Comprehensive, foundational, extraordinary. This 10th anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling and award-winning In 2016, Pailin Chongchitnant published her debut cookbook, The recipes you know and love from the first edition: Whether it’s curries, soups, salads, stir-fries, or desserts, all your favourites are included, many with QR codes that take you to Pai’s website with video tutorials that walk you through the recipe step by step. A brand-new chapter: House Specials is a chapter of 8 new recipes that are longtime fan favourites or under-the-radar gems from Pai’s youth. A new foreword from J. Kenji López-Alt: Hear from a trusted chef colleague and friend, and dive into a new introduction from Pai, looking back on all that she’s learned. Both a definitive resource and an extraordinary exploration of Thai cuisine, <Hot Thai Kitchen: The 10th Anniversary Edition< is a celebration of Pai’s best recipes, to delight and inspire you in your Thai cooking journey.

Autorentext

Pailin Chongchitnant

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**Comprehensive, foundational, extraordinary.

This 10th anniversary edition of the internationally bestselling and award-winning Hot Thai Kitchen is the definitive guide to understanding Thai food—with 75 delicious recipes to cook at home.**

In 2016, Pailin Chongchitnant published her debut cookbook, Hot Thai Kitchen, and it became a classic kitchen staple for home cooks across the globe. Now, in this celebratory and updated 10th anniversary edition, Pai brings her signature warmth and impressive technique to Thai food fans everywhere. Combining her love of teaching with her devotion to Thai food, in Hot Thai Kitchen Pai shows readers how easy Thai home cooking can be, while grounding her recipes in their cultural context. From the culture of eating and commonly used ingredients to flavour combinations and putting together an authentic Thai meal, Pai is here to guide you. Inside, you’ll find:

• The recipes you know and love from the first edition: Whether it’s curries, soups, salads, stir-fries, or desserts, all your favourites are included, many with QR codes that take you to Pai’s website with video tutorials that walk you through the recipe step by step.
• A brand-new chapter: House Specials is a chapter of 8 new recipes that are longtime fan favourites or under-the-radar gems from Pai’s youth.
• A new foreword from J. Kenji López-Alt: Hear from a trusted chef colleague and friend, and dive into a new introduction from Pai, looking back on all that she’s learned.
  Both a definitive resource and an extraordinary exploration of Thai cuisine, Hot Thai Kitchen: The 10th Anniversary Edition is a celebration of Pai’s best recipes, to delight and inspire you in your Thai cooking journey.

Leseprobe
When I originally wrote this book, Hot Thai Kitchen was just a side hustle. I was borrowing my friend Adam’s kitchen to film videos on the weekend, and I had gone back to university to become a home economics teacher because I was done with restaurants and wanted to teach cooking instead. Today, I’m teaching cooking, just as I wanted, but in a studio instead of a school. Hot Thai Kitchen has become my main hustle, and Adam has his kitchen back.

As I reflect on how it all happened from its humble beginning, it feels rather surreal. In 2009, in my small San Francisco apartment, I filmed the first Hot Thai Kitchen video, tom yum goong. My brother Eddie, who was also my roommate, helped film with his point-and-shoot, and I somehow managed to convince a French guy who lived in my building to make my first logo for free. I learned how to edit videos by trial and error, working well into the night and sometimes in the dark because I was too engrossed in the editing to get up and turn on the light.

For the first few years, I was working in the restaurant industry while posting videos whenever I could. I had no clear vision of what I wanted Hot Thai Kitchen to become, because being a “YouTuber” wasn’t a thing you could be yet. I just knew that I wanted to have a cooking show and that I wanted to share what real Thai cooking was, and this project ticked those boxes.

But in the years that followed, Hot Thai Kitchen grew in a way I couldn’t have imagined. When my channel reached 100,000 subscribers, a viewer commented, “Next is a million!” I remember vividly thinking, “Pfff, that is not happening. There aren’t that many people who want to learn to cook Thai food!” I also thought that even if there were, it had taken me 8 years to get to 100,000 subscribers, so getting to a million would take me more than a lifetime. How wrong I was. As it turns out, most things in life are not linear.

It’s been an honour and a joy to be able to empower people around the world to cook the food of my home country. I’ve been brought to tears many times by stories people have shared about how my work has impacted them. Some were able to recreate long-lost dishes their Thai mother had made; others were able to relive their precious memories from Thailand. Some used my recipes to start a food business, and others were just so proud of themselves that they finally made dishes they never thought they could. Most surprising were the number of people who told me that just watching my videos, not even cooking anything, was what got them through the struggles of the COVID-19 pandemic, which for some was the darkest time they’d ever experienced.

As I wrote in my original introduction to this book, one of my main motivations for teaching Thai cooking was—and still is—to show the world what “real” Thai food is, and that it’s not the syrupy-sweet, broccoli-studded dishes that most people have access to. Almost 2 decades into Hot Thai Kitchen, I can see that authenticity in the new wave of Thai restaurants and chefs who no longer feel the need to change Thai food to please the Western palate. But the fight isn’t over. There are still too many peanut-butter-laden “Thai” recipes out there, written by people without the necessary knowledge of or respect for Thai cuisine.

This tenth-anniversary edition of my book is my continued contribution to this fight. I’m thrilled that the original edition has been embraced for so many years, and it’s a privilege to continue connecting with you through these pages. I hope the book will help you get to know Thai cuisine at a deeper, more fundamental level, including the culture and context the food exists in. In that spirit, I’ve created a new recipe chapter for this edition called “House Specials," where I’m sharing recipes that are either fan favourites you’ve loved over the years, or recipes that are under-the-radar gems that I want to teach you. Ultimately, I hope that this book will help you cook Thai food “like a Thai person,” with the right understanding and with confidence. Thank you for indulging my inner food nerd, and for your support of Hot Thai Kitchen over the years.