There are many spicy foods, but none seem to come even close to Thai foods. I’ve had Indian food in India and Mexican food in Mexico and neither one brought tears to my eyes the way Thai food, real Thai food, did the first time I had it.

It seems like Thai’s like to add chili’s to every dish and you’ll find a variety of chili condiments on the table at any Thai restaurant. The most common are simple dried chili powder and nam prik which literally means “chili water” and is a combination of fresh chili’s, vinegar, fish sauce and lime juice.

Thai’s use a wide variety of chili’s in their cooking, but the most common are the prik kee nu and the prik chee faa chili’s. Both will curl your hair, but the prik kee nu is definitely the hotter of the two. Tread carefully with these chili’s if you’re not used to spicy food and I mean REALLY spicy food, not what you typically find in America.

Prik kee nu chilis are green or red and about one inch in length. You can find them in most major cities in the U.S. in Oriental grocery stores and they freeze well (up to one year) so if you’re just visiting the city for the weekend you can buy lots and freeze them. Simply wash the chili, dry thoroughly and put it in a Ziplock freezer bag to freeze.

When the prik kee nu is dried it is called prik hang and is even hotter if that’s possible. You can also find these in Oriental groceries and the smaller the chili the hotter it will be. Golf and I get these shipped to us by her dad from Thailand by the kilo, we typically use about ½ pound a month. You will very likely get better mileage

When I started eating with Golf she would always tell the waitress to make our order paed mak mak. I had no idea what that meant for weeks until finally she told me, paed means “spicy”. So my introduction to spicy Thai food was extra spicy from a Thai perspective. In years before that I know that any Thai food I got was served for Western tastes and even now if I am by myself and order food paed mak mak they won’t make it nearly as spicy as they do when I am with Golf.

Don’t think though that Thai food is just about the spicy chili’s. The spicy dishes usually combine other elements such as sweet, sour and salty together in intriguing ways. If you haven’t tried real Thai food yet then I suggest you subscribe to my feed and keep coming back. Golf has promised to start posting at least one authentic Thai recipe a week so you should be able to build quite a recipe base very quickly.

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