Thai food, cooked at home, explained properly.

Why "Fish Sauce First"

Fish sauce is the first thing a Thai cook reaches for and the last thing most Western recipes mention. It is where the salt comes from, where the depth comes from, and the ingredient people are most nervous about. Start there and the rest of the cuisine opens up. The name is a stance: learn the pantry properly, and the recipes take care of themselves.

What this site is for

Thai food has a reputation for being hard to make at home. It is not. It has a short pantry, a few techniques, and a way of balancing salty, sour, sweet and hot that you can learn in a weekend. What makes it feel hard is recipes that list ingredients without saying why they are there, or that skip the step that matters.

Every recipe here has a "why it works" section before the method. Every ingredient in the pantry guide says what it does and what happens if you leave it out. The heat scale uses the words a Thai cook would use.

How recipes are tested

Daeng cooks each recipe at least three times on a home stove, with ingredients from a regular Asian grocery store, not a restaurant supplier. Paul weighs and times every step so the measurements use the units on packaging in Europe and North America, with the Thai names so you can find the right thing on the shelf.

About Daeng

Daeng is the cook in every video. She grew up cooking Thai food the way most Thais do: at home, by taste, with a mortar on the floor and a mother who never wrote anything down. The recipes on this site are hers. The measurements are the part she finds funny, because she has never used a measuring spoon in her life. Paul, her husband, films her, weighs everything as she goes and turns it into a page you can follow in a European kitchen. When a recipe says "taste, then adjust", that is Daeng talking. When it says 120 g, that is Paul. Nothing is made easier or milder than she would serve her own family. What is adapted is the shopping: every ingredient comes with what to buy in a European supermarket and what to do when the real thing is not on the shelf. Daeng and Paul live in Germany now, so the shopping advice starts with what you can actually find in a German supermarket or Asia-Laden.