Tom Kha Gai

[christianpfc]

Tom Kha Gai

Also interesting to read about the food and at the risk of making you appear slightly odd in restaurants perhaps ( I mean god forbid! ) but if you ever felt like it maybe a pic of two of some of the more obscure dishes or even just whatever you're having would be interesting to teach people like me who out of a mixture of either sheer laziness as I have the same thing five or six dishes over and over again OR perhaps through a lack of knowing what to order to try something "different" for fear of not knowing something is on the menu revert to playing it safe, so perhaps a pic or two of a few dishes and a brief description might be useful and interesting to read if you ever feel like it. ( and I'm being totally serious here by the way just in case you think otherwise

Picture from the internet:



I would say one of the most famous dishes in Thai cuisine, but NIrish has a point. I rejected all dishes that have “spicy” in their name because I am not a fan of chili. Then a friend had Tom Kha Gai and invited me to try it. Delicious! This way, I found out that there are at least three different “spicy”:

Chili-spicy (that’s the one I can do without),
Lemongras-spicy (this is fine)
Ginger/Galangal-spicy (this is fine)

I order Tom Kha Gai with little chili and pick out the chili before eating (still seeds and small bits remain). Beware of the red drops of oil that float on the soup, they are chili-spicy! The Galangal and Lemongrass is not for consumption, too fibrous. I remove these before eating as well. I noticed many Thais don’t remove them and don’t eat/drink all the soup. I don’t want to waste a single drop of the delicious soup, so I take out the Galangal and Lemongrass (often even take them into my mouth to suck out all the soup), and finally put rice into the bowl to get the last drops out of it.

That the chicken meat contains no tendons and bones goes without saying.

I wonder if they could put the Galangal and Lemongrass in a bag, similar to a tea bag, to remove it before eating. The lemongrass can decay into small pieces, dozens of them.

[lvdkeyes]

You can tell the waiter you don't want your soup spicy hot (mai prik kee nu).
If you make tom kha gai yourself you can strain out the kaffir leaves, galangal and lemongrass before you add the chicken. I have never seen Thais do this, but I do sometimes.

[Smiles]

The best attribute taste-wise of tom kar gai is it's spicy sourness ... accent on the latter. The spicy part is pretty well common to most Thai soups and you can add or subtract to taste and order. But the deep 'sour' part ~ although not peculiar to ~ of tom kar gai is my must-have, and like all basic Thai dishes some restaurants do it up better than others.
I have my favourite tom kar gai joint, as I do also with pad thai, khao mun gai, penang and masaman curry, pretty well any whole fish dish, and even som tum (best handled by the old lady who comes by our home in a roofed push cart)