“Those are the three noodles that everyone who’s been to Thailand wants to make,” said Ms Watcharee Limanon, who has moved between Bangkok and the United States since 1994, and built a small Thai culinary empire from her home in Yarmouth, Maine.
As a longtime seeker of perfect stir-fried noodles, I asked Ms Limanon and other cooks how they adapt these dishes for their own kitchens, with local ingredients, appliances and challenges.The tiny Manhattan apartment that chef Hong Thaimee first moved into had a tiny stove without a single powerful burner. So she long ago started using her robin’s-egg-blue Dutch oven for stir-fries.
When balancing these big tastes, she said, every home cook follows his or her own “rot meu,” or “hand flavor.” Your uncle might have a heavy hand with pungent garlic and hot chiles; your mother might lean toward sweet basil and coconut vinegar. “There’s never just one recipe,” she said. “People assume that a good substitute for an Asian ingredient is another Asian ingredient,” she said, noting that bok choy and Napa cabbage are often suggested — unhelpfully, in her view — as good substitutes for gai lan. “That’s not always true.”
“I refused for a long time,” she said. But eventually she decided that the central role of condiments — the ubiquitous fish sauce, chili powder, lime wedges, pickled chiles and more — proves that in Thailand, taste is sometimes more important than tradition.Understanding ingredients can be a challenge, especially for cooks who are unfamiliar with, say, the entire array of Asian soy sauces.
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