Of course I cooked Thai food for the White Lotus finale

Here's what I made.

A Thai potluck for pop culture’s sake. I did *not* cook all of this.

I won’t spoil the White Lotus season 3 finale, but I can say that at least one person died, and it happened in Thailand. And since I can’t seem to let a pop culture moment pass without tying a food experience to it, I of course cooked up a few Thai dishes for the occasion.

I have four Thai cookbooks, including the seminal tome Thai Food by David Thompson, but I decided to stick to my fave of the bunch, Night + Market, by local LA wunderkind Kris Yenbamroong.

Named after his restaurants in West Hollywood, Silver Lake, and now Venice, Night + Market is the rare cheffy cookbook that doesn’t get under my skin. Are there sub-recipes galore? You bet. But the writing is so accessible, the steps so easy, and the results so sublime that I forgive Yenbamroong for the incessant page-flipping I’m forced to do with any given recipe.

Previous successes from the book include an excellent pad see ew, a mouthwatering chicken fried rice, and of course a great pad Thai. What next? I figured I would make a simple chicken dish. Enter Thai Boxing Chicken.

Thai Boxing Chicken / Gai Yang Sanam Muay

Gai Yang Sanam Muay with Jaew in the center.

Yenbamroong names this chicken after the vendors that often populate the exteriors of muay Thai stadiums, and given the ample muay Thai imagery (and scenes) in the later episodes of White Lotus season 3, it felt downright necessary to make this dish.

It’s dead simple… although, it doesn’t come together quickly. First, it calls for bone-in, skin ON chicken thighs, a combo that’s hard to find. Ultimately, I wound up deboning 12 thighs, which I started off annoyed about, but by the end my deboning had really improved; so I was actually really happy for the experience. I was like Gaitok learning how to use a gun! But it was a knife instead. And completely different.

The chicken goes in a simple yet potent marinade of palm sugar, coconut milk, Thai seasoning sauce, and a garlic-cilantro paste we have to make separately. Yes, a dreaded sub-recipe. But it takes 5 seconds to make, especially if you’ve purchased peeled garlic (and you always should buy peeled garlic for these kinds of nights).

After marinading overnight, I preheated my grill to a high heat, oiled the grates, and placed the chicken over the flames. The recipes says 5 minutes per side, but as I was flipping the thighs, my entire grill became consumed in a massive fire that felt, well, dangerous? I swiftly cut the flames, evacuated the chicken to a plate, and closed the cover in hopes that I wouldn’t burn down my entire house. Thankfully, we were safe. Mook would have been very impressed with my bravery.

I transferred the thighs to a broiler to let them finish, and once cooked through, my friend Judy sliced them into strips and placed them around a bowl of jaew.

Oh yeah! Jaew!

Jaew

This is a chili dip that will casually light your mouth on fire, much in the same way I nearly enveloped my patio in an inferno. It’s one part fish sauce, one part lime juice, and 1 tablespoon roasted chile powder.

Roasted Chile Powder

If this is starting to feel like Inception by way of Choose Your Own Adventure, you are not wrong. This book has recipes that lead to other recipes and still others from there. Nevertheless, the roasted chili powder recipe had me pushing 2 cups of dried árbol chiles around a dry wok for about 7 minutes before grinding them to a pulp in a food processor. Yenbamroong warns “Be careful not to breathe in any chile dust when you remove the lid,” but I’m afraid we can’t all be diligent inhalers. Despite my best efforts, I definitely got a whiff, and it had me sporadically coughing for about two hours. Worth it.

Back to the Jaew

After putting the chile powder in the jaew, we’re supposed to add sesame seeds and toasted rice powder right before serving. Toasted rice powder you say?

Toasted rice powder

A classic Thai ingredient, Yenbamroong’s version has us toasting dried sticky rice in a wok with slices of galangal, lemongrass, and makrut lime leaves. It took about 15 minutes but was so worth it, especially when I added it to… to…

OMG I MADE THIS DAMN POWDER AND FORGOT TO ADD IT TO THE JAEW AND ONLY REALIZED THIS NOW. UGH. CAN WE GET BACK TO THE CHICKEN??

Back to Thai Boxing Chicken

With the chicken arranged artfully (thanks Judy!) around the rice powder-less jaew, it was time to serve this beaut of a dish to the group.

But notably, Yenbamroong’s recipe suggests pairing the chicken with a green papaya salad and sticky rice. Who was I to ignore a decent suggestion?

To the papaya salad!

Green papaya salad / som tum

I’d made green papaya salad once or twice, and it had always turned out very nicely, but it was never exceptional like so many restaurants I’ve been to. Part of that was because, well, I’m not Thai, and I do think there is something to be said for the generational know-how that gets poured into cooking. But beyond that, if there is a beyond that, I don’t think I ever had the right equipment for the task. I always had to use a food processor, which worked very well, but it wasn’t the same as a proper mortar and pestle.

But now I had a mortar and pestle! A sturdy, heavy, granite mortar and pestle! I was at last equipped for my papaya salad journey.

“Find a lightweight [mortar and pestle]… the heavy-duty granite versions are used for curry pastes,” Yenbamroong writes. Dammit! So my mortar wasn’t the right kind?? What sort of cruel joke was this? I decided to just work with my granite misfit of a mortar because buying a whole SECOND one would be absolutely ridiculous.

I bought it.

I mean, of course I bought a new one. I couldn’t help myself! But wait - I can explain. To prep myself for the dish, I watched a video online where a chef named Pai made papaya salad using the lightweight mortar and pestle that Yenbamroong recommends. What struck me was how much more leverage Pai was able to get with the long, wooden pestle (compared to the stumpy one that comes with my granite mortar). The lightweight mortar also had a deep bowl which could accommodate all the papaya and other accoutrements without flopping out all over the place (a common issue with my granite one). I always thought a mortar was a mortar, but I realized that an apt comparison is saucepans. There are big ones and small one; both are from the same family but are used for wildly different reasons. In other words, you *can* have two mortar and pestles, just like you would have two saucepans.

And so now I have welcomed mortar diversity into my kitchen, and I couldn’t be prouder. Bashing all the ingredients (fish sauce, palm sugar, garlic, chiles, beans, papaya, carrot, lime juice, peanuts, tomatoes) was a breeze. I felt very powerful. So excited for future endeavors with my deep mortar.

This is 3 cups of shredded papaya and other friends. Everything fit easily in the new mortar!

For those wondering about the papaya, I’m lucky to live near two different Thai markets; so sourcing the fruit was easy. Yenbamroong and others recommend cabbage, kohlrabi, and other firm, neutral items. Also, I shredded it using a hand julienne tool that I picked up somewhere along the way (I think during a misguided zoodles phase that lasted about 36 hours).

Anyway, this papaya salad was fantastic. It had all the flavors and punch of any you could find at a restaurant, and its simmering spice was perfect. Fantastic. Recipe here.

Pineapple Shrimp Fried Rice

Yenbamroong recommends sticky rice to go with the chicken… but what if instead I made pineapple shrimp fried rice? A totally different concept, yes, but unlike sticky rice, this recipe gave me an excuse to hollow out a pineapple and turn it into a vessel!

Since this was a stir fry, it came together incredibly fast. But also, there was some advance prep that needed to be done. I had to make a stir fry sauce (Thai seasoning sauce, oyster sauce, sugar), and I needed to cook some rice the day before (old rice = the best rice for fried rice). Oh, and also some Prik Nam Pla.

Prik Nam Pla

Similar to Jaew, this condiment is also roughly half lime juice, half fish sauce (a little heavier on the latter though), but instead of chili powder, we add a bunch of minced Thai chiles and a ton of garlic. You already can imagine how delicious this is, and I won’t have you believe otherwise.

Back to the Pineapple Fried Rice

Once again the wok hit the flame, this time for a rapid fire (pun intended) fried rice bonanza. First, I heated up some oil, then added some sliced onions and garlic. Once translucent, I dropped in several shrimp (which required yet another substep of thawing earlier in the day).

There was a lot of shaking and stirring (and an occasional bead of sweat on my brow). Once the shrimps became semi-opaque, I added an egg and scrambled it up with the wok’s contents. Next it was time for the rice, sugar, and that stir fry sauce which I cooked until the rice turned brown and the moisture had largely evaporated away.

Lastly, I removed the wok from the heat and tossed in pineapple, cashews, green onions, and white pepper. I wouldn’t call it much of a looker, but it didn’t really need to be since I had fancy pineapple bowls to hold it. Fun!

This dish had all the comforting pleasures of a fried rice with the added whimsy of pineapple chunks. It was great, and while it was not sticky, I found the rice did an excellent job of balancing the chicken and that spicy, spicy jaew.

Oh yeah, the chicken!

So, with that all being said, this chicken was…

Excellent? Mouthwatering? Spectacular? It was the runaway hit of the evening (although, my friend Matt’s mango and sticky rice dessert was maybe my favorite of all). This was a purely wonderful dish, worth every heartbeat of terror I felt when those flames sprung out from the bottom of my grill. I may need to pop some lorezepams the more I think about that tense experience.

To that end, I think in the future I may just roast the chicken and finish on the grill or under the broiler. I did love the char — it felt very street food-y — but I fear fire; so no more high flames for this recipe. (A longer, slower cook over medium flames would probably work well too, with a brief lashing over high for the last minute or so).

The headline here, however, should not be about my questionable pitmaster skills. It should be about the chicken - bursting with garlic and coconut flavors, impossibly moist, and addictively crispy on the edges. This did taste like street vendor food in the best way and was an exemplary centerpiece to a very crowded Thai table.

Check out the recipe here.

---

So yes, I set out to make a simple chicken dish and wound up cooking a billion other things, large and small, but that’s a feature, not a flaw. I love a cookbook that produces well-rounded meals, not just single recipes. How many times have I labored over a dish, only to realize that I have no idea what to serve with it?

Now, I might have liked this a whole lot less had I been caught off guard by the sub-recipes. The lesson here is to always, always read your recipes thoroughly before cooking (or shopping), and if you’re putting together a dinner party, do it the day before.

Did you cook Thai food for the White Lotus finale? And even if you didn’t, any recipes you love from the region?