rolls. Not shown is the Shrimp dumplings which are the same as the pork dumpling recipe, but using chopped shrimp. You can also add cleaned shrimp to this dish if you like. Most of these can be made well ahead of time and frozen, you can take them straight from the freezer to the plate ready to cook. The above plate is enough for 2 people.

Here is the vegetable plate. Again there is enough in the photograph for 2 people. It consists of celery, baby corn, green cabbage, chinese cabbage, spring onions, carrots, shitake mushrooms, glass noodles and coriander leaves. The dumplings shown in the photograph are shrimp dumpling explained above. If the mushrooms are dried, soak them for 15 minutes in water, chop the cabbage, cut the spring onions into lengths and peel and chop the carrots.

Next to the sauce, in Thailand we eat 'MK' sauce, MK is the name of a chain of Suki restaurants with their own special sauce. You can find this sauce in Asian supermarkets, there are also many variants available both from Thailand and Vietnam, all are called 'suki-yaki' sauces. If you cannot find suki-yaki sauce, you can substitute a teriyaki dipping sauce but it's not quite the same.

The Thai version uses chillis and garlic, normally it is served in a separate plate so that each person can choose to add more or less chilli to their sauce. Chop the chillies & garlic and place in a serving bowl.

Ingredients
5 Garlic Cloves
3 Red Chillies
5 Small Bird Chillies
1 Lemon Slice
1 Raw Egg

Serving The Suki-Yaki
So far we've prepared the meat plate, the vegetable plate, the sauce and the Thai chillies & garlic. You should also serve a raw egg, or salty egg if you have one.

Ingredients
2 Litres Water
2 Chicken Stock Cubes
1 White Chinese Radish

Equipment
1 Electric Wok
1 Bowl per Guest
1 Sauce Bowl per Guest
Chopsticks

Preparation
1. Peel and slice 4-5 slices of radish. Use the large Chinese radish, not small western salad radishes.
2. Put the water into the electric wok, add the stock cubes and radish and bring to the boil.
3. At this point, it's up to you what to add, you cook the ingredients as you wish in one batch or several batches.
4. Carrots, baby corn, shitake mushrooms and frozen meats will take longer to cook, so should be added earlier. The other ingredients cook quicker and can be added later.
5. Once they're cooked for a few minutes, use a sieve or slotted spoon to remove the items and place them in your bowl.
6. Take some of the Suki sauce in your sauce bowl, add some chilli as you wish, a squeeze of lemon and some garlic - this is your personal dipping sauce. Take items from your bowl, dip them in the sauce and eat.

For this recipe you will need middle aged old coconut. Not quite young coconut, not old coconut, just middle aged. You can find this frozen in your Asian supermarket, as medium old coconut Mapow How or Mapow Roy Kanom.

Ingredients
500 gms Shredded Coconut Meat
300 gms Sugar
150 water
Food colouring

Preparation
1. Mix the sugar and water together. Heat and bring to the boil.
2. Boil the water off to a thick sugar syrup.
3. Add the shredded coconut, lower the heat and continue stiring until all the liquid has gone.
4. Let them cool a little, taking two teaspoons take out ball shaped lumps on the mixture and let them cool on a drying try.

While up in the country, I decided to show you some of the berries that can be picked and eaten in Issan (North Eastern Thailand).

Ma Yom

These small green berries (above) are called Ma Yom. They are much smaller than they look in the picture, each one is less than 1cm. These sour berries are eaten with flaked chilli and salt or sugar in East Isaan, and added to som tam (the 'bok bok' salad that Thais eat) to add sourness. Inside there is one little seed which you don't eat. You may find them flavouring Thai icecream, and sorbets.

Updated - I've found some preserved ma yom at the market. These are preserved in brine and sold with a sugar chilli dipping powder. You can get a better idea of the size from this photo, and the dipping mix is shown at the back.

Makam Pom

The tree for this grows wild, it's not cultivated and the berries are not sold, but they are eaten by children. The older the berries are, the more they turn red, and the redder they are, the sweeter they are. Peel off the outer husk and eat the pulp minus the seed.

If you think of the taste of an yellow sweet plum and that's about right for the taste and texture of this fruit. Clean it carefully with clean water and you can eat the skin like other plums, but in Thailand we always wash the outside of fruit we buy with drinking water. In the photograph I've removed some of the skin on one so you can see texture inside.