Sawaddee ka welcome to hot Thai kitchen today instead of cooking I've decided to teach you a few
useful Thai words that will help you read a Thai restaurant menu see most high restaurants like
to use the time names of the dishes but then write them out in English phonetics which is
great but if you don't know what those words mean then it doesn't tell you anything about the dish
so just knowing a few useful words can actually help you quickly find what you're looking for
without having to read all the little fine print descriptions under the names so today I've got
a few thai restaurant menus here that I went around town and grabbed them and I looked for
words that came up over and over again so those are the words that we'll go through and then at
the end I'll show you how you can use your new vocabulary to help you read a Thai restaurant
menu next time you go so first let's look at all the big animals we've got gai which means chicken
moo sounds like it should mean cow but it really means pork neua, nua means beef now there's a couple
of spelling variations for Neua because different restaurants tend to spell things differently and
this is the case for a lot of the vocabs coming up so I'll just show all the spelling variations
together bped means duck now moving on to seafood we've got goong meaning shrimp pla means fish pla
meuk literally translates to Inc fish but it means squid bpu means crab hoi is a general term that
includes all the bivalve molluscs like clams mussels scallops and oysters talay Talay means
the sea but in the context of food it refers to a dish that uses multiple types of seafood in it
so the next category of words are the cooking techniques we've got Pad which means to stir-fry
this will include all fried Rice's fried noodles as well as anything that uses a wok such as pad
thai yum yum is a type of salad and if you see multiple types of yum on the menu chances are
they use the exact same dressing tom means soup usually a brothy kind of soup gang gaeng
means curry but it doesn't always mean the rich coconutty kind of curry like a green
curry it could also be a brothy curry like gang ba which is also known as the jungle curry Tod
means to deep fry and this will show up a lot in the appetizer section neung this doesn't come
up very often but it means to steam and it will come up usually in the seafood section
and finally we've got a few miscellaneous words that also come up sometimes we've got prik which
means chilly grob which means crispy and this will usually means the thing is deep fried kao
means rice ped means spicy and don't confuse the word bped with bped which actually means duck and
sometimes different restaurants will spell them exactly the same way so that's the only two that
can be confusing and then finally if you're vegetarian you want to look for the word pak
means vegetables and if the word pak is in the name of the dish the dish chances are there's
no meat in that dish you still want to ask the restaurant and check for fish sauce and oyster
sauce but at least you know that there's no meat in it so let's see how your newfound vocabulary
can help you read a Thai menu so let's take a look at this menu and let's say you're at a restaurant
and you're feeling like fish and you remember from hot tide kitchen that fish is splat so I'm looking
here at the seafood section so with just one quick look at the seafood section I already see that
number 46 47 and 48 I'll have my pla in it so these are the dishes that I want to consider and
I also recognize that number 43 here has the word pla but that's not fish because you remember that
pla meuk or Inc fish is a squid so let's take a look at another example now a lot of restaurants
like to categorize things according to the types of protein they use for example let's look at this
chicken section here so here on this list you see that this whole list is chicken but you recognize
that Pad all these are stir fries because you know that Pad means stir fries which is really helpful
in this case because in the description it doesn't even say how the chicken is done it just gives you
a list of ingredients so but you know that it's a stir fry and also you recognize kaeng kaeng and
kaeng here and you remember that that means curry so already if you're in a mood for curry you
quickly know that all you have to think about is these three and ignore all the rest of them
and that's all for today I hope learned a thing or two and next time you go to a Thai restaurant
you'll be able to read a menu more easily for a list of all these words that I just went through
and visit my website at hsn.com and I will see you next time for your next delicious title