The Foods and Flavors of Thailand

Thai food is enjoying renewed popularity in the United States. Diners can find Thai restaurants in just about any city, and Thai-themed ingredients and dishes are appearing in many supermarket aisles.

Thai cuisine can be difficult to define, but understanding the history and basics of Thai cooking will greatly assist the process. Using Thai techniques and flavors in developing products leads to more interesting, popular foods that appeal to a wide variety of consumers.

Thai can be thought of as one of the world's first fusion cuisines. Elements of Chinese, Indian, Malay, Portuguese and other cuisines play an important role in Thai tastes. For example, stir-fried dishes and those made with noodles are considered Chinese-based food. The Thais even consider the ubiquitous pad Thai as a Chinese dish.

Much like Italy, Thailand is a nation of "foodies," to whom food is central to everything. Even the country's government wants to ensure the proper representation of its cuisine and culture around the world: In 2001, the Thai government announced its involvement in an effort to ensure that Thai food sold around the world is the genuine article, a strong statement on the commitment of that country to its cuisine.

Food makes up such an integral part of Thai culture that many Thai idioms use food imagery to convey meaning, such as:• manao mai mii naam ("like lime without juice"): dull;• sen yai ("big noodle"): an important person;• waan yen ("sweet cool," the name of an iced dessert): an easy-going person;• and phak chii rohy naa ("coriander leaf sprinkled on top"): perform- ing a deed for appearances only.

Thai cuisine is complex and vibrant with an intricate interplay of taste, texture and seasoning, where all components are equally important. The food strives to maintain balance, known as rot chaat, with "rot" meaning taste and "chaat" meaning proper, unified, balanced or appropriate.

This is the epitome of Thai cooking. In contrast to certain other cuisines, where simplicity reigns and some of the best dishes consist of a few ingredients that stand out, Thai food consists of a combination of many very complex ingredients blended to create a simple, pure, balanced taste - a typical recipe can have as many as 20 ingredients. The diverse flavors work together, rounding, contrasting and supporting each other. Texture is important, as well. Examples include the famed mango and sticky rice, where creamy rice cooked with coconut milk and served at room temperature contrasts perfectly with the cool, juicy, tart mango. Crispy, fried mung beans often garnish the dish, adding just the right touch of crunch.

Tap tim grop ("crispy rubies") is another dessert that is really all about the interplay of different textures. This cold dessert soup starts with an aromatic, floral broth based on coconut juice. Smooth, chewy, glutinous rice-cake bits; crispy, red-dyed, water-chestnut "rubies"; and crunchy, crushed ice garnish the soup. The solid ingredients, which have little or no flavor, take up the flavor of the sweet broth. This results in an extremely complex texture experience with a pure, gentle background taste.

A dish called miang kham is based on a collection of very strongly flavored items, such as roasted coconut pieces, peanuts, lime zest, hot chiles, dried shrimp, shallots and a salty-sweet palm-sugar syrup flavored with fish sauce. The ingredients are presented on a plate with betel leaves. Diners put small amounts of each ingredient on the leaf, roll it up and pop it into their mouths. This results in an explosion of flavors in the mouth that come in quick succession. This dish proved so popular at the Portland, OR, restaurant Typhoon! that other establishments in the area quickly added it to their menus.

Every Thai dish provides a balance of hot, sour, salty and sweet flavors, used in such a way as not to disguise the ingredients, but to bring them to life. People often think of Thai food as spicy; however, this is not really the case. A Thai chef prepares a dish so it is balanced, not hot. If a dish has too much heat, it will overpower the other flavors, making it unbalanced.

The diner determines the final mix of flavors. Hot (chiles or hot sauce), sour (lime juice), salty (fish sauce) and sweet (sugar) condiments accompany every meal. It is left to the discretion of the diners to adjust heat and other flavors to their liking.

Interestingly, the chile pepper is a relatively recent addition. The Portuguese introduced the spicy flavor of chile to the Thais in the 1500s. Prior to that, the main source of heat in Thai cooking was the indigenous prik thai (Thai pepper), known to us as black pepper. The most common chiles in Thailand today are prik chii faa ("sky-pointing" chiles), named because they grow with their pointy ends sticking up, and the much-hotter, tiny prik kii nuu ("mouse-dropping" chiles), named because of their resemblance to that health-department nightmare.

Other important flavor ingredients include:• Thai limes (smaller and sweeter than U.S. varieties);• sour tamarind (a date-like fruit pod);• fish sauce (nam pla);• coriander;• lemongrass (citronella);• kaffir-lime leaves and zest; • palm sugar (made from palm-flower nectar);• dried shrimp;• ginger;• shallots;• galanga root, or galangal (a relative of ginger, possessing a floral-anise flavor);• Thai basil (more minty than the Italian variety);• and coconut milk.

The most-widely used ingredient is fish sauce, which adds not just a salty flavor, but also acts as a flavor enhancer. It is produced by the runoff from salted fish in a fermentation tank. The fermentation process ultimately breaks down the fish proteins, resulting in the presence of 5' ribonucleotides. High-quality fish sauce has no fishy flavor or odor, and is generally very light in color.

Thailand has regional cooking styles, namely Central, Northern, Northeastern and Southern. Central Thailand is considered to be the heartland of the country, and its food is the most complex, reflecting the wealth and diversity of the region. The Northern region has many hill-tribe people, and its food tends to be hot and salty. The availability of cooking fuel from the abundant forests in the area makes grilling, steaming, simmering and braising popular cooking techniques.

The Northeast, or Issan area, is a poor region, and its food reflects this. Flavors are extremely strong to compensate for the meager portions served with rice. A shortage of available fuel make raw, cured and pickled food popular. The Southern region's proximity to Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia greatly influences its food. Seafood also plays a major role here due to the abundant oceans.

Another kind of Thai food worth mentioning is called "Royal Thai," which is based on the extremely complex and elegant preparations once reserved only for royalty. Intricate presentations, such as fruit carvings and bird-shaped dumplings, as well as the inclusion of luxury ingredients, epitomize this sub-cuisine.

In Bangkok, diners will find some of the freshest, best-prepared food at street stalls throughout the city. Locals say that people who run these stalls and cook only one dish become experts at making that dish. Restaurants, with their diverse menus, therefore, cannot compare. Some street stalls are so popular that customers frequently experience long waits, and some have even expanded into real buildings with tables, chairs and other restaurant accoutrements.

A popular evening activity in Bangkok is to design your own dinner by visiting several street stalls, and enjoying each stall's signature dish, from noodles to dessert, while enjoying the unique Bangkok ambiance of sitting at a small plastic table on a crowded sidewalk as large amounts of traffic slowly drive by.

Wherever you eat, rice is the main feature in any Thai meal, which typically includes several dishes. Thais usually serve everything at the same time on common platters. No rules dictate what to eat first; however, the rule of thumb is to not mix dishes on the plate. Diners serve themselves from the common plates, taking only enough food to be eaten in a few bites. Taking more would represent gluttony. A little rice eaten with each bite shows humility. Cleaning one's plate might be interpreted as a signal that the diner did not get enough food to eat, and is still hungry.

Diners eat food with a spoon, except for noodles, where they use chopsticks, reflecting the Chinese origin of noodle dishes. Forks only help push food onto a spoon. Putting a fork in your mouth in Thailand is the equivalent of eating with a knife in the United States.

The Thai, who live in a nation of snackers, don't necessarily eat meals at a particular time of day. "A little bit, often" is their maxim.

One of the most popular Thai cooking styles is the Thai curry (geng), which bears little or no resemblance to its Indian counterparts. Curries vary greatly from region to region and even from town to town. They consist of any wet savory dish that is enriched and thickened by a paste.

The curry paste is central to the taste of the curry dish. A Thai cook may use a food processor to chop the ingredients, but the traditional mortar and pestle extracts the flavors from the ingredients much more thoroughly, resulting in balanced and layered flavors, as opposed to those made with a food processor, which will be shredded, torn and whirled into a pulp. The paste may be mixed with coconut milk, fried in coconut cream or added to other liquids to make the curry dish.

Curry may provide the best example of the complexity of Thai ingredients. Strongly flavored ingredients meld together to create a subtle and cohesive whole. Some common types of Thai curry dishes include red, a mellow curry used mainly for seafood or chicken; yellow, a very hot paste made from turmeric and shrimp paste, used for seafood; green, which is hot, salty and pungent, not sweet; Massaman (Muslim), an extremely complex curry with cumin, cloves and nutmeg; jungle, which is extremely hot but very simple; and Panaeng, a salty, sweet basil curry mainly used with beef.

Some consumers may be looking for an authentic Thai food experience, but many want a "safe" ethnic food adventure. For them, incorporating a more-common Thai flavor that they may be familiar with (such as lemongrass) may be enough to entice them to buy the product. In restaurants, appetizers make a more-acceptable way to add Thai-influenced items to the menu, since customers may not risk ordering things that sound too strange as a main course, but will sample a bite or two.

Either way, the most important element is balancing the hot, sour, salty and sweet flavors to create a cohesive, flavorful whole that will entice customers into repeat purchases.

Using authentic ingredients, such as kaffir-lime leaves or galangal root, does add the perfect touch, but may be cost-prohibitive. Using a flavor house to substitute these ingredients with a good-quality flavor can be a cost-effective solution.

The bottom line: When formulating products, whether authentic or simply incorporating exotic elements, they must taste good. A good-tasting product leads to repeat purchases.

With more and more of the public traveling to exotic destinations, along with the influence of media and restaurant menus offering exotic tastes, people are demanding a greater variety of food and flavors at home and at restaurants.

The delicate balance of hot, sour, salty and sweet, the interplay of texture and flavor, and the unified, pure flavor consisting of extremely complex ingredient sets, are all hallmarks of Thai cooking. Thai food has such variety and universal appeal, that it makes the perfect cuisine from which to draw ideas when formulating new products. Whether using elements of Thai cuisine in familiar context, or formulating authentically, it allows product designers to appeal to the new generation of savvy and demanding consumers.

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