Thai Tricks of the Trade

Salacious title but it refers to food, you perverts!

The CC was taken to a "home-style" Thai restaurant. This was extraordinarily good cooking. What an extraordinarily competent mom (not grandmom, mind you!) would make.

If this sounds like "damning by faint praise", rest assured, it's anything but. The CC has impossibly high standards, and this is quite excellent food.


What surprised the CC was how quickly they could tailor the recipe. The owner ("Charlie") would quickly gauge the heat quotient of the tables and either amp it up or down.

What was extraordinary was that they could tailor the heat using dry chillies or Thai green chillies, on demand (the two taste nothing like each other!)

This is almost impossible. There's gotta be a trick.

It took the CC a day to figure it out.

The clue was given by the friend who took the CC there. He remarked, while eating, that the heat seemed to be on the "surface" of the noodles -- an extraordinarily perceptive remark -- the significance of which the CC didn't quite latch on to for that night and the morning after.

DOH!!!!!!

It's an old Thai cooking trick. One of the oldest in the book.

In fact, the CC has used it here (in the first dish.)

Dry rice is roasted on a skillet and ground to a fine powder. You can mix it with anything. This powder is the glue of cooking. It will stick to anything that it comes in contact with. In fact, it's hard to get this powder to unstick!

This is precisely the trick they use to get water-based salad dressings to work!

Rice powder mixed with powdered chillies!