How to Eat Thai and Enjoy It

(NewsUSA) - Do you love to eat at Thai restaurants but always order the same dish, such as Pad Thai, because, although everything sounds delicious, you're confused about the complex and intriguing descriptions on the menu?

Here are some tips from award-winning Chef Chai Siriyarn of Marnee Thai Restaurant, San Francisco, to help you expand your horizons and enjoy one of the most popular and healthiest types of cuisine available today across the United States.

1. Go with friends who are willing to order and share different dishes. Thai food is meant to be eaten family style, shared by everyone at the table, so all can savor and appreciate the different tastes.

2. Ask your waiter to recommend food combinations so you can enjoy a variety of flavors. Thai food balances pungent, spicy, sweet, herbal, salty, and tangy tastes. Request an assortment of complex and simple dishes, fresh flavors and more robust tastes to sample the panoply of excellent Thai cuisine.

3. Order dishes that use different cooking methods, such as frying, steaming, simmering, grilling, and stir-frying, so you can experience various textures.

4. Be prepared to receive all the dishes at once. In Thai meals, a welter of dishes appears on the table at the same time, rather than course by course. This is the best way to taste the full range of Thai flavors, because each dish compliments the other, providing the balance of different tastes, textures, colors, and ingredients.

5. Make rice, the bedrock of every Thai meal, part of your order, especially Thailand's most famous, aromatic, white jasmine Hom Mali rice.

6. Try dishes that feature fresh seasonal produce. It's a chance to experience the best dishes of the chef and to eat local.

7. Complete your experience with dessert. Thai desserts tend to be light, mildly sweet creations based on fresh fruits, palm sugar, sticky rice, coconut milk, and the tropical pandanus leaf. Thai desserts help soothe your palette after a spicy meal.

8. Eat with a fork and spoon. Unlike some other Asian cultures, Thais typically eat with a fork and spoon, not chopsticks. Many dishes of food are set in the middle of the table, with a serving spoon for each. Use the "sharing spoon" to put the food on your own plate, then gather the food, sauces, and rice together on your spoon to combine all the flavors in every tasty bite.

For more information on Thai tastes, visit www.marneethaisf.com.

"Article By: NewsUSA"