THAI RESTAURANTS: Behind The Scenes! - HTK Special

[Music] so welcome to a very special episode of hot thai kitchen so normally i am in my kitchen showing you how you can make thai food at home but today i want to show you how the professionals do it yes we're going to go behind the scenes of two of my favorite thai restaurants here in vancouver one that's a small mom and pop operation that does mostly take out and the other a little bigger a little fancier so they're two very different places and i'm really interested to see how they each run their kitchens and hopefully we can even take home some pro tips all right let's go all right so here we are let me introduce you to the owners of unchai warri and chef narong thank you so much for having us here um so this by the way is my favorite place for thai takeout but it's a relatively new restaurant i remember that when i first came here the place was just open and i was very very pregnant and i was craving some thai spicy food and i came here and it totally hit the spot so that's why it became sort of my favorite now before we get into see the kitchen which i can't wait to do can you tell us a little bit about the restaurant you guys were offering free food to people in need now most people would know that restaurants are not operating with a lot of profit margins so can you talk about why you decided to do that that's fantastic i have more questions for you but i think i want to first check out the kitchen inside so can we go and take a look for sure all right but first since we're going to go into a small crowded place gotta put some masks on everything has been cut so this is the secret to why things come out so quickly because you're definitely not cutting anything from this brings me back to my restaurant days it's quite heavy but it's so good like things just don't stick on here and that burner is uh inferno right there this is a very small kitchen how many people is cooking at any given time in here basically you don't have to walk you'd go from here and you turn around here put everything here and everything you need is that your hands reach i see all of your spices back here toasted rice powder which i'd like to note you toasted really dark darker than i toasted that maybe i need to up my game with how dark my rice is this is the fish sauce that i use the fish sauce they use you guys this is like a good staple fish sauce we've got golden mountain sauce which you guys have seen me use on the show all the time it's a different kind of soy sauce a thai mushroom slice these guys use everything i use these have been it's pretty it's not very big like a lot of meatballs amazing food comes from the smallest of kitchens so you know if you have a small kitchen definitely that's not that's no excuse for not making amazing thai food all right so shall we get cooking so the noodle strainer doubles as a blancher in general and even pizza blueberry so that's a thai chili paste that you combine the store-bought paste and then you add some some ingredients of your own to make it a little more customized right they mix together the fish sauce and the palm sugar so they caramelize the palm sugar makes the fish sauce that they keep in advance for a long time but then the fresh stuff like the lime the garlic and that gets added day to day so that it stays fresh huh pro tip for you and that's a really good idea with the chili paste of combining store bought with some of your own ingredients so that you're not doing all the work sour mangos lemongrass fried shallot fried shallots the fried shallots you don't fry yourself uh no this yeah fried shallots is one of those things that like if you fry yourself good for you but it is a lot of work so that's right chinese celery leaves oh interesting so that mix of herbs they chop and mix in advance because that's like the general herbs that you add to a lot of different things so you don't have to keep them all separated tasting time of course my favorite part so i have had this before this was one of the dishes i ate when i was i came here and i was pregnant for the first time and this i'm telling you totally totally hit the spot i like i like mine a mix of sweet and spicy and sour and that mango i love the addition of that mango which is it's not traditional that's like their edition but i absolutely love it tastes so fresh all the earth excellent all right so now we're going to make a red this is why the curry tastes always a little different and really good from other places all right let's get started you only have one curry at any given time and why is that foreign by the way i just want to point out this is the biggest can of coconut milk i ever did see restaurant size we'll put this aside for now okay thai eggplant yeah that's definitely a classic ingredient in many many thai curries thai eggplant i generally don't add it because it's really hard to find but i guess you have your sauces what i call finger root you can get them brined in a glass jar and it adds just like a fresh cooling aroma it makes such a big difference that guy's gone over okay so now they're the stuff that's delicate and they're only going to take seconds to cook so they add that at the very end holy basil thai basil and beetle leaves this is like a ah that looks so good i can smell it through my mask that's how intense this aroma is looks so beautiful oh my gosh it's not done wow this is a lot of such wonderful ingredients thank you so much normally you would have this with hot jasmine rice but i just want to taste it straight up right now what i love so much about curries here it's not overly sweet perfect balance of creamy really creamy you can tell there's a lot of coconut milk in there so many herbs like all the things that you add they really do shine through next up is chef narong making the cult favorite boat noodles the aromatic broth has already been made in advance so he's just bringing it to a boil with beef balls and braised beef shank that he slow cooked for four and a half hours he seasons it with a combination of white and black pepper the stir-fry sauce which is their own mix of oyster sauce and different soy sauces chili vinegar and a splash of fish sauce while that's coming to a boil he blanches fresh rice noodles for only three to four seconds and then straight into the serving bowl and now the ingredient that makes this legit pork blood which is added to flavor and thicken the broth quality control of course and straight onto the noodles now this looks amazing already but it gets much better he adds bean sprouts that same mix of herbs that went into the salad chinese celery stems fried garlic crispy pork rind and an absolute must-have for any thai noodle soup garlic oil and i want to try that beef oh so tender look at that it's just falling apart in my spoon or melt in your mouth this is delicious there's so much flavor in the beef itself so you've got the flavorful broth and you bite into the beef and it's also got lots of flavor just like thailand in a bowl right here after saying goodbye to unchai we headed over to man nam which is a bigger and fancier thai restaurant the chef actually owns many places in the city but man nam was his first and is most well known it's a nice spacious place and i also want to point out that the book is out now and if you have a look at the back of the book you're going to see my name on it and also i want to point out that if you look at the back of my book you're going to see his name on it as well so we help each other out all right let's meet the chef so engaged thank you so much for having us here um so this you guys have been around for a very very long time ten years you were saying 10 11 years now 10 11 years and i remember when i first came here you guys have just started opening and i remember thinking oh like this place has some legit thai flavors i was pleasantly surprised i remember that and then i was even more surprised to find out that you the chef were not thai so can you tell us a little bit about how you ended up going from being a french trained chef to being one of the best thai chefs in the city at the time i didn't really know much about thai food i'm chinese so i knew you know chinese food i thought it was always the food i liked more and when i was introduced to really proper thai food the first time was with david and you know the flavor the flavors were so intense they were so robust and there were multiple layers of flavor and yet it was so balanced in harmony yeah and i thought that you know wow um it was something that i have to learn and the city is so happy that you did that because it really was quite a revolutionary place for tyroshan being kind of modern and fine dining which we didn't have before yeah it was something we wanted to change too because i think the perception of going to going up for ethnic food like chinese food thai food that kind of thing is uh it's not like romantic you know we want to make sure that you know main omar restaurant not only serves good food but it can provide a good atmosphere and have a good night out so i'm super excited to see how you run your kitchen because you have several restaurants obviously this is something you're very good at so shall we take a look sure so we'll start upstairs in the prep kitchen sure oh it smells good we're moving warehouses so i can smell something even through my man so you prep for your other restaurants as well uh yes and no so sometimes we prep for them sometimes uh you know mainland is so busy too we can't keep up right but when when all the new restaurants first start off we always supply them with curry paste when we first started off we were still trying to figure out how we're going to uh get the best high ingredients at first it was hard to find them so we started making a combination of store-bought curry purse first with our own spices and then within about a year or so we started making everything from scratch they're going to show us how they make their own curry paste from scratch which i have to point out not every thai restaurant does in fact i would say most don't whoo look at that come take a look at this ah there's scratch chai there's uh the freshly dried chilies that we soaked a little bit there's turmeric uh there's galango and then chopped lemongrass but you've got an awesome machine i've never seen a curry paste machine like this before so tell me about that yeah so you know my wife and i we went to thailand and we were sourcing all different type of machines but there are obviously um the smallest one we found was the size of this table yeah because they're for like factories right exactly so uh i on a layover to thai uh thailand in taiwan i actually found this machine for that purpose as the traditional curry paste machine would have it's got two mills so the stones are actually milling so it mimics the action of a stone mortar and pestle exactly you're just basically going to mix it up a little bit and the lemongrass you're mentioning that you buy pre-chopped and frozen yeah before we were chopping them but it was really just one person's job to chop okay it's lemongrass so we made it with frozen and nobody could tell that it because it's it's in the curry paste but we don't compromise on some of the fresh stuff so for salads we actually import thai baby lemongrass so it's different than the big mexican ones so yeah this is the funnest room kit in the candy store for me right here so talk us through some of your your ingredients we obviously have a lot of different whole spices but and you always do whole we always do a hole because i don't like powder spices they're flavorless and they they kind of and they don't last they don't last so we we keep them whole and we toast them and then we also have two different kinds of coconut milk we use i love these uh rod tetra packs yes that and that's my if you follow my show you know that this is my coconut milk of choice i think they're closest to kind of freshly made closest to it as you can find on the market yeah we tried to make our own coconut milk before but it it's it's just so different here so it goes rancid within the day okay so this stuff we use for desserts we fry curry with this stuff with this one okay and this is really sensible because the tetra pack stuff is better but it's also really expensive so you save that for dessert where you can really taste the difference let's talk about your palm sugar i saw your palm sugar this is not palm sugar i can get here right so this is probably the palm sugar you would get here which is okay but this stuff here we started importing for ourselves uh we're the only one that i know that uses it because we bring uh like 30 cases at a time for for us and it's sitting in the storage flavor right yeah it's more pliable more it just it flavors better yeah in here there's a lot of king sugar mixed in so here's our walk-in fridge so this is the thai lemongrass that we get it's much much more fragrant it's much smaller and more tender and you just smell uh even through your mouth oh yeah so we reserved the good stuff only for salads and soups and we also right now have some holy basil this is so hard to find i have to like call a guy if i ever want a holy basil because you just can't get it at the store baby okay you cannot get fresh baby corn here and i have never understood why because they're so good in curries and stir fries they're so versatile you can only get them in the cans and they're not they're not as good in the can let's go downstairs yeah let's go downstairs so over here alex is going to be frying some some curries off check this out so this is coconut milk that's been reduced reduced reduced so much that it separates and curdles almost and that's the start of curry paste alex is going to fry the curry and we're going to go nice and slow so it gets nice and flavorful i think that's one thing that people don't realize when they're making curry is that if you don't cook it enough it takes very raw and we also kind of do it until the oil splits again and then he's going to start seasoning with palm sugar a little bit of tamarind fish sauce coconut cream coconut milk a little bit of stock and then and then we simmer for a little bit and then that's it until service time got it talk to me a little bit about your menu because you do a lot of modern dishes maybe something not traditional and you do a such a beautiful job of mixing local ingredients with thai food you know it must be a bit of a line to walk between being innovative and still delivering the essence of thai food it was a tougher thing to kind of learn initially because you know when you're trying to cook someone else's cuisine yeah it's it's not something that's easy to do when we first opened mainam you know we tried to just do things by the book everything kind of uh according to what you we would have it in thailand for example but it comes to a point where i feel like okay what i don't want to compromise on is flavor right but what i want to start utilizing is the beautiful local products we have here we can't use other things that is not galangal for example to substitute in dish but instead of frozen kingfish we can use sablefish that is fat that is local and sustainable exactly so this brings me to a question i know that you guys have received this high select certificate from the thai government can you tell me what that means well it makes a lot obviously i think it's a not to kind of our quality and it's a consistent measurement all across the world even though we are in canada we are looked at as a a restaurant that's doing you know thailand proud it's great for people at home too if you go to thais like ca they can just have a list of restaurants that are basically certified authentic is a simpler way of putting it all right shall we get cooking sure so we're doing one of my favorite salads uh it's a basically a some dumb but with corn oh that's my favorite we figure local corn is so beautiful when they're in season believe it or not this is actually a dish i had in thailand but with thai corn and i feel like oh dc corn is so much sweeter i'm going to make that when i come back so basically you know he's pounding it in the claymore and pestle what you would do with uh with the papaya salad so you do papaya salad plus the corn yeah ah okay dressing's already made again it's for consistency yeah and you've got the ladles for portion control exactly yeah we steamed the corn in our steamer upstairs and that gets done ahead of time and to order when we get one order we grill them we brush a little bit of coconut cream on it to get the caramelization going i'm picking up pro tips left right and center here so you don't pound the corn no i i want the corn to be nice and crunchy still so we kind of fold it in nicely oh wow what a cool presentation so that's one of my my favorite salads uh that we make here and it's seasonal you know you can't get this in winter yeah which is great oh i can smell the grill that is so good the corn is so sweet and i love the grilling and alex going to make us a green curry so that's the paste that's been prepped in advance we're trying to utilize things from our garden right now so the kale is from our garden some wing beans hyatt pea eggplant and then you have to have fresh baby corn you'll let it out i call it let it out which means a little bit of liquid and then bring out and that's the coconut milk that we don't use from the cream okay yeah i think a lot of people think that in the back of a thai restaurant kitchen there's just like a pot of finished curry simmering and then you're just ladling it down to order but it's not it's um most of it is done fresh we're serving with halibut cheeks on this one halibut cheeks so once it comes up to the consistency we want we're going to start adding the protein and then he's going to check the seasoning and then we're going to finish off with more sliced kefir lime leaf and green curry and fish by the way it's a really classic combination in thailand but in thailand they don't use fresh fruits they like to use those fish balls yeah finish that off with the holy basil and thai basil i just love how much herbs fresh herbs go into a bowl of curry like curry doesn't strike people as something that's quote unquote fresh but there is so much fresh actually goes in there and you know a great thing about a curry in a restaurant is you can throw in like eight different vegetables whereas when you're doing it at home i mean you're not gonna cut eight different vegetables right so this is the perks of coming to a professional and what oil did you just put the curry oil oh the oil that separate it from frying the curry paste yeah and we keep it a little bit uh so i'm gonna give you a little bit of rice yeah of course gotta have rice i'm gonna take some of that salad cheese i think this is uh when you can really tell the effort of a fresh-made paste yes it doesn't taste like a store-bought paste at all you can really tell that's different it's amazing i love how the pea eggplant pops in your mouth and it's really a fun it's like the bubble tea of curry all right we're going to finish with the stir fry yeah we're going to finish with the stir fry so it's a lingua stir fry the funnest part of any thai kitchen is the wok station so this is lenka we covered in a bit of cornstarch slurry some vegetables and pound by hand garlic chili for stir-fry so you want to make sure you have a hot wok clean the oil is hot but not not burnt what kind of oil do you use for stir fry ah this is canola here we add the vegetables first and then now the paste doesn't burn okay you also will not have a lot of arm hair left or eyelashes and so the sauce has already been pre-made so it's a three flavor sauce that has ground ginger garlic cilantro stamp that's been ground down and we cook it with palm sugar and tamarind and fish sauce and this is a great restaurant tip right here it's pre-cooking your protein getting it perfectly cooked and then throwing it to the stir-fry so you're you're not having to try to cook it with everything else and the slurry as you'll taste later actually clings onto the sauce yes that looks beautiful this is a tiger like thai baby garlic you make your own fried garlic and a little bit of fried basil on top as well i think stir-fry is probably the hardest thing for home cooks to make just because of the heat yes and you have to have that uh that smokiness from the wok yeah it's something that seems easy but there's so much nuance and technique i get people asking me about stir fries all the time what am i doing this wasn't gonna work was it yeah you have that's why we fried the fish first so it's it picks up the flavor of the sauce yes still holds the texture and it has a bit of crunch still even the slurry still holds together and the three flavors that you're talking about is sweet sour and salty but it's all in perfect balance it's not a dish that's overly sweet or overly sour i need that baby corn yeah that thai baby corn it's so nice we put it in a lot of dishes it's so good and that is it i hope you found that interesting i certainly learned a lot and during this time remember to support your local restaurants they need us more than anything right now and if you've enjoyed this video check out a few that we've done linked below i've done a lot of really cool stuff outside of the kitchen and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next video thank you as always for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: Pailin's Kitchen

Views: 132,518

Rating: 4.9450965 out of 5

Keywords: Hot Thai Kitchen, Thai food, Thai cuisine, Thai cooking, Thai, Thailand, Bangkok, street food, Southeast Asia, Asian cooking, Asian food, Asian cuisine, Asian recipe, Thai recipe, Cooking, cooking show, how to cook thai food, how to cook

Id: YHgaGwhVffo

Length: 25min 10sec (1510 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020