Thai Recipes
137 recipes found
Chicken Larb
Chicken Laab
Thai Beef Salad With Lemongrass Dressing
Easy Shrimp Pad Thai
Crystal Spring Rolls
As served at Thanying Restaurant in Bangkok
Neau Pad Prik (Sauteed Beef With Chilies)
Dom Yam Gung (Spiced Shrimp Soup)
Craig Claiborne’s Thai Beef Salad
In 1986, Craig Claiborne wrote about “an exceptional sauce ‘borrowed’ from the cuisine of Thailand, where it is known as nam pla, and Vietnam, where it is known as nuoc mam.” This fish sauce is made with an essence of anchovies. Claiborne said one of its best uses was in the preparation of this salad.
Pad Krapow Gai (Thai Basil Chicken)
As dynamic as it is speedy, this ground chicken and green bean recipe from “Night + Market” (Clarkson Potter, 2017) by Kris Yenbamroong and Garrett Snyder, delivers a wallop of flavor with punchy ingredients that stir-fry in just 15 minutes. While this popular Thai street food can be whipped up using a range of proteins, Mr. Yenbamroong refers to his riff as “low-rent” because it’s prepared with ground chicken rather than pricier slices of meat. It’s piled with basil; Thai basil or holy basil provide more assertive licorice notes, but sweet basil adds herbal bursts of brightness. Spiked with Thai seasoning (see Tip), the chicken mixture is salty on its own, but it’s inextricably linked with rice, and imparts the right amount of salinity when dispersed.
Kua Kling (Southern Thai-Style Red Curry)
Whereas larb is bright and acidic — light on its feet — this simple adaptation of a traditional Southern Thai dry red curry, is grounding and spicy. It owes much of its flavor to red curry paste, turmeric and fresh chile that have been toasted until they shake awake. For scorching heat (a curry like this is typically brutally hot), add more chile. As the chicken — though it could be ground pork, sliced beef or chicken, or mushrooms — cooks, its fat renders and the fired-up curry paste adheres. Season it with brown sugar and fish sauce, and serve with rice, cabbage, herbs, avocado, cucumber and-or a crisp fried egg.
Slow-Cooker Curried Sweet Potato Soup With Coconut and Kale
This creamy Thai-inspired soup is all about balance: When the contrasting flavors are in harmony, it is outrageously delicious. (It is also vegan if there’s no fish or shrimp in your curry paste.) Supermarket curry pastes are a great shortcut to flavor for weeknights, but salt and spice levels can vary greatly among brands. So taste at the end, and adjust: You may need to add curry paste, sugar or lime juice to your liking. Chile-lime flavored peanuts, available at some grocery stores, are particularly good for topping — snap them up if you happen to see them. Otherwise, roasted salted peanuts will work beautifully.
Thai-Style Sweet and Salty Shrimp
Made of equal parts sugar, fish sauce and vinegar, the sauce in the famous pad Thai at Kris Yenbamroong’s Night + Market restaurants in Los Angeles is too good to be used exclusively on rice noodles. This adaptation is simmered with a tangle of shrimp, peanuts, scallions, chile and lime juice for for a sweet, salty stir-fry. Add a quick cooking vegetable, like peas, thinly sliced asparagus or bean sprouts, with the shrimp, or substitute tofu, salmon or cubed boneless chicken thighs for the shrimp. Serve over shredded cabbage, rice, a roasted sweet potato or rice noodles.
Pressure Cooker Pork With Citrus and Mint
In this recipe for a Thai-inspired salad, made for a 6- to 8-quart electric pressure cooker, crispy pork, flavored with fish sauce and lime, is paired with sweet and juicy pomelo (or use grapefruit) and heady fried garlic chips. If you’d rather make this in a slow cooker, you can; it'll take 5 to 7 hours on high. (You can also make it in a stovetop pressure cooker, by trimming a few minutes off the cooking time. The stovetop versions tend to operate at a slightly higher pressure, cooking food more quickly.)
Poached Shrimp With Thai Basil and Peanuts
This quick shrimp salad is garnished with roasted peanuts for crunch. You can serve it on crisp lettuce leaves for an impressive presentation, but cucumber rounds also make a fine conduit.
Coconut Red Curry With Tofu
This simple weeknight red curry relies on jarred or canned red curry paste for flavor, which you can find at larger supermarkets and specialty markets. Transfer leftover canned curry paste to a jar, top it with a little oil and store in the refrigerator for up to a month. Or freeze for longer storage. Feel free to substitute other vegetables for the mushrooms and snow peas, though you might have to increase the cooking time slightly if using something dense like carrot or cubed winter squash.
Quinoa With Thai Flavors
This recipe for quinoa seasoned with mango, lime juice and red onion, was brought to us from Susie Fishbein by way of Julia Moskin. Ms. Fishbein is the author of the popular Kosher by Design cookbooks, which have sold more than 300,000 copies. Quinoa is popular among kosher cooks because although it tastes and chews like grains, which are forbidden during Passover, many religious and botanical authorities consider it a berry.
Butternut Squash and Green Curry Soup
This creamy, vibrant soup is a Thai-inspired version of the puréed squash soup you know and love. The green curry paste, which is relatively easy to find in the international aisle of the grocery store, along with coconut milk and fish sauce, perfectly complements the butternut squash's sweetness. But it's the topping — a spin on miang kham, a snack in Thailand and Laos full of peanuts, coconut and chiles — that's the real standout.
Thai-Inspired Coconut Curry Soup With Vegetables
There are dozens of types of curries in Thailand, but most can be categorized as red, green or yellow; this is a streamlined vegetarian version of a red curry, named after the color of chile found in the curry paste. This one is spicy, sweet, creamy and adaptable. When the red curry paste is cooked in oil, the blend of chiles and aromatics like galangal and lemongrass come alive and become the curry’s backbone. Because store-bought pastes vary in intensity, this recipe also uses fresh garlic and ginger to ensure a zingy final result. Use any vegetables you like, but it’s nice to have one hearty vegetable (like sweet potato) and one crisp one (like snow peas) for a mix of textures. If you find your curry too spicy, stir in a bit of brown sugar. If it’s feeling a bit flat, squeeze in a little lime juice or add a dash of soy or fish sauce.
Pad See Ew
Built around the satisfying umami of soy sauce, this is an easy Thai recipe to shop for and cook at home. The classic version is made with wide, fresh rice noodles, but Pailin Chongchitnant, a popular Canadian YouTube chef, said that restaurants in Bangkok proudly advertise using spaghetti; in southern Thailand, her family used egg noodles. (In other words, there’s flexibility.) The street-kitchen version of this popular dish — a close relative of Cantonese beef chow fun — will always have more of the seared edges that make the dish extra delicious, but cooking it in a wide, heavy pan that holds onto heat gives great results. If gai lan is not available, Ms. Chongchitnant says that broccolini, a hybrid of gai lan and broccoli, or steamed broccoli are good alternatives. (The crunch of the stems is what you’re after here.).
Cold Pork Rice Noodles With Cucumber and Peanuts
Sometimes you want dinner to be cold. For those evenings, there's this make-ahead pork and rice noodle dish, offering a robust infusion of zing from garlic, fish sauce and tons of fresh herbs plus plenty of flexibility. Add more peanuts and basil, or go heavy on the mint and lime. Use pork tonight, and ground turkey or chicken the next time; it’s your choice. This basic formula is easily adapted, and the components pack up easily for a work lunch or another night’s dinner. To make this vegetarian, substitute semi-firm tofu, cut into 1/2-inch cubes, for the pork, and substitute a few tablespoons of soy sauce for the fish sauce.
Red Curry Paste
Raghavan Iyer created this version of Thai red curry paste for his 2023 book, “On the Curry Trail: Chasing the Flavor That Seduced The World” (Workman Publishing). Curry pastes make up the soul of Thailand’s regional curries. In his recipe for Pan-Fried Tofu With Red Curry Paste, Mr. Iyer uses coconut milk to mellow the heat. The red curry is part of a trilogy in his cookbook, which includes green curry paste (with cilantro leaves and fresh green Thai chiles) and yellow curry paste (which relies on fresh ginger and turmeric and yellow aji amarillo chiles). Red, green and yellow curry pastes are nice to have on hand to give complexity and depth to meat, vegetable and grain dishes.
Pineapple Fried Rice
“It’s a whole balanced meal inside a tropical fruit,” writes Pepper Teigen about this pineapple fried rice recipe in her book “The Pepper Thai Cookbook” (Clarkson Potter, 2021). This is fried rice, which means in place of the bacon and chicken, you can use shrimp, beef or whatever vegetables you have languishing in your crisper drawer. The one thing you shouldn’t skip are the assertive seasonings, which merit a party: The full 2 tablespoons of curry powder and 1 teaspoon of ground white pepper are what make this dish tingle and trot with a hot, addictive savoriness.
Thai Larb Gai (Chicken With Lime, Chili and Fresh Herbs)
Larb gai is a dish of browned ground chicken, mint, basil and red onions dressed with lime juice and ground red chiles that's popular in Laos and Isan, neighboring rural sections of Thailand. (The dish is sometimes spelled laab, lob or lop.) It's perfect hot weather food: spicy, crunchy and light, but rich in flavors and contrasts. Traditionally, this dish is made with a roasted rice powder that's prepared by toasting raw rice in a wok, then grounding it to a powder, but you can find premade roasted rice powder at Asian markets. Whatever you do, don't skip it — it adds a nuttiness that's essential to the authentic flavor of the dish.
Pad Thai-Style Rice Salad
My basic technique works like this: Cook the rice as you would pasta, in abundant salted water, tasting as you go; the cooking time will range from around 15 minutes for white rice to as long as 45 minutes for the most stubborn brown varieties (almost all will be done in 30 minutes or so). Drain and rinse; you want to get any remaining surface starch off so the salad isn’t too clumpy. When the rice is cool enough to handle, dress it; it will absorb a bit of the dressing. Add herbs and garnishes just before serving.