Nat Thaipun’s dream has always been to tell stories of food and culture through her writing. She loves to explore the world’s cuisines and find ways to make them accessible for the home cook, particularly the food of her own Thai Australian heritage and culinary traditions of her mother and late grandmother.
After taking out the MasterChef Australia gong in 2024, Thaipun has trained in some of the world’s best restaurants, including St. John and Core in London. She’s thrown a few sold-out pop-ups in the mix, here in Australia and further afield, before joining the award-winning Vue de Monde team on level 55 of Rialto Towers.
It’s an action-packed CV, and one that Thaipun has flexed thoroughly in her excellent debut cookbook, Thai. Here she is now with how it came to be:
I wrote Thai because I wanted to preserve the stories, memories, and techniques of Thai food before they disappear, especially the dishes that live in family kitchens rather than restaurants. I wrote most of it between pop-ups, flights, and quiet mornings before service by recalling memories being with my family in Thailand and being raised surrounded by the best Thai food. Unfortunately sometimes those longhand in notebooks are covered in soy stains, sometimes typing half-asleep after testing recipes until three in the morning. It was my way of reconnecting with where I came from, while also exploring what it means to cook Thai food anywhere in the world – even far, far from home like the Swiss Alps.
The main thing I learned writing it was that recipes are just the surface. What really matters is the rhythm of cooking. The balance, the smell, sounds and the instinct to trust your hands. I learned to listen to my food the way I listen to people, to understand it before trying to control it. And I learned that writing about food is really writing about belonging.
If you take one thing from this book, it should be that Thai food isn’t about perfection, it’s about balance and generosity. The goal isn’t to replicate a dish exactly but to understand the why behind it. If you can taste your way through a recipe instead of following it blindly, you’ve already cooked like a Thai person.
But I’d also love it if you tried making your own curry paste and using the condiments like Thai people do. It’s one of those things that seems intimidating until you do it, and then you realise it’s deeply meditative. Especially for the curry pastes, the pounding, smelling, tasting, adjusting. It connects you to centuries of cooks who did the same thing with the same sounds and scents.
If you’re a relatively new cook, give the pad gla pow a try. It’s fast, forgiving, and full of the kind of punchy flavours Thai food is loved for – salty, spicy, sweet and aromatic. It teaches balance, heat control, and how a few ingredients can create something powerful. Plus, you’ll learn how to use the condiment nam pla prik in the process, too.
If you’re looking to extend yourself a bit more, meanwhile try the gang som pla, the southern-style sour curry. It’s fiery, tangy, and teaches a lot about Thai philosophy: bold but balanced, humble ingredients elevated through intuition. It’s the dish my mother and grandmother loved most, and if you can master its balance, you can cook almost any Thai curry with confidence. I want to warn though, it’s more of a traditional “Thai” curry where it’s more like a soup. It’s not curry-based at all.
Cooking Thai food can be wayyy easier than you think. Some hacks from Thai include:
- Fish sauce = salt. Don’t be afraid of it – it’s seasoning, not a flavour bomb. But if you really don’t have it, just use soy or salt.
- Tamarind = acid. If you don’t have it, just use lime or lemons. Don’t be so hard on yourself when it comes to using the “correct” thing.
- Palm sugar = sugar. It can be swapped for brown sugar, regular sugar like raw or even white. Just taste to adjust as white sugar will be much sweeter.
- Roasting chillies before blending = heat, aromatic and nutty flavours. It adds a layer of smokiness that feels like home.
- Use your senses, not just measurements. Thai cooking is a lot about intuition – the dish should taste balanced, not just read balanced.
When you’ve finished reading Thai I hope you’ll cook with curiosity and care. I hope you’ll feed the people you love, not just with food but with attention. And mostly, I hope it makes you feel connected to Thailand, to their stories and to your own story, and to the joy of making something that’s both ancient and completely your own.
Thai: Anywhere and Everywhere by Nat Thaipun (Hardie Grant Books, $50) is out now and yours to purchase from great Victorian booksellers including Readings, and Hill of Content.