CORNUCOPIA
A sharp, acidic taste is a staple in many Thai dishes, but the fruits that lend them this flavour are increasingly scarce By Suthon Sukphisit
The sharp, acidic fruits that lend many Thai dishes their flavour are becoming harder to find.
Sour foods and drinks can play an important part in helping us appreciate the taste of the food that we eat. It is believed that they stimulate the tongue and allow it to perceive flavour more quickly while also increasing one’s appetite.
Beverages made from the juices of limes, tamarind, oranges and pineapples are refreshing and soothe the throat when the natural sourness from the fruit takes precedence over sweetness. Thai dishes like tom yam, yam, all kinds of nam phrik and the spicy southern curry kaeng lueang all combine sourness, chilli heat and saltiness. They are at their best, however when the sourness is more prominent than the hotness and saltiness, with the latter two tastes stimulating the appetite in a way that keeps you eating.
Located as it is in the hot and wet tropics, Thailand has a great year-round variety of plants and fruits that taste sour. Different ones appear during different seasons and cooks of earlier eras knew which foods could be made with which sour plant ingredients, and were also skilled at making substitutions when any of them went out of season.
It is unfortunate that many local and regional sour fruits are becoming scarce. One reason for this might be that the number of cooks who have a thorough knowledge of their use in the kitchen is on the decline, and when there is less demand for the plants, farmers do not replant them when the old stocks die out. With the passage of time, more commercial crops replace them in popularity and they are banished to some remote corner of the fields if they are retained at all. Limes and tamarind, for example, are now used to make many dishes that were once flavoured by other sour fruits.
Let’s look at some of the sour fruits used in cooking and at the foods that include them. Most popular of all is the lime. Universally popular as it is, availability is not constant throughout the year. At the end of the cool season as the weather begins to heat up, there are fewer of them in the market, which means that prices go up.
Cooks of earlier generations used sour tamarind water when limes became expensive as their availability declined with the season. When a tom yam (sour and hot soup) was to be made, say one made with plaa thuu sote
(fresh mackerel), they would substitute the sour tamarind water for lime juice, with the resulting dish called a tom prio rather than a tom yam. It was delicious in a way that was quite distinct from the usual tom yam, but tom prio dishes are very hard to find in restaurants these days.
When the shiny green sour fruit called madan was available, that, too, could be substituted for the lime to make plaa thuu tom
madan, another dish with a special appeal all its own.
The South is lucky where sour fruits are concerned because the heavy rainfall allows the tree called makhaam khaek to flourish. Its sour fruits appear all year long, and local people cut them into thin slices and dry them so that they can be stored for later use.
When making the hot and sour soup called kaeng lueang plaa kraphong kap yawt maphrao (made with sea bass and heart of coconut palm), it is not necessary to use only lime to give it its sour tang. If lime is available, it can be used, but if not there is makhaam khaek, which will give it a different savour.
When making the sour-hot, salad-like dishes called yam, many cooks think that only lime juice is the only proper sour seasoning, but this is wrong. Yam dishes of the kind made with crispy ingredients like plaa krawp (crispy dried fish) or grilled plaa salit (a flat, freshwater fish), and that include peanuts or cashews and crisp-fried shallots, sprinkled on top, call for something different. The seasoning sauce poured over the yam ingredients is made by simmering sour tamarind water with palm sugar, nam plaa and pounded dried chillies, and once again it has a distinctive sour-spicy taste quite different from that of lime juiceseasoned yam dishes.
During the season when the elongated, light green sour fruit called taling pling appear, they can be made into a yam with grilled plaa salit. They are cut into slices and scattered on top to both add to and soften its sour jolt. Yam plaa krawp can be enlivened with some makawk farang (golden apple), sliced fine and sprinkled on top.
Sour fruits can be substituted for each other by a cook who knows which alternatives are appropriate. Pad Thai is usually served with a wedge of lime, but this can be replaced by chopped sour mango, sour starfruit, madan or taling pling scattered on top. Many of today’s cooks think that the use of lime is an ironclad requirement, so the pleasures of ordering pad Thai in a restaurant are less varied than they could be.
One more example: nam plaa phrik khee
nuu, the standard seasoning set on the table for fried fish dishes and made from nam plaa, thin slices of garlic, phrik khee nuu (very hot bird chillies) and lime cut into little pieces can be varied. If limes are pricey and scarce in the market, makrood limes can be used instead. This citrus has the advantage of being inexpensive and is available all year. When using them to make the nam phrik, the rind is removed, leaving just the pulp inside, which is cut into thin pieces. The result is delicious and has a delectable fragrance.
When making dishes that need a sour accent, there is a whole list of fruits that can be used to give it an acid bite, and a skilled cook will know which ones can be used in place of each other should one or another of them become hard to get hold of. This is knowledge of a kind that is less widespread than it once was, but it well worth reacquiring now, right at the time when the hot, dry weather is coming and the price of limes is on the way up.