Cooking Thai: Heritage and Modern Recipes from My Kitchen Notebooks

Long before Pim Techamuanvivit became the chef of acclaimed restaurants, she began collecting the recipes of the Thai food she missed while living in the United States. Trips home became opportunities to cook alongside relatives, each with a preferred way of making a dish, and her collection grew to include handwritten notebooks, family recipes, and old Thai cookbooks. 

Cooking Thai, written with Andrea Nguyen, brings that accumulated knowledge together in 100 recipes. Techamuanvivit pays particular attention to the actions that experienced cooks perform instinctively and recipes often leave unwritten, explaining techniques and ingredients so that home cooks can understand not only what to do, but what makes a dish distinctly Thai. 

The range is broad, from beef tartare laab, curried fish cakes, and grilled shrimp and lychee salad to Southern Thai crab curry, caramelized pork belly, northern Thai chicken curry noodles, and pandan madeleines. Restaurant favorites appear as well, including the wings from Kin Khao, alongside a guide to sourcing and understanding Thai ingredients. 

Despite Techamuanvivit’s Michelin-starred restaurants, this isn’t primarily a book of restaurant cooking. Its foundations are the dishes she grew up eating, the cooks who taught her, and years spent recording the knowledge she feared could otherwise be lost, making Cooking Thai both a practical guide to the cuisine and a record of culinary inheritance.

Hardcover. Color photographs throughout.