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Or Lam: Luang Prabang's Peppery Stew

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Every old capital has a dish that could only have been invented there, and for Luang Prabang it is or lam. It is a stew, but not a curry and not a soup: a thick, dark-green tangle of eggplants, beans, mushrooms and meat, perfumed with herbs and heated not mainly by chillies but by pieces of peppery wood. Visitors expecting the fire of Isan or the coconut richness of central Thailand get something else entirely — woodsy, bitter-edged, warming rather than burning, and unlike anything else on the Lao table. The Pepper That Is Wood The signature ingredient is mai sakhaan , the dried vine-stem of a pepper-family plant gathered from the northern forests. Cut into thumb-length pieces and simmered in the pot, it gives or lam its slow, mouth-tingling warmth and its unmistakable woody depth. You do not eat the pieces; you push them aside as you go, the way you would a bay leaf — except that by then they have flavoured everything. The second quiet trick is the thickening. A spoonful of soaked sti...
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Hat Yai Fried Chicken: Shallots on Top, Always

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Hat Yai Fried Chicken: Shallots on Top, Always Photo: Hungry in Thailand Every fried chicken has a signature, and Hat Yai's is not the crust — it is what lands on top of it. Gai tod Hat Yai, the fried chicken of Hat Yai in Songkhla province, comes out of the wok with a thin, shattering, deeply seasoned skin, and then the vendor does the thing that makes it Hat Yai: a generous shower of golden, crispy fried shallots over the chicken and over the sticky rice beside it. The shallots are sweet, savoury and impossibly crisp, and they perfume everything they touch. Take them away and you have very good fried chicken. With them, you have one of the most loved plates in southern Thailand — a dish so popular that stalls selling it have spread from Hat Yai's markets and train station to street corners all over the country. A railway city's famous chicken Hat Yai is the great transport and trading hub of Thailand's Deep South — a busy, multicultural city where Thai Buddhis...
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Location: Hat Yai, Hat Yai District, Songkhla 90110, Thailand
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Beef Rendang: The Slow Curry That Outlasts the Day

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Beef Rendang: The Slow Curry That Outlasts the Day Photo: RecipeTin Eats Some curries are ready in twenty minutes. Rendang is not one of them — and that is exactly the point. Beef rendang is a slow, dry curry from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra that found a second home in Malaysia, where it is now one of the country's most loved dishes. Chunks of beef simmer for hours in coconut milk with lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, chillies and toasted coconut, until the sauce has all but disappeared and what is left is a dark, fragrant paste clinging to meat so tender it falls apart at a touch. It is rich, warmly spiced rather than fiercely hot, and it tastes even better the next day. If you make one Malaysian curry at home, make this one — just give it the time it asks for. From Sumatra to Malaysia Rendang began with the Minangkabau of the West Sumatran highlands, a people famous for travelling far for trade and work — a tradition called merantau. A dish that could survive a ...
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Location: Kuala Lumpur, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
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Prahok: Cambodia's Fermented Fish Paste, Explained

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Prahok: Cambodia's Fermented Fish Paste, Explained Photo: Paxse via More Than Temples Every Cambodian kitchen knows prahok, and most Cambodian cooks would not want to cook without it. Prahok is a grey-brown paste of salted, fermented freshwater fish — pungent, deeply savoury and used a spoonful at a time to give Khmer soups, curries, dips and stir-fries their unmistakable depth. Foreigners sometimes call it "Cambodian cheese," which is not a bad nickname at all: like a strong cheese, it can startle you the first time you meet it, and then, cooked into the right dish, it wins you over completely. There is an old saying in Cambodia that runs "no prahok, no salt" — meaning that without prahok, a meal has no real seasoning at all. This is the ingredient to understand if you want to understand Khmer food. Born on the Tonle Sap Prahok exists because of a lake that behaves like no other. The Tonle Sap, Cambodia's great lake, swells enormously in the wet sea...
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Location: Phnom Penh, Cambodia
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Where Arab Traders Met the Thai Kitchen: The Thai–Arab Fusion Story

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Most fusion food is a restaurant idea, a chef's experiment from last decade. The food in this corner of our blog is something else: a fusion that happened slowly, over centuries, in port towns and palace kitchens, cooked by Muslim communities who made Thailand their home and gradually made its food their own. When you eat a massaman curry or fold a hot mataba around spiced beef, you are tasting one of the oldest true fusion cuisines on earth — Arab and Persian spice craft poured into a Thai vessel of coconut milk, tamarind and fresh herbs. This guide anchors our Thai–Arab Fusion Food tab. It tells the story of how the traders came, explains the flavour grammar their descendants cook by, walks the signature dishes at survey depth, and shows you where this food lives now — from Bangkok's old Muslim quarters to the roti shops of the Deep South and the breakfast stalls of Phuket. Our Deep South guide covers the Malay heartland in full, and a dedicated Mataba post already sits in t...
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Food of Thailand's Deep South: The Malay Table of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat

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Drive far enough south in Thailand and the country changes around you — quietly, completely, and deliciously. The wats give way to mosques with green domes. The signs gain a second script. The language on the street stops being the Thai you have been getting by on and becomes Yawi, the local Malay dialect written in Arabic letters. And the food — the food turns a corner too. This is the Deep South: the provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat, a Malay-Muslim heartland that has more in common, plate for plate, with Kelantan across the Malaysian border than with Bangkok a thousand kilometres north. This blog mostly lives upcountry — Laos, Isan, the northern hills. But the Deep South earns its tab. It is one of the great regional tables of Southeast Asia, and one of the least written about in English. Here is how it works and what to eat when you get there. A Country Within the Country The Deep South was once the heartland of the Sultanate of Patani, a Malay trading kingdom that grew ric...
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Khao Mee: Pakse-Style Stir-Fried Noodles

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Khao Mee: Pakse-Style Stir-Fried Noodles Photo: Simply Suwanee Walk through a morning market in Pakse, in Champasak Province in southern Laos, and you will find Khao Mee before you find almost anything else: big shallow trays and wide bowls of glossy, amber-brown rice noodles, already cooked, already dressed, waiting to be scooped into a banana leaf or a small bag for the ride home. This is the south's great stir-fried noodle — called khua mee or kua mee in Lao, and sometimes Pad Lao outside the country. Flat rice noodles are tossed in a sauce that starts, unmistakably, with sugar cooked to caramel, then deepened with fish sauce, soy and oyster sauce until it turns sweet, salty and faintly smoky all at once. Thin strips of golden omelette go over the top, bean sprouts and herbs are folded through, and the whole plate is eaten warm or happily at room temperature. If Pad Thai is Thailand's famous noodle, Khao Mee is Laos' beloved answer — simpler, sweeter at its heart,...
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Location: Pakse, Laos
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