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More than pad thai and tom yum soup: Thai chef’s real food quest, and why it’s hard to find the right recipes

What are your childhood mem­ories of food? “My parents had a street stall until I was 13. My mum cooked about 10 dishes per day: four curries, Thai noodles, two soups, three to four stir-fries and a chilli relish called nam prik. She would wake up at 3am and start cooking and selling food until 4pm, then go to the market to buy ingredients for the next day.

“I hated waking up at 5am to help my mother, but I had no choice. When I was five, I picked herbs for her, then after school I helped her again. While other kids were playing, I had to squeeze coconut milk and make curry paste, both by hand. When I used the mortar and pestle, the chillies got into my eyes – it’s so painful, and cutting the chillies would burn my hands.”

How did you become a chef? “I went to university and wanted to study English, but when I passed the test, I realised it was for a bachelor’s degree in English education [to teach secondary school students] – I didn’t want to face 40 teenagers every day. A friend recommended that I work in hotels so I started as a waitress and then became secretary to the F&B manager.

“I was 28 when I met Jason [Bailey]. He had his own Thai restaurant in the Australian Southern Highlands, in New South Wales, in between Sydney and Canberra. At the time, I was working at Blue Elephant [a cooking school and fine-dining restaurant offering royal Thai cuisine, in Bangkok] as a secretary. Jason wanted to learn more about royal Thai cuisine. He invited me to Australia to train in the kitchen with him, so I did, in 2005. I knew how to cook in my mum’s kitchen, but not a commercial one. Jason was hard on me. He had to train me from the beginning, and not just in the kitchen, but the whole restaurant business, too.”

So was it love at first sight? “When we first met, we felt a really strong pull; it was destiny. After a year, for visa reasons, we got married. We lived in Australia for about seven years before we came back to Thailand and opened Paste in 2012. We wanted to cook Thai food for Thai people, to show that our food is good enough for them. We thought it would be easy. But it didn’t turn out that way.”

Why? “In Bangkok there are so many restaurants, and ours is more expensive than local ones. We tried to do modern Thai cuisine at first because, in 2012, no one else was doing it, but people didn’t under­stand, they thought we were doing fusion Thai, which we weren’t. Then we started using traditional recipes from old cook­books and travelled around Thailand to better understand the cuisine.

“During King Rama V’s reign (1868-1910), aristocratic families began publish­ing their own recipe books. We bought these books and saw that Thai cuisine isn’t just tom yum goong or Thai green curry. There are thousands of curries and salads but no one makes them any more, maybe because they can’t find the ingredients, or it’s time-consuming. We want to bring those dishes back.”

Is it hard to recreate these dishes? “It’s like a puzzle, you can’t get all the infor­m­ation from one place. For exam­ple, massaman curry – I have researched where it comes from, what it is meant to taste like, how many recipes there are. Each recipe has different ratios for the ingredients. So you have to think how to represent this curry. To modernise the dish, if the old recipe has four or five flavours, we may add another three, so when the customer tastes our food they can taste the complexity. We follow the old ways of preparing the food, but when it comes to cooking meat, we use modern techniques, then present the dish with rare Thai herbs that were used in the old days.”

Many of us only know Thai dishes such as pad thai and tom yum goong. What would you like people to learn about Thai cuisine? “People think Thai cuisine is cheap street food, but it can be fine dining. What is real Thai food? Even we don’t know because Thai food is mix and match. Massaman doesn’t come from Thailand, it is from India. If you want real Thai food, it’s dishes such as nam prik and gaeng pa, a curry made without coconut milk, which only started being used when Indians came to Thailand. I want people to see that Thai food has a lot of history and there are a lot of cuisines in the one cuisine.”

How do you master a good curry? “You have to start with quality ingredients, as there are different types of chillies, lemongrass and galangal – the heirloom varieties have stronger flavours. Fish sauce and palm sugar bring balance to your food. We use coconuts that are 45 days old because they are creamy and have aroma. Young coconut milk has a thinner taste, so the curry tastes lighter. You also have to know how to fry the ingredients together – shallots, garlic, galangal and herbs – to make the curry paste before adding coconut milk. After that, you cook the meat and whatever type of vegetables you add into your curry; each one has specific vegetables to go with it. Thai cooking is about prep­ping; the actual cooking is fast.”

Has your six-year-old daughter shown an interest in cooking?“When she was two, she started to peel garlic and pick herbs. She likes to make pastry because she likes to eat dessert, and sometimes she does plating. Because she grew up in the restaurant, it is like her home.”

Bongkoch “Bee” Satongun was recently in Hong Kong as a guest chef of Vea, in Central.

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