Kay Plunkett-Hogge on how to bring Thai home cooking to your kitchen

She didn't want her cookbook to simplify Thai cooking, the food she grew up on. Instead her cookbook 'Baan' is about bringing the food of her childhood to western home kitchens, says Julia Platt Leonard

Born and raised in Bangkok, she spoke Thai before speaking English and this book is the collection of home cooked recipes from her home country (Louise Hagger)

Baan. It’s a Thai word that means hearth, home, and village. It’s the place you come from and where your heart is. For food writer Kay Plunkett-Hogge, baan is Thailand – where she was born and spent over half her life.

Although she now lives and works in the UK, she’s firmly rooted in Thailand; the people, places and food fuel her writing and her recipes.

Fitting then, that she chose it for the title of her latest cookbook: Baan: Recipes and stories from my Thai home.

When she started writing Baan, Kay knew as clearly what she didn’t want, as what she did. She says she didn’t want to simplify Thai cooking, but rather to demystify it.

“People say to me, ‘I can’t get my head round Thai cooking’ or ‘I look at the list of ingredients and I don’t go any further, it seems so complicated,’” she says. “I want to say, ‘no, it’s not that complicated.’”

Flicking through the recipes it’s clear that yes, some recipes take longer to prep and prepare, but others are blissfully simple and straightforward.

Take, for example, her recipe for kai toon or steamed eggs – a savoury custard with a silken texture that’s the perfect foil for spicier dishes. Chop some spring onions, whisk together eggs and a few other ingredients, steam it and you’re sorted.

Many of the recipes are ones she grew up eating and are part of her culinary DNA. “There are some dishes that are just engrained. Some were scribbled down from our mum.”

Kay’s parents arrived in Bangkok in 1961 when her Dad took a job as a sales rep for Anglo-Thai Motors, a Ford subsidiary. She was born and lived in Thailand, until she went to boarding school in the UK.

No matter what the recipe, Kay gives two pieces of advice: read it thoroughly and prep all of the ingredients before you start cooking

“Some of the recipes I’ve been doing for so long, I don’t even remember the genesis of them,” she says. Other recipes are ones she learned from her “Thai heroes.”

And there are elusive ones like the recipe for moo nork kok – pigs outside their sty – a dish she tasted in the early Nineties while working in Thailand on a film set.

Later, she couldn’t find anyone who knew how to make it.

In Baan she says, “It got to the point that I began to wonder if I’d imagined the dish…” Eventually she made a pilgrimage back to the restaurant in Thailand where she’d eaten it originally. She ate it obsessively for four days, and 25 years after eating moo nork kok for the first time, she had the recipe.

'Traditional fast food in Thailand was a stall on the side of the road serving a homemade curry and rice, but today more kids are queueing up to get a frankfurter on a stick', she says (Kay Plunkett-Hogge)

Throughout the book, she shares helpful hints such as when you can make substitutions, like using flaked, hot-smoked mackerel instead of dried shrimp in miang khum or little bites, and where you can’t.

Prayoon’s fish cakes are made with shop bought red curry paste and sai oua or spiced northern thai sausage – flavoured with a heady spice paste of coriander roots, shallots, galangal, lemongrass, garlic, turmeric, and fresh chilli – can be made into patties, if you don’t feel up to sausage making.

In Thailand she’s welcomed back as na farang hua jai – the foreign-faced girl with the heart of Thai

No matter what the recipe, she gives two pieces of advice: read the recipe thoroughly and prep all of the ingredients before you start cooking.

She admits to owning seven woks and five mortar and pestles, but says that Thai cooking doesn’t require much kitchen kit. “It was really important to me to recreate all of the dishes in a Western home kitchen, without any fancy stuff.” And the same goes for ingredients. “There’s no point in using weird ingredients that people can’t find.”

She first chronicled her time in Thailand in her food memoir, Adventures of a Terribly Greedy Girl, published in 2017.

Baan and Greedy Girl sit well together and tell the story of someone deeply in love with her home, its people and food. “They’re great companion pieces,” she says of the two. “In my writing life, I honestly thought Baan would come before Greedy Girl, but that’s not the way publishing and life goes.”

Today, when she travels back to Thailand, some things have changed but much hasn’t. “Traditional fast food in Thailand was a stall on the side of the road serving a homemade curry and rice.” Today, “more kids are queueing up to get a frankfurter on a stick,” she says. But the allure hasn’t lessened. “Every time I go to Thailand, I find something extraordinary.

I find a new dish, a new person selling something on a street corner or I go to a new town or village. They’re not new to Thailand, but they’re new to me.” She just went back recently and felt at home, in the place where she’s welcomed back as na farang, hua chai Thai – the foreign-faced girl with the heart of Thai.

'Baan: Recipes and stories from my Thai home' by Kay Plunkett-Hogge, published by Pavilion Books is out now. Photography: Louise Hagger

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Kay’s Top 10 Favourite Thai Ingredient

1. Fish sauce – of course. I couldn’t live without this.
2. Palm Sugar – sweet, creamy, almost smoky – heaven.
3. Plaraa– a funky fermented fish sauce from the north east. An acquired taste, but one I am addicted to.
4. Thai basil – peppery, aniseed-y, fragrant.
5. Mama instant noodles – these naughty instant noodles kept me going as student – and still do late at night. Add an egg and some bottom of the veg drawer leftovers.
6. Scuds – tiny, very hot bird’s eye chillies. Not for the faint of heart.
7. Jasmine rice – freshly cooked, toasted and ground, or made into a savoury porridge – this fragrant Thai rice is something I always have to hand. A desert island staple along with fish sauce, chillies and limes.
8. Pork stock powder – this MSG free, tasty powdered stock has come to my rescue many a day.
9. Limes – juicy, bright, fresh.
10. Oyster sauce – one brand is head and shoulders above the others – Mega Chef – it uses real oysters smoked over teak wood.

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