Searching for hot food in Thailand

When you read the guide books about Thai food, the one thing they consistently tell you is to be careful about hot food. Thais like their food spicy, and apparently we Westerners have wimpy tongues and should watch out lest we burn them off on the first bite.

I do pretty well with spicy food from a typical Seattle point of view. On a scale of 1 – 5, I’m a low 4 when it comes to ordering. So I figured I had some good kicky food to look forward to as well as some that would be building my tolerance for hot food.

The hot food warning was repeated by Karis, our new friend in Chiang Mai. Among the phrases she taught us for getting by in Thailand (along with “hello,” and “thank you,”) was the phrase for “not spicy.” It sounds like “MY pet.” I thought that was a good phrase to know and tucked it away in my memory bank for future use.

Unfortunately, I think that future use will be back in Seattle.

I am sorry to report that most of the food we ate in Thailand was bland enough for Swedish palates. Granted, we ate primarily in restaurants. I’m not sure the average Thai person could afford to eat in these places, even though the prices felt very reasonable to us, so the cooks probably cater to what they think western palates will be. Unfortunately, they’ve been very well informed that their customers are wimps. But there are almost always chilies in sauce on the table, so bumping the zing factor up a tiny bit hasn’t been too hard.

I guess next time we’ll have to find more places where Thai people actually eat. The lady who taught our cooking class confirmed that real Thai cooks would put 10-15 chilies in a green papaya salad I put 2 ½ in during our class (and found that the right amount of heat). Then “MY pet” will be useful and I can stop wishing Karis had taught us the phrase for “more spicy” instead.