Walking the streets of Bangkok is like making your way through an endless buffet. Given, this can mean different things to different people… But I mean it in a culinary sense.
Thai food as we know it in America is just the tip of the iceberg, or perhaps the chili in this case. It’s not that Thai restaurants are holding out or wouldn’t enjoy serving some of their favorites from home, it’s just that replicating street food is hard to do.
That’s because vendors specialize. Sometimes they even need specific equipment and setups to offer particular items, like the people who make flavorful beef, chicken or duck noodle soups. It sounds so easy – but it’s an all or nothing proposition. The aromatic, spiced broth takes a long time to make and has to be done just so – and roasting enough whole chickens or ducks takes time and money. It’s not a small scale business. You’re either in or you’re out. Nonetheless, a soup cart with a good broth and ducks with the right flavor and texture can make a killing – around the clock.
The same goes for specialties like the whole roasted, spiced stewed pork with eggs hardboiled in the aromatic broth and juices in which it’s cooked.
Other things involve a barbecue, making them not so simple for a traditional restaurant. There are Thai street vendors who just deal in sausages – garlic pork, garlic fish, thick rich chicken, long thin light chicken, fish cake-based, and spiced beef. They spend their days roasting sausages on skewers and serving them with sides of fresh raw veggies, sticky rice and sometimes drowned in a sweet and spicy sauce called “chim” – which is best on chicken and fish sausages, in my opinion.
Then there are the luk-chin stands. Similar to sausages, but balls of meat of all sorts skewered and roasted over coals always drowned in chim.
A stand with sausages or luk chin may occasionally expand its offerings into other skewered taste treats. Marinated squid on a stick is one of Emily’s favorites as are chicken livers. Pretty much every innard and extremity of a chicken gets barbecued too.
Our favorite stand is always the som tam seller. Spicy papaya salad originated from Laos, but make “Thai style” here. Thais take the basic recipe of grated green papaya, fish sauce, palm sugar, chilis, lime juice, green beans, fermented fish paste, tomatoes and sometimes a small blue crab and enhance it to Thai tastes by adding dried shrimp, peanuts grated carrot, several cloves of garlic – while ditching the fermented fish paste. Smart omission. Emily and I also ditch the crab and the dried shrimp.
Although man could survive on som tam alone, vendors typically offer an array of complimentary products. Always sticky rice. Often fresh BBQ chicken, salted BBQ river fish, and garlic sausages. And the most authentic of all include a variety of Lao-Isan salads ranging from mixtures of fermented fish paste and chilis to sauteed, seasoned vegetables or spicy chopped meat salads like larb or nam tok. If I’m lucky, I’ll stumble across a som tam vendor with a fresh supply of highly rare pad mee – a salad of thin rice noodles with a pad Thai flavor. For some reason, pad mee is one of the most elusive side dishes in all of Thailand.
Fried chicken was a big part of Thai cuisine long before the Colonel came to town. Thai fried chicken is battered and deep fried in a giant wok, then cut into strips and pieces for easy eating. It may seem incredible simple and almost bland for Thai food, but not to worry – Thais have that covered – literally – with spicy sauce and chili flakes. Some go for the ever-important extra carbs with a side of sticky rice. For those who like it less than kosher, they make the same thing with pork fillets too.
Southern Thais tend to enjoy the chicken rice vendors who sell nothing but tender, steamed white meat chicken slices over rice cooked in chicken stock and served with a light seasoned broth, some plum sauce and a few side items, usually cucumbers and tomatoes. It’s really a Hainanese dish found all throughout Southeast Asia – anywhere you have overseas Chinese which is practically everywhere, and especially Malaysia and Singapore.
The steamy stands offer other Chinese inspired foods. Thais love to take a good idea and Thai-ize it like they do with khanom jeeb — the Thai version of Cantonese Shumai. The little open ended dumplings get steamed on roadside carts and sold hot and fresh any time of day. Some Thai chilis give the ordinarily bland shrimp and pork dumplings a kick while smothering them in toasted garlic and soy sauce makes the flavor more complex.
The same goes for Chinese steamed buns known is bao or pau which are usually either mild mixtures of pork and vegetable or saucy BBQ sauce-laden sliced pork filled buns, are spicy aromatic treats known as sala-bao in Thailand. Because Thais love variety, they have chicken and veggie varieties, different seasoning and spice combinations and sweet sala-bao that include custard, pandan and taro. They even sell these in convenience stores. 7-Eleven used to make their sweet sala-bao easily identifiable by shaping them like mice. Nowadays, they color-code them green for pandan, purple for taro and yellow for custard.
The thing is, Thais love sweets – and they do them so well. Americans sample only a few of the innumerable Thai desserts because most of them are made fresh and hot on stands. Moreover, like most tropical cultures, Thais practically worship coconuts and know how to use them expertly in all manner of sweets.
Being a dessert guy, I appreciate that Thais are just as happy to start off their morning with dessert as anything else. That’s why when I lived in Bangkok, my usual breakfast was a packet of warm coconut sticky rice and a bag of cool, cut-up pineapple. While Thai restaurants in America and many stands here pair coconut sticky rice with mango, I can skip the delicious, juicy Thai mangos and get down to business with the rice itself. It’s all I really need.
For those who don’t see the full value of the coconut sticky rice – stands here happily top it off with your choice of mango, coconut custard, or coconut cream jelly. The rice also comes in flavor variations including cumin, pandan and strawberry. Some special dessert treats congeal coconut sticky rice in a caramel-like sauce of thickened palm sugar. There’s also black sticky rice cooked in coconut milk – which I love almost as much as the original. Occasionally, coconut sticky rice also gets roasted in a palm leaf with bananas.
Aside from these, vendors roam the streets of Bangkok and just about every Thai town selling homemade fresh young coconut ice cream – sometimes mixed with taro. This rich, flavorful treat comes either as a sandwich on a hot dog bun or in small cups with coconut sticky rice and your choice of several candied and jellied treats.
The parade of coconut madness just keeps going with endless concoctions of fruits and candies mixed into hot, thick, sweetened coconut cream. These can include bananas, jellied coconut, coconut noodles, taro, yams and berries – or my favorite “bualloy” that uses candy puffed lotus seeds, young coconut meat and an egg. Such desserts are always served piping hot like a soup.
Sweets stands often include custards and candies made of mung beans, yellow steam cakes made with mango, tiny crepes covered with sticky-thick coconut cream and fried grated taro and coconut pancakes called “pancit.”
Amazingly, these are just a few. I can’t even identify all the desserts we see on the streets.
That’s the thing about Thailand – it’s always a taste adventure. You never know what great food you’ll meet on the next street.
Of course, they have restaurants that serve all the curries and fried dishes people at home have come to expect from Thai cuisine. People here are also enjoying green curry chicken, tom yum, pad Thai and cashew chicken. They too are staples of Thai cuisine. However, Emily and I don’t stop for them often because we can have them in LA anytime we want.
We’re after the stuff that you only eat on the streets and the flavors that exist only within the kingdom itself. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to walk along and try a bite of this and a stick of that. The best flavors and smells of Thai cooking are every five to ten feet. God bless Thailand.
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