Popular Thai Dishes
If these Thai dishes are new to you, or you plan to travel Thailand, you may want to learn a few Thai food terms first, and check out the street food culture.
- Gaeng is curry
- Thai curry dishes begin with fresh dry roasted and ground coriander seeds and cumin seeds which are then blended and ground together with different kinds of chili and varied amounts of garlic, lemon grass, shrimp paste, galangal to form a curry paste. The familiar red (ped) and green (keo wan) gaengs are thinned with coconut milk, while gaeng masaman is a thicker curry with a more Indian flavour and gaeng panang is a dry curry.
- Pad Thai
- Probably more prevalent in restaurants outside of Thailand than within, pad thai is stir-fried noodles with shrimp, chicken, tofu, beansprouts and peanuts, along with the Thai mainstays of garlic, chiles, lime and cilantro. You'll find a wider variation in the flavours and fresh ingredients of this dish in different regions of Thailand than you will in western restaurants.
- Som Tom -- Try the Thai Green Papaya Recipe!
- Green papaya is shredded and pounded into a mortar with dried shrimp and/or dried squid, garlic, chilis, cilantro, lime and nam pla for a delicious crunchy salad.
- Tom Yum Gung and Tom Yum Gai
- A tangy, very spicy soup with either shrimp (gung) or chicken (gai), tamarind, galangal, garlic and chilis.
- Gai Yang
- The flattened barbeque half or quarter chicken on a stick is a popular snack offered by street and market vendors.
If you're just starting to cook Thai food and you're not familiar with some of the ingredients in the dishes you find here, invest in a good cookbook that covers all the cuisines of Southeast Asia and includes a glossary of Asian ingredients, because many of them cross cuisines but go by different names. Once you start stocking up on ingredients for cooking Thai food, you'll be able to use many of them in Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian dishes too!
