Wonder what shrimp paste is? Turn to page 177 and wonder no more. Don't know what galangal is? I didn't either until I found it in the glossary. He has a small history of Thailand at the beginning, several pages of Thai cuisine theory, and an extensive (and very, very helpful) glossary of Thai ingredients. Thompson delves into not just the how-tos, but the whys, the wheres, and the what's thats. This book is like a bible, both in size and spirit. When I saw this one had been placed on several Best Cookbooks Ever lists, and that it included recipes of items I'd been missing (panang curry, I miss you most of all) I thought it might be what I'd been needing. I've missed Thai food a great deal while I've been over here in Slovakia-there just isn't a place to get it in my little town, and I've only mastered 2 curry dishes by myself since I came here-so I've been dreaming of getting a Thai cookbook for some time. The spicy, the sweet, the sour, the umami. There's something rich in the deep combination of flavors the food imparts.
Saara and I both recently agreed that Thai food is our favorite cuisine. For those of you who want to know immediately what I think about it, I'll say: I like it and it impresses me.
This is a difficult book to rate, so I will refrain from giving it stars. Magically, with a hand written recipe in my pocket, i stumble across a used copy and She Said Boom on College. It being a lazy sunday afternoon i of course got sidetracked with my usual weekend route of book/record store stops. Last weekend when we had a craving i scribbled out a grocery list and headed to the market to pick up supplies. Oddly enough, we'd written down the recipe for penang curry to use after returning the book. But i find the information about ingredients and techniques to be really insightful. Obviously thai food is far from vegetarian, so if you're strict, or uncertain about adapting recipes to not use shrimp paste this book is going to be useless. I've a lot of ground to cover in the book, but on the whole it seems like an excellent reference for making thai food from fresh ingredients (not the standard asian market prepackaged mae ploy stuff, which i find to be pretty good, but doesn't compare to fresh galangal and lime leaves.) I'd really only attempted a couple variation of a penang curry, which turned out pretty magical despite adapting it to be vegetarian and leslie and had written down that recipe to use in the future. Admittedly, a compendium of thai cooking penned by someone named David Thompson (who i can only presume to not be thai) clothbound in hot pink left me feeling a little skeptical, but flipping through it seemed to reputable and thorough in its information. I don't remember where i found a listing about this book, but we got it from the library last summer in the attempts to satiate the never ending desire for thai food. I'm sure there is good stuff to be had somewhere, but i've yet to find anything beyond moderately palatable. That is of course until i moved to toronto where, in my three years, i've yet to eat a decent thai meal. it seemed like a lot of work and it was always so quick and easy an cheap to eat out wherever i was.
THAI COOKING PHLO HOW TO
I never really felt the need to know how to cook thai food.
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