[Narrator] Some people learn to cook by imitation,
repeating recipes just as their mother or their grandmother taught them.
But that's not how Chef McDang tackled the challenge
of mastering his native Thai cooking.
[Chef McDang speaking] Thai cuisine is all by memory.
You know, your grandmother tells you to do that, you do it!
And you can ask her, say, "Well, Grandma, why do you put this in first?"
"Don't ask me! My great grandfather tells me you have to do it this way, so you do it!"
Well for me it was different.
So, I had to spend some time analyzing why
they're doing this kind of thing.
So, in terms of my approach to Thai cuisine,
it's more systematic, and more scientific, and more food science oriented.
So, that I find that that's easier for me to understand,
and it's easier for me to be able to impart
Thai recipes, Thai food tradition,
to Western cultures or Western cuisines.
[Narrator] The signature flavors of Thai cooking lie in its foundational seasonings.
The ingredients that Thai cooks use to add
sweet, sour, salty, or herbaceous notes to a particular dish.
Chef McDang leads us through those essential defining ingredients.
[Chef McDang speaking] Let me just explain something about Thailand.
Thai food for me is unique
in a sense that....
We are like the Japanese with machinery,
with technology in terms of, you know, building cars or the camera and everything else.
We seem to have absorbed everybody else's food culture
and everybody else's cooking techniques
and turned it into something that's very Thai.
So, what is something that's very Thai?
Thai food has very distinctive flavors
and Thai food is very light,
and Thai food always uses a lot of fruits....
....in their cooking,
which is very strange.
It has.... The flavor that you have is the sweet,
sour....
But the sweetness that comes from it is not just your regular, um....
sugar — cane sugar. But you can use palm sugar or coconut sugar....
Salty, salty.... The majority of the saltiness that comes in
is usually from fish sauce.
If you find in Thai recipes that they said using soy sauce, or something like that,
then it's not Thai. It's a bastardization of Thai cuisine.
And if they use granulated sugar,
it means that you can't find coconut sugar, okay?
In terms of sweet, salty, sweet, sour.....
The sourness comes from many, many, many things.
Some from vinegar,
just regular distilled vinegar, *not* soy vinegar.
Anything with soy, just forget it, it's not Thai! Alright?
We have lime juice, we have lemon juice....
Lemon juice in Thailand — we don't use it that much, but you can interchange it in the West.
And in terms of acid, there's another thing that we use quite a lot,
which is a tamarind.
Tamarind is an import from India,
we have that influence from India.
And....
....those are the three flavors.
Sweet salty — then there's the hotness.
The hotness comes from Chili Peppers,
either dried, roasted — all kinds of stuff.
And the herbs that we use are very, very varied.
But there are certain herbs that are used so much in Thai cuisine,
that you probably need to know about it.
Lemongrass — definitely,
Kaffir lime — that's definitely another one....
Kaffir lime fruit, galangal.....
Those are the probably pretty much it.
And then the Thai basils. There are so many kinds of Thai basil that, um....
We can't get all of them in this country.
And they're used differently for different things.