Food — Thailand

Thai cuisine is among the world's most celebrated, and rightly so: it juggles the four foundational flavours — salty, sweet, sour and spicy — in combinations that shift from region to region, family to family, street cook to street cook. Each dish is a small ensemble performance in which lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, fermented shrimp paste and coconut milk take turns at melody and harmony.

Pad thai is the global ambassador of Thai food: rice noodles wok-tossed with egg, prawns or tofu, tamarind sauce, crushed peanuts and a wedge of lime. Found everywhere, it can be sublime at a great street stall and merely passable at a tourist restaurant — the quality gap is enormous. Som tam (a green papaya salad with chilli, garlic, lime, fish sauce and peanuts) is the unmissable dish of the Northeast and of every market: fresh, fiery, addictive. Massaman curry, Persian and Indian in origin, is a slow-braised meat curry with coconut milk, potatoes and peanuts — milder than other Thai curries and frequently named by food critics as one of the world's greatest dishes.

Khao pad (fried rice with egg and vegetables, endlessly variable with prawn, chicken or crab) is the everyday workhorse. Soups play a central role: tom yum kung (a spicy broth with prawns, lemongrass and mushrooms), tom kha kai (a coconut-milk chicken soup, gentle and fragrant). Pad kra pao (minced meat stir-fried with holy basil, chilli and garlic, served over rice with a fried egg on top) is the everyday favourite of Bangkokians — order it at a corner shophouse for the price of a coffee.

Street food in Thailand is an institution. Night markets — the Night Bazaar in Chiang Mai, Chatuchak in Bangkok at the weekend, the Railay market in Krabi — gather hundreds of stalls of marinated meat skewers, ladled curries in small bowls, sweet or savoury Thai pancakes (roti) and fresh coconut milk served in the shell. The signature dessert is mango sticky rice (khao niao mamuang): sweet ripe mango, glutinous rice cooked in coconut milk, a salty-sweet sauce — a perfect harmony, in season from March to June. Freshly pressed fruit juices — watermelon, pineapple, passion fruit — round out the bright, generous meals.

For best price and maximum flavour, head for the talats (covered markets), the street stalls with plastic stools and bubbling curry pots, and the no-frills restaurants with plastic tablecloths and no English menu — infallible signs of an authentic address packed with locals.