Fruit 111
Fresh Mangos in Sweet Coconut Cream with Roasted Peanuts 112
Spiced Mango Cocktail 113
Thai Iced Coffee 114
Thai Iced Tea 114
Lemongrass Ice Tea 115
Acknowledgments 116
Index 118
Resource Guide 119
Foreword by
Corinne Trang
The cuisine of Thailand remains one of the most popular cuisines in the world. No matter where I’ve taught or lectured, I’ve often encountered students who wanted to learn how to cook Thai food. As a result, in my lesson plans, I’ve always included a popular Thai recipe or two, and now I can recommend to them a cookbook they’ll actually use for cooking. Easy Thai Cooking by Robert Danhi, includes easy to understand step-by-step simple and delicious recipes for the home cook and professional chef alike. For more than 20 years Robert has traveled back to Thai-land, immersing himself in its food culture and bringing back with him a wonderful array of authentic recipes he’s recreated in such a way that anyone can grasp. Filled with classics such as Thai Spring Rolls, curries, satays, and Pineapple Fried Jasmine Rice, as well as contemporary recipes such as Red Curry Shrimp Cakes, Sriracha Chicken Salad, and Coriander Beef, Easy Thai Cooking is a great illustration of how a classic cuisine inevitably evolves over time, due to trade, tourism, neighboring countries, and any number of factors. For example, my Asian aunts all made spring rolls differently, yet the original family spring roll recipe was my grandmother’s. Same source, but different hands and as a result new interpretations! Robert explains from the beginning, how there is not one defining flavor profile that can describe Thailand’s food. Rather, like all world cuisines, there are regional differences. Read Easy Thai Cooking, follow the recipes, but loosen up in the kitchen, he’s giving you the path to authentic Thai flavors and textures as well as the freedom to enjoy the process of cooking by giving you smart shortcuts (like calling for store-bought items such as curry paste, coconut milk, and tamarind concentrate, if you don’t feel like making your own from scratch). The chapters are broken down into traditional cookbook chapters, organizing vegetables, fish, and meat into separate chapters, for example, but pay special attention to the chapter entitled “Basic Recipes,” which contains a few essential recipes that are at the core of Thai cuisine, such as fried shallots, garlic, and chilies, and a few sauces including homemade Sriracha, if you so desire. I love Robert’s loose approach to cooking, always taking into account and respecting Thailand’s unique cuisine. The flavors are authentically Thai, yet there is room for experimenting because, as he says, “things ALWAYS change.”
Enjoy!
My Adventures with Thai Food
My first trip to Southeast Asia came at the relatively young age of nineteen, over 20 years ago, the year prior I had met Estrellita Leong, a beautiful Malaysian woman. We met while taking a cooking class in Los Angeles. We took a journey to visit her family in Malaysia and while we were in the region we visited Thailand. It was immediately apparent that Thailand had a very different food culture. Since then, Thailand’s unrestrained range of flavors have delighted my soul.
Once you arrived in the Land of Smiles (as Thailand is called), you know that this is an amazing place, a place where everyone feels welcome. There are endless offerings of food everywhere you look, the lively street corners are active with culinary exchanges, narrow alleyways are packed with people eating, chatting, and playfully laughing about the day’s happenings. Open air restaurants churn out plates of addictively spicy cuisine that can be traced to the colorful local markets that supply the country with a bounty of crisp vegetables, aromatic herbs, and fresh seafood.
In the past two decades I have dedicated my life to gaining a better understanding of this region’s culinary identity, immersing myself into the traditional food ways that have evolved over the last few thousand years. My first book, Southeast Asian Flavors was published with the goal to summarize this dynamic region and give the world a snapshot of the unique cultures of Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore. This book is different.
What makes this book different?
This book is about everyday cooking for the home cook. Traditional recipes? Not really. Authentic flavors? For sure! My wish is that these recipes become your “go to” recipes for when friends come over for a quick meal, or you need to whip up a weekday dinner, or for a party, or a sit-down meal with the family.
Easy Thai Cooking was created after numerous requests for me to write a book with simpler recipes than Southeast Asian Flavors. Frankly, at first I was hesitant to write an “Easy Thai Cookbook.” Fearful that I would over simplify recipes that had taken centuries to create. I have too much respect for Thai people and their food culture. Then I started to think about all the food I had eaten in Thailand that were not the iconic dishes that food writers have memorialized in thousands of Thai books, like the tom yum goong (hot and sour shrimp soup) and papaya salad (som tom), and saw that food evolves and that Thais cook just like us. Not all my meals at home are American classics. People across the US cook from a similar pantry. So I began to lighten up a bit and think of ways I could create a book with recipes that taste Thai but may not be the traditional versions that I have come to love. Rather, the food I eat when visiting a friend’s home in Koh Samui, attending a party in Chiang Mai, or walking down the street late one night in Bangkok discovering a vendor selling their version of fried ramen noodles
I spent countless hours recalling the food I cooked in my home; the recipes I created in my test kitchen; the flavors of Thailand that I fashioned from the condiments on my shelves and from my produce packed refrigerator. I began to realize that the cooking principles I employed in creating dishes that tasted Thai were not really Thai recipes per se. There is no one flavor profile that encompasses all of Thailand’s food but there are some complex flavors conjured by combining ingredients in balance and employing cooking techniques that produces tastes that are distinctively Thai. It was an “ah-ha” moment, excited that I figured out the focus of the book, I began to pour through my notes, recipe books, thousands of photos, hundreds of videos that I have compiled over the years. I did look at some classic dishes and constructed recipes that pay homage to them but don’t quite replicate them.
This was not a new process for me. I taught the culinary arts full time for many years, and while teaching at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, I had to figure out a way to teach authentic food without over simplifying it. I found myself saying “There are a lot of right ways to make a traditional dish…and there are a few ways to do it wrong.” For instance, using heavy cream instead of coconut milk in a Thai curry changes it all together and, in my opinion, it’s no longer Thai food. Now, what if I used a premixed curry paste instead? Well, if you go to local markets in Thailand you will see mounds of curry paste waiting to be scooped up and taken home to create an authentic curry. So I began to accept that selecting some key pre-made ingredients could save considerable time and get me closer to creating a simpler recipe
