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Nongkran, Pad Thai Champion!
In the past several decades, many Americans have explored ethnic and often exotic cuisines, welcoming flavors and ingredients that rarely appear on the average American dinner table. Thai food, with its balanced flavors and textures, has staged a major American success. Thai-centric restaurants, Thai-inspired recipes, and Thai cookbooks have gained the public spotlight. You can walk down any street in almost any town in the USA and find a Thai restaurant dishing out pad Thai and chicken with basil. Not surprisingly, a number of Thai chefs have gained celebrity status. One who stands out is Nongkran Daks, owner of Thai Basil restaurant in Chantilly, Virginia and the winner of the Food Network’s “Pad Thai Throwdown with Bobby Flay.”
A native of Chumporn province in Southern Thailand, Nongkran Daks may well have been born to cook. She certainly began her kitchen life at an early age. Nongkran recalls that at age seven, when living with her sister-in-law in the small town of Langsuan, she was required to make ten curry pastes each afternoon to sell at the local open market. At her first lesson, she was seated before all the curry ingredients arranged in piles on trays and instructed to pound together the makings for each paste with a mortar and pestle. Unlike other cooks, whose first kitchen foray might be boiling or frying eggs, hers was making authentic Thai curries from scratch. Gradually, cooking transformed itself from something she had to do to something she couldn’t live without.
As she matured, Nongkran continued to cook, preparing and serving luncheon foods for her schoolmates at the request of her teachers. “My head teacher would ask me to make Panang curry and stewed pork with egg,” she remembers. She cooked the dishes in the school kitchen and wrapped each serving in a banana leaf for separate lunch packets. The teachers chose Nongkran for this task because they knew she cooked well, and though it took time, they also knew she could keep up with her studies.
After high school, Nongkran moved to Bangkok, where she attended Chulalongkorn University’s preparatory school. After graduation, she attended Kasetsart University, where she studied agricultural economics and lived in a dorm for the first few years. Her friends, knowing about her kitchen skills and her love of cooking, would ask her to cook for them. “Every Friday I rode my bike back home,” she says. “My friends had collected money for me to buy ingredients so I could make them curries when I came back on Monday.”
Upon graduation from Kasetsart in 1965, Nongkran married Larry Daks, an American Peace Corps volunteer who was teaching at that university; she was both his student and his Thai language teacher.
Nong shooting the Throw-down at Thai Basil Kitchen. Meeting Bobby Flay. Son-in-law eggs (Eggs with Tamarind Sauce, page 140) being stir-fried.
Over the years, the couple has lived in the US and in various locations throughout Asia, including China, Laos, Taiwan and Thailand. During one of their stays in Bangkok, Nongkran ran a snack bar called Nong’s Kitchen, which featured Thai and Western food, including an outstanding cheesecake.
Thailand is also where Nongkran began to teach cooking. Most of her students were fellow Thais who wanted to learn more about their own cuisine and that of neighboring counties, but she soon began to expand her clientele.
During one stay in Beijing, Nongkran started catering parties for foreign diplomats, because few international foods or restaurants were available at the time. She often catered for the American embassy as well, especially after staff members had tasted and requested her special Chicken Satay with peanut satay sauce (page 34). She also conducted cooking classes in Beijing, where people were just starting to discover Thai food. “There was a lot of demand for Thai food,” she remembers. “And also in Beijing, we were very close to Thailand and people from the embassy went there for R & R. People who had not known Thai food before fell in love with it.” Expats in the American community in particular praised her cooking, and a number of them encouraged her to open a restaurant.
When Nongkran moved back to the Washington, DC area permanently in 1996, she continued to cook for friends and local Asian festivals, and offered cooking classes in her home. She finally began to look into finding a real outlet—a restaurant—for her cooking passion. She got the opportunity when a Thai friend decided to sell her restaurant in Chantilly. Within days, Nongkran had opened up Thai Basil, which is now a major player in the Washington, DC restaurant world. She also became a member of Les Dames d’Escoffier, the prestigious women-only culinary group, and has been asked to give talks and to hold cooking classes and demonstrations throughout the mid-Atlantic region.
Making Pad Thai (page 114) in Winnipeg. A close-up of the finished dish. Nong and television host Samantha Brown preparing to cook.
After her victory in the Throwdown and a subsequent appearance on the Travel Channel, Nongkran has become something of a local legend. Thai Basil and her regular cooking classes continue to draw patrons not only from the immediate area, but from both coasts and Canada, and even from Thailand itself. She is widely noted for using traditional Thai recipes without modifying them for Western tastes—she prefers to educate Westerners’ palates. For this reason, Nongkran is particularly proud that Thai Basil is one of the few restaurants in the United States to earn the Thai Select Award, a recognition of excellence awarded by the Thai Ministry of Commerce.
About Thai Food
Capturing the hearts, minds, and palates of a global audience, Thai food really is the stuff of gastronomic dreams: its flavors are a balance of sweet, salty, hot, and sour, and a recipe’s components are thoughtfully composed to provide texture as well as balanced flavors. The ingredients may include just about anything that walks, crawls, or swims. In Chiang Mai, in the northern part of Thailand, for example, locals may enjoy grilled snakes or ants or crickets, or even fried bamboo worms. Elsewhere, water bugs and (reportedly) scorpions add a protein element to the diet. And on everyone’s dining table, the produce—from the familiar long beans and the less-familiar marble-sized eggplants to the aromatic durian and crunchy water convolvulus—is supremely fresh. Street vendors, home cooks, and professionals in upscale kitchens alike can use traditional techniques and ingredients and individualize recipes to suit a mood or to appeal to modern tastes.
Tracing the development of Thai cooking reveals several influences. In studying the numerous cultural and culinary elements that have shaped Thai cooking, food historians have determined that migrant Chinese, Indians, Burmese, and Europeans passing through ancient Siam (now Thailand) left their imprint on the country’s cuisine over the centuries. Neighboring Southeast Asian peoples from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Burma have influenced their Thai neighbors as well. In the north and northeast regions of Thailand, for example, dishes such as the Green Papaya Salad from Laos (page 66) and the hearty coconut-milk-based curry from Burma known as Khao Soi (page 108), have become culinary mainstays.
Chinese cooks also made three major contributions to Thai cuisine: rice, including the rice porridge known locally as chok (pronounced “joke”); noodles, a key ingredient in many dishes, particularly in the classic dish known as Pad Thai (page 114); and the versatile cooking vessel, the wok. Fish sauce, an essential component of Thai cuisine, also originated in China. Even Portuguese missionaries contributed an important element to Thai cooking: the chili, introduced from South America. The missionaries inspired Thai cooks to incorporate the fiery chili heat into many recipes. In fact, the legend surrounding the creation of one
