Isaan - Northeast Thailand Food & Traditional Cuisine

Isaan food is the regional cuisine that conquered the rest of Thailand. Som tam and grilled chicken are sold on every street in Bangkok, and they come from here.

The foundation is sticky rice, steamed in a bamboo basket and eaten with the hands — pinched off, rolled into a ball, and used to scoop. Everything on the table is built to be picked up that way.

The flavour profile is hot, sour and salty, with very little sweetness and almost no coconut milk. The salt and depth come from pla ra, fermented fish, which is pungent, essential, and the thing most likely to divide opinion. Lime, tamarind and raw chilli do the rest.

Cooking methods are simple and mostly involve fire: grilling, pounding in a mortar, and quick dry-frying. Toasted ground rice gives many dishes their characteristic nutty texture.

Raw and bitter elements are normal — fresh herbs, raw vegetables, bitter leaves and in some dishes bile — and a plate of raw greens sits alongside the meal as a matter of course.

Som tam is the region’s emblem: green papaya shredded and pounded in a clay mortar with lime, fish sauce, palm sugar, garlic, long beans, tomato and a great many chillies. The Isaan version, som tam pla ra, adds fermented fish and is considerably more pungent and hotter than the Bangkok one.

Laab is minced meat — pork, chicken, duck or beef — tossed with lime, fish sauce, chilli, shallot, mint and toasted ground rice. Eaten warm or at room temperature with sticky rice and raw vegetables.

Gai yang, chicken marinated in garlic, coriander root, pepper and fish sauce and grilled slowly over charcoal, is the standard partner to som tam.

Nam tok is the same idea as laab made with sliced grilled pork or beef, and koi is the raw version, which carries a real liver-fluke risk and is best avoided.

Also: tom saep, a hot and sour offal soup; sai krok Isaan, the sour fermented pork-and-rice sausage grilled on a stick; gaeng om, a herbal dill-scented stew; and sticky rice with mango in season.

Eating in Isaan is informal and outdoors. The typical arrangement is a som tam stall with a charcoal grill beside it, plastic stools, and everything shared from the middle of the table with a basket of sticky rice each.

Morning markets across the region sell prepared food from dawn, along with the pounded chilli pastes, fermented fish and herbs that define the cooking. These are also the best places to see what the plateau actually produces — frogs, mushrooms, red ant eggs, bamboo shoots and river fish in season.

Ordering som tam has its own etiquette. You specify how many chillies, and the honest answer for most visitors is one or two; phet nit noi means a little spicy and will still be hot. Watching it pounded to order is part of it.

Night markets in Khon Kaen, Udon Thani and Ubon Ratchathani are large and good, and considerably cheaper than their equivalents elsewhere.

Insects are genuinely eaten here rather than sold as a dare — crickets, silkworm pupae and bamboo worms, usually fried and salted.

Isaan has no wine tradition and no vineyards of consequence — the plateau is too hot, too dry and its soils too poor. What it has instead is a strong and distinctive tradition of rice-based drinks.

Sato is the regional drink: an unfiltered fermented rice wine, cloudy, mildly sour and low in alcohol, made in villages and at temples for festivals. It is close to a Lao and Isaan equivalent of farmhouse beer, and the commercial versions sold in bottles are a pale imitation of what is made at home.

Lao khao, clear distilled rice spirit, is the stronger option and is drunk widely, often shared from a single glass passed around a circle.

Both are bound up with the festival calendar, and the Rocket Festival in particular runs on them.

Beer is ubiquitous, and imported wine is expensive and rarely seen outside the provincial hotels.

Note that alcohol sales are restricted by law to roughly 11am to 2pm and 5pm to midnight, and banned on major Buddhist holidays.