Thai Recipes29 authentic family recipes

Thai cuisine is built on a four-flavour theorem: sour (lime, tamarind), sweet (palm sugar, coconut), salty (fish sauce, soy), and hot (bird's eye chilli, dried chilli). A properly built Thai dish hits all four at once, which is why a single mouthful of green curry can feel like five different things happening simultaneously.

The pantry overlap with Indian cooking is significant — coriander root, kaffir lime, galangal, ginger, lemongrass, dry red chilli, and shallots all do similar jobs to Indian aromatics, just in different proportions. The big differences are fish sauce (umami where Indian cooking uses asafoetida and dried lentils), coconut milk (which goes into almost every Thai curry), and Thai basil (which has an anise note Indian basil doesn't).

Our Thai recipes cover the classics (green curry, red curry, massaman curry, tom yum, pad thai, pad see ew) and a handful of street-stall favourites (laab gai, som tam, basil chicken). About a third are vegetarian — Thai cooking adapts well to tofu and mushroom — and the seafood is calibrated for what's actually available in coastal South Asia.