Savour true food heaven during your luxury Thailand tour

Just because you now can eat stir-fried phad thai noodles the world over doesn’t mean you should during a luxury holiday in Thailand. As you will discover, Thai cuisine has infinite variety; it’s very inexpensive; and whether you dine in a five-star luxury Thailand hotel restaurant, a neighborhood family café or a flimsy street stall, it’s next to impossible to have a bad meal.

Breakfast

If you get up early to visit and photograph an early morning fresh market, you’ll find plenty of food stalls serving breakfast foods that can eaten there or taken away.

That hearty thick porridge is joke, with a base of broken rice. You then have many choices to suit your tastes. You can add chicken or pork bits cooked in stock. Or a soft-boiled egg. Garnish with shredded ginger, spring onions or garlic and top up with a dash of soy sauce or chilli.

That white milky beverage bubbling on another vendor cart is soy milk (nam tau-hu) made from soaked and ground-up soybeans. You can add chewy tapioca pellets, boiled oats, shredded jelly or black sesame seeds.

Choose Your Noodle Type

Most Thais seem to eat more than three meals a day, but they tend not be heavy meals – usually either a bowl of noodles (kuay-ti-o) or a large scoop of steamed rice (khao) with accompaniments and embellishments.

Whether ordering in a restaurant or hawker stall, you’ll have a choice of noodle: probably rice noodles, yellowish egg noodles, rice vermicelli and bean vermicelli. The default is to have the noodles dunked in a soup (nam), but you can also choose to have the cooked noodles served dry (heng) with such additions as strips of roast pork or beef or duck, crabmeat, fish balls or vegetables. You can personally add condiments like cilli flakes, chillies in vinegar, sugar or ground peanuts.

Fish ball noodle soup (kuay-te-o luuk-chin plaa) is a good starter. Another standard is egg noodle soup (ba mee nam) with a sprinkling of wantons. The less timid and very hungry should try the rich red yen tao fo noodle soup. It includes cuttlefish, fish balls, fried bean curd, pork, blood cakes and morning glory.

Curries and Fishy Salad

As for rice, a curry (gaeng) served with rice is a staple. Try coconut chicken curry (gaeng gai) with a base of coconut milk. Kaeng luuk chin plaa is the alternative with fish balls. In the so-called Muslim version, the curry has potatoes, onions and peanuts, along with either beef (Masaman nua) or chicken (Masaman gai).

For a more filling main dish in the evening, try yam plaa duk fu, a delicious crispy fish with a Thai take on ‘salad’ (yam).  If you see this fish being cooked outdoors over charcoals at a hawker stall, you might think it’s just a basic charred fish. In fact, the duk fish is steamed, pounded and deep fried, then mixed with chillies, lemon juice, fish sauce and onion—all before the cooking phase.  

Thai Sweets: Glutinous Rice and Coconut Pudding

It hardly needs to be said that fresh mango with sticky rice and coconut cream (khao-niew ma-muang) is the best Thai dessert to enjoy during your luxury holiday in Thailand.  Many Thai desserts start with glutinous rice flour, which makes for soft chewy dough.

Try bean-filled crescents (khanom tun paeb), in which the dough is filled with boiled green beans, rolled over shredded coconut. A close cousin is chewy strings (khanom niew) in which the dough logs are wrapped with threads of crispy rice and syrup.

A favourite of buffets and street vendors you might encounter during your luxury tour of Thailand is tako, coconut pudding served in palm-sized banana leaf cups. Hidden below the slightly salty translucent top layer of coconut milk is a mixture of cornstarch, rice flour, water chestnuts and sugar.  The proper technique is to chomp into the two layers at once to savour all the flavours in a single bite.