Ingredients in Thai Cuisine
Tue, Sep 18th 2007, 00:00
Thai food is known for its enthusiastic use of fresh ingredients and Thailand is fortunate that both land and sea yields rich harvests.
The staple in Thai food, rice, grows in abundance, as do an impressive variety of vegetables, fruits, herbs, and spices that enliven each dish. Aromatic long-grained Jasmine rice is indigenous to Thailand and a patchwork of paddy fields blankets Thailand's central plains. The Thais consider untreated rice as inferior, and prefer polished rice cooked to a light fluffy texture.
Thai dishes in the central and southern regions use a wide variety of leaves and roots relatively unknown in the west. They lend refreshing citrus and spice flavours to dishes. The most common:
Kaffir lime leaves (makrut): a thorny bush native to Indonesia. The leaves have a sharp flavour reminiscent of lime and neroli. They are used to flavour most Thai soups.
Galangal: also called blue giner, this root resembles ginger but has a pine-like flavour with a faint hint of citrus.
Lemon grass (cymbopogon): A perennial grass with a citrus flavour. The stalk itself is too hard to eat, so it is usually bruised and added whole to a dish. This releases the aromatic oils from the juice sacs.
Fingerroot (krachai or Chinese ginger): another root with a pungent yet refreshing taste reminiscent of ginger.
These leaves are combined with garlic and liberal amounts of chilli to make the popular curry pastes. Portuguese missionaries only introduced chillies from South America in the late 1600s. Little did they know how they would become one of the main ingredients in Thai cooking! Herbs such as Thai basil add fragrance to the dishes, together with other popular ingredients like tamarind, cilantro/coriander (pahk chee), dried shrimp (prik haeng), oyster sauce (nahmahn hoi) and dark soy sauce (si yu dahm).
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