The best Thai dishes: recipes and cooking features

Thai cuisine is a terrific phenomenon, as the Thais managed to preserve the whole identity of their national cuisine, despite the huge influence from India and China. In this article we want to talk about the most famous and popular dishes of this stunning country.

Products used by Thai people

Thai dishes are unique in that during their preparation they use an incredible amount of various spices. Very popular bitter pepper, which is the basis of many dishes. In general, the dishes of Thai cuisine are very sharp.

The basis of nutrition for residents of an exotic country is rice, which is considered the main Asian culture. Almost all Thai dishes contain this product. And rice of two varieties is used: sticky and white crumbly. The second is eaten with spoons as a side dish, and balls are rolled from the first, which are then put in the mouth. Roast with rice, liquid soup, sweet and sour rice ... The list of dishes from this product, which are prepared by the Thais, is simply endless.

But on the table to the side dish is always served a variety of sauces (soybean, fish). However, it should be noted that Thai dishes are not just rice. Together with him, vegetables, fish and meat are served.

The next product for popularity after rice can be considered soybeans, which are used in processed form. They make pasta, cottage cheese, sauce.

Many Thai dishes are prepared from fish. Mostly freshwater species are used, which are found in local lakes and streams. From fish prepare delicious soups and second dishes, wrapping in banana leaves. Very popular in Thailand and seafood.

It may seem that the Thais use exclusively fish. But actually it is not. In their diet, there is meat. The most popular is pork, chicken meat (any poultry meat), from which simply deliciously delicious dishes are prepared.

Features of national food

Thai food has one feature. In Thailand, almost completely lacking milk and all kinds of dairy products. The Thai people from this in no way suffer and replace them with coconut cream and milk. These products enrich the local food with an unusual taste, which in our conditions is difficult to reproduce.

The climate of Thailand gives its inhabitants the opportunity to enjoy the ripe fruit all year round. Bananas and papaya are very common here. But fruits such as rambutan, mangosteen and mango appear only in season, but they are always available.

Thai food is very unusual. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it is prepared from very unusual products for us, and the ways of its preparation are unusual. Therefore, at home, reproduce such dishes is not easy, because you need to achieve special taste tones. But still you can try to cook the most popular dishes.

Beef Dish

Beef in Thai is a completely new interpretation of a seemingly familiar dish. If you offer your guests such a meal, they will be very surprised and will probably ask for supplements.

The dish turns out slightly spicy and spicy, which gives it some kind of piquancy. A mixture of sauces and spices gives the familiar meat a completely new sound.

For preparation, you need the following products:

1. Beef tenderloin - 260 g.
2. One lime.
3. Grass lemon - 20 g.
4. Clove of garlic.
5. Celery greens.
6. One chili pepper.
7. Green onion.
8. Basil.
9. Chicken broth - 120 g.
10. Soy sauce - 15 g.
11. Cane sugar - 7 g.
12. Olive oil - 12 ml.
13. Corn starch - 12 g.

Beef cooking

Beef in Thai is prepared with a lot of herbs. Preparation should begin with the preparation of rice. It must be thoroughly rinsed until the water is completely clear. After this, the groats can be poured with water in a proportion of 1 to 1.5 and sent to cook on medium heat. The rice is considered ready once all the liquid has evaporated.

Meanwhile you can go to the preparation of meat. Beef should be marinated. We cut it in small slices and put it in a bowl. Now you need to prepare marinade: squeeze out the juice from lemongrass, and cut the pulp, add soy sauce and exactly half of the prepared starch. The resulting mixture is sent to beef.

Garlic should be chopped and finely chopped chili. Mix these ingredients and add fish sauce, as well as sugar and juice of the fourth part of lime.

Then you need to cut the green onions, and the remainders of the starch dissolve in the broth. Now fry the beef on a well-heated frying pan for a few minutes, removing the previously lemongrass. Then we add oyster sauce (prepared by us) and broth with starch into the pan. All the ingredients are mixed and brought to a boil. At the end, basil and onions are added, after which the frying pan is removed from the plate.

Now you need to properly serve the dish. Beef we lay out on boiled rice, and on top of it we will decorate with greens of coriander.

Pad Tai

We would like to offer you a recipe of one of the most popular and delicious dishes of Thailand. Pad Tai consists of roasted flat rice noodles (its width is about half a centimeter) and tamarind (sweet and sour) sauce. The second component, unfortunately, is very difficult for us to find. Therefore tamarind sauce can simply be replaced with a mixture of fish and soy sauce with lime juice and vegetable oil (peanut and sesame are well suited).

In the original performance, it is very difficult to reproduce the dish, but you can prepare a more adapted version, close to the original. All the necessary ingredients can be purchased in large supermarkets or in specialized shops of Asian cuisine. Another preparation requires special dishes - wok.

So, let's start with the preparation of noodles. It must be boiled according to the instructions given on the packaging, and then rinsed. Next, we clean the shrimp, removing from them all unnecessary. We beat several large eggs in a separate bowl with a whisk.

We cut the feathers of onions, grind several shallots and one clove of garlic. Salty roasted peanuts should be chopped.

Next, we turn to cooking meat. One hundred or two hundred grams of pork is sliced. We put on the stove wok and warm it sesame oil. We put shallots in bowls and fry it for about a minute, then add the meat and also cook a couple of minutes. After that, put the garlic and shrimp in a frying pan and fry all the ingredients for a few more minutes, not forgetting to stir constantly.

Now in the pan you need to enter the eggs and then mix everything thoroughly. If the wok is too hot, then you can raise it and mix the contents on the weight. Eggs should turn into something that looks like flakes. This effect is not so easy to achieve.

Then you can turn down the fire and add the rice noodles, mixing the ingredients, you need to let them sink.

In the dish we put a tablespoon of ketchup, two tablespoons of fish sauce, a teaspoon of sugar (it is better to use cane or palm), juice of one lime, zhamenu sprouted legumes. All components are again mixed and removed from the fire. Finished dish sprinkled with herbs onions, pepper ground and chopped peanuts. Mixing the ingredients well, the food is served in special bowls.

Sauce syrup

Thai sauce sirach is incredibly aromatic and spicy, it fits almost any dish: rolls, fish, meat, and is also used for baking food.

Ingredients:

1. Three cloves of garlic.
2. Chili pepper - 65 g.
3. A tablespoon of soy sauce.
4. One head of onion.
5. Rice vinegar - 2 tbsp. L.
6. A tablespoon of vegetable oil.
7. Tomato paste - 120 g.
8. Sugar - 2 tbsp. L.

This sauce was first cooked fifty years ago by one Thai in a small village. He liked everything incredibly. And after a while the recipe was bought out and the sauce was produced in large quantities. Sirach is still very popular in Asian countries. It is used for baking, frying, as an ingredient for marinade.

Preparation should begin with the fact that fry in a pan a chopped onion and chopped garlic. Next, you need to add pepper and tomato, and to strain the workpiece for five minutes. Now you can pour vinegar, soy sauce and put sugar. Prepare the dish until the ingredients are soft. After our sauce has cooled slightly, it must be crushed in a blender. It can be put in a glass jar, clogged and stored in a refrigerator.

Massaman curry

A dish with such a beautiful name is included in the TOP-50 of the world's finest cookery. So, it is definitely worth a try. Massaman curry is prepared in every restaurant in Thailand. This type of curry is considered the least acute among other species. In addition, it is worth knowing that the dish is prepared exclusively from beef. Of course, you can use chicken and pork, but then it will not be quite an original dish.

It is said that in the time of King Siam Rama II Massaman curry was present in the royal menu. The basis of the dish is pasta. It traditionally consists of shallots, red dried pepper, galangal, garlic, zir, white pepper, lemongrass, white coriander, salt and shrimp paste.

A stunning combination of pulp with potatoes, stewed exclusively in coconut milk, is complemented by the aromas of spices, resulting in a very harmonious dish.

Ingredients:

1. Coconut milk - 220 g.
2. Beef - 430 g.
3. Onion-sieve - 18 pcs.
4. Pasta from tamarind - to taste.
5. Pastry curry massaman - 60 g.
6. Fish sauce - to taste.
7. Cashew or roasted peanuts.
8. White cardamom - 5 pcs.
9. Bay leaf - to taste.
10. A half teaspoon of zira.

Recipe

In a dry wok fry cardamom and ziru. Cut the meat into pieces. From the jar with milk (coconut) we will get the cream and add them to the pan along with the curry paste. Ingredients fry until the cream begins to emit oil. Next, in the wok, put the meat in and mix it until ready (about thirty minutes or forty). Meanwhile, we prepare the onions and potatoes, clean them and cut them into large pieces. Twenty minutes before the end of cooking meat in the pan should add onions, potatoes and fish sauce. The dish should go to the ready. At the very end of the cooking, you need to add zira, cardamom, palm sugar, tamarind paste, bay leaf. The finished dish is served in a deep dish, sprinkling peanuts on top.

Thai miracle

Panang Guy is a terrific dish. In this article we want to give a simple recipe for its preparation. The main thing is only to find all the necessary products on sale, because without curry and coconut milk the dish just will not work.

Ingredients:

1. Chicken fillet - 350 g.
2. Vegetable oil.
3. A teaspoon of fish sauce.
4. String beans - 120 g.
5. Three teaspoons curry paste.
6. Two teaspoons of brown sugar.
7. Coconut milk - 220 ml.
8. Broccoli - 120 g.
9. Chile - 4 pcs.
10. Pinch of lime leaves.
11. Nuts - 60 g.

Recipe

Chicken fillet should be washed and dried, and then cut into slices. Then broccoli grind on the inflorescence, chop the leaves of lime and chili. Meat a little fry in a pan, and blanch the beans.

In the saucepan, put the cream of coconut milk and bring them to a boil. Then add the curry paste and mix the mixture until dissolved. Now you can add milk, fish sauce, put some of the lime leaves and sugar. Next to the wok we send broccoli, chili, chicken and beans. All ingredients should simmer for ten minutes. Vegetables and fillets should be fully cooked. The dish is ready.

Green curry

Thai green curry is one of the best dishes of northern Thailand. The combination of coconut milk with spicy spices gives a tremendous flavor, due to which the dish is incredibly popular. Its basis is the paste itself of green curry, which can be purchased or prepared.

Ingredients:

1. Pea aubergines - one handful.
2. Thai eggplants - 6 pieces.
3. One breast of chicken.
4. Melon winter - 250 g.
5. A bank of coconut milk.
6. Chili pepper - 3 pcs.
7. Curry paste (green) - 3 tbsp. L.
8. Three cloves of garlic.
9. Two tablespoons of fish sauce.
10. Lime leaves.
11. Palm sugar.

Vegetables must be prepared: Pea eggplants plucked from branches, round - cut, melon cut into pieces, pepper shredded in the form of rings. Chile and garlic need to grind in a mortar and fry in vegetable oil. You can use coconut cream for frying. Next, add the curry paste to the frying pan and fry the ingredients for a couple of minutes. Then pour some milk (coconut) and mix the mixture, put pieces of chicken and continue cooking on a very slow fire. Do not bring the dish to a boil, otherwise coconut milk can simply exfoliate.

Now you can pour the remainder of the milk and cook, remembering to stir it. We add sugar, fish sauce, pea eggplants, chilies, lime leaves and again everything is warmed up. At the very end of the cooking, basil leaves are put in curry. They are added to the dish and immediately removed from the fire. Curry is usually served with rice noodles and rice.

Thai salad

Salad Som There is incredibly popular among Thai women. It consists of a dish from almost all herbs and is quickly prepared. There are two kinds of Som Tama: with salted crabs and dried shrimps.

Ingredients:

1. Green papaya.
2. Two chili peppers.
3. Six cherry tomatoes.
4. Two cloves of garlic.
5. Six bean pods are long.
6. A tablespoon of sugar.
7. Lime.
8. Two tablespoons of ground peanuts.
9. A tablespoon of dried shrimp.

Papaya must be peeled off and seeds removed from the core. Using a special device, rub the papaya in the form of noodles (the knife for the fruit is somewhat similar to our potato peeler).

In the stupa, grind chili and garlic. The more sharply we want to get a salad, the more thoroughly we season the seasonings. Then add the tomatoes and beans to the mortar and press the contents. Tomatoes should let the juice run. Now put the shrimp, papaya, peanuts and all the other spices, squeeze out the lime juice and mix the ingredients carefully. The dish is ready!

Thai shrimps

Shrimp in Thai - an incredibly tasty dish with seafood. To prepare it we will need:

1. Tiger shrimps (large) - 0,8 kg.
2. Lime leaves.
3. Lemon sorghum - four stems.
4. Ginger - 60 g.
5. Two chili peppers.
6. Sesame oil - 6 tbsp. L.
7. The juice of three oranges.
8. Sea salt.

Ginger and garlic grind the grater, previously cleansed of the skin. We cut the stems of Schizandra into four parts. Chili pepper finely chopped and add it to ginger with garlic. There we pour orange juice, sesame oil, put salt, schisandra, lime leaves and mix the ingredients well. As a result, we got a marinade. In it we add prawns and let them brew in the refrigerator for six hours. Marinated seafood is wrapped in several layers of foil and baked on charcoal or on a grate. The approximate cooking time is 10-15 minutes.

If you want to cook such a dish, you can buy a set for Tom-Yam soup, it has everything you need. This will make it easier for you and do not have to look for all the ingredients separately for marinade preparation.

Instead of an afterword

We cited recipes for only the most famous and popular dishes of Thai cuisine. In fact, there are an incredible number of them. It is impossible to talk about everyone within the framework of the article. Following the cooking tips, you can enjoy yourself with a home-made Thai dish or just orientate yourself, what to order in establishments practicing cooking such a meal.