REVIEW: Chaophraya Restaurant, Liverpool One
Jun 9 2009 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post
Chaophraya Thai Restaurant
IT’S healthy, light, packed with flavour and reassuringly exotic. Demand for good Thai food has largely outstripped supply on Merseyside, with Thai restaurants never becoming as ubiquitous as their High Street Chinese counterparts.
But with Thai food now becoming widely available – the highly-rated Chaophraya restaurant opened in Liverpool One yesterday – people want to try their hand at dishes from South East Asia that are more healthy and authentic than chicken with sweet and sour sauce from a jar.
Chef Thanyanan Phuaknapo – nicknamed Pum – runs Thai cookery workshops at Chaophraya in Manchester. She’ll soon start classes at the Liverpool restaurant, too.
“Thai food has got more popular and people want to know how to cook it at home,” she explains. “The special thing about Thai cooking is that we use fresh ingredients, rather than dried. It’s not as oily as Chinese food, as they like their food to look shiny. Because it’s so hot, we don’t need anything oily.”
Green or red curry paste should be store cupboard staples, says Pum. She recommends Nittaya brand. A great supplier of Thai food, she says, is based in Prenton – Premium Thai Produce Ltd, or Raanthai (tel 0844 414 2311, North Cheshire Trading Estate, Prenton).
While the fresh pastes are excellent, pounding the herbs and spices yourself is more authentically Thai.
“You can use paste but in Thailand we like to pound the ingredients together with a pestle and mortar,” says Pum. “It should take about an hour. You cover the bowl with your hand and just bang the ingredients. You don’t get the essential oil out of the skin so well using a blender.”
Kang Pa, jungle curry, is less ubiquitous than green or red, but just as tasty. It isn’t mixed with coconut milk. The end result is sweet and hot. “In history, it was what you used in the jungle when you were hot and needed something hotter to eat. You wouldn’t have had coconut milk but you would cut some vegetables and kill an animal. You put what you found into the pot, with water and some sugar cane.”
Tom Yam – meaning clear soup – is another favourite. The paste is available in supermarkets, but making your own is easy.
Share
