There’s a ton of amazing Thai food, but in the end for me it all really comes down to southern Thai food. It’s more like Malaysian food, flavorful dishes made from fish, scorchingly hot soups and curies and coconut milk it widely represented.
In the episode I enjoy one of my favorite flavors in the entire world, a Thai southern soup known as Kaeng Som (แกงส้มใต้). The base of the soup is made with garlic, lots of chillies and fresh turmeric root. Those ingredients are blended and added with water. Kaeng Som can be made with a variety of other ingredients but for this particular version, we made it with slices of barracuda fish and with sweet pineapple. It’s also common to be cooked with bamboo shoots, green papaya or young coconut shoots.
The flavor is intense, a hot and sour soup that will literally probably burn your throat going down but that will flavor up your mouth like you’ve never imagined. If you ever get sick and need to clear your nostril, kaeng som is the ultimate treatment!
Note: In Bangkok when you order kaeng som (แกงส้ม), it’s a red sweet and sour soup – but in the south, this is was kaeng som is, sometimes referred to as kaeng leung in Bangkok.
Southern Thai food is a complex cuisine of wonderful and often robust flavors. When you’re dining in Thailand, it literally can not get much better!
Music:
This video contains royalty free music by Fool’s Chaos with Brenda Kurtz.
The track used in this video is called “Slowly Falling Out of Innocence.” Here is a direct download to the song: http://soundcloud.com/fools-chaos/slowly-falling-d1111
All license information can be found here: http://soundcloud.com/terms-of-use and here http://soundcloud.com/101/creative-commons
I used this song royalty free under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. The video includes attribution to the producer of the music.
Thank you for watching and hope you enjoyed this intro video to the delights of southern Thai food!