Road Tripping - Austin Bush

The Splendid Table: Conversations & Recipes For Curious Cooks & Eaters

Austin Bush, an American food journalist and author of 'The Food of Southern Thailand,' shares his deep exploration of the region's vibrant,

Key takeaways

• Southern Thai food is the spiciest in Thailand, with a distinct heat profile combining chilies, ginger, black pepper, and salt.
• The region's cuisine reflects its coastal geography, with abundant seafood preservation techniques and strong use of salty, fermented, and aromatic ingredients.

Main topics

• Regional diversity of Thai cuisine
• Spicy flavors and heat profiles in Southern Thailand

Notable quotes

"Southern Thai food is the spiciest. It really is. And they even have a different word for it: petron, which means burning spicy."

Conclusion

Austin Bush's journey through Southern Thailand reveals a cuisine deeply rooted in local

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with W. Kamau Bell, and he is no stranger to creating his own lane. We dig into the whys behind some of his biggest decisions, like holding space for Ted Danson to talk about his blackface scandal, Kamau's approach to dealing with trolls, and what he would have changed when interviewing the KKK. We also wonder if Megan Kelly is flirting with us. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Speaker 3 (0:34) Hey, it's Francis, and this summer we're bringing you a road trip series that explores food destinations and their cuisines with the writers and storytellers who know them best. This week's stop in our road trip series is Thailand. We're revisiting an episode from a couple of years ago where we talked to Salvadorian chef Carla T. Vasquez and food journalist and photographer Austin Bush, author of The Food of Southern Thailand. Austin has lived in Thailand for over 20 years. taught himself the language, speaks it fluently. He has talked with everyone you could possibly imagine, from village cooks to austere chefs. And I love talking to him about where to eat in Thailand. Have a listen. Speaker 3 (1:23) So we'll go from the first English language cookbook on the food of El Salvador to what I'm pretty sure is the first English language cookbook on the food of Southern Thailand. And it's called, well, it's called The Food of Southern Thailand. Austin Bush is an American from Oregon who moved to Thailand, learned to speak fluent Thai, and spent over 20 years there, traveling the country with his camera and his notebook to write travel guides and, more passionately, to document home, roadside and restaurant cooks and their recipes. The definition of an old soul Austin is old school in his approach, a classic food journalist. He reports extensively about the spicy and coconutty cuisines from southern Thailand and he went far away from the tourist resorts and got deep into the Malay, Indonesian and Chinese inflected cultures of this incredibly vibrant part of the world. Speaker 2 (2:16) So, hey, Austin, it's great to see you. Hey, Francis. Thanks for having me back on. Good to see you as well. Speaker 3 (2:22) Congratulations on the book. It is. Thank you. You know, I expect nothing less of you, but I'm sure it's not comprehensive in that as you travel, like you're always seeing, oh, my God, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. I didn't know about this place or this dish. And it's really an enormous, like a magisterial work, I think we'd say. It really feels like I'm traveling through so much of Southern Thailand when I'm in that book and I want to eat all the food. It looks incredible. But congratulations on this like huge, huge project. Thank you. Thanks so much. So I want to ask you though, you know, so this book is The Food of Southern Thailand. And obviously I knew you through living in Bangkok. through your work reporting on food, mostly in Northern Thailand. And in recent years, I feel like here in the States, there's been a lot more English language coverage. When we talk about Thai food, a lot of times we are talking about northern Thai food. I think that's thanks to a lot of American chefs and writers, yourself included, who really love that region. But we haven't really heard much at all about southern Thailand and the food of southern Thailand. Do you have a sense of why folks like you have gravitated north and not to the south? Speaker 2 (3:40) Well, I think, I mean, to be honest, I think... Chef Andy Ricker with Pok Pok in Portland when that was still alive, that was a huge factor in opening our eyes to Thai regionality in the US. I think a lot of us or a lot of people outside of Thailand didn't realize that the food was so sort of diverse and regional. Speaker 3 (3:59) I Speaker 2 (4:00) think we have Andy to thank for that. As for Southern Thai food, honestly, it's a bit of a paradox to me because for years and years, decades and decades now, most... of the people who went to Thailand probably went to the south, probably went to a beach. Yeah, yeah, most visitors probably went to a beach somewhere, went to an island or something like that. So I would suspect that it's the region of Thailand that most visitors have been exposed to. But for some reason, the food just never sort of drew people's attention or maybe they weren't really aware of what they were eating or... Alternatively, maybe they were eating in sort of guest houses and restaurants for foreigners. Speaker 3 (4:43) Yeah. So when we do think of the regional food of the South, the local food, what the different communities of the South are eating, this is always a hard question, but let's try to do our best. How would you describe the food of Southern Thailand? Speaker 2 (5:01) Well, I would say among the various sort of regional cuisines of Thailand, southern Thai food is the spiciest, which is a bold statement in a country of spicy cuisines. But it really is. And the dishes there come from, you know, like a lot of Thai dishes, they start with these curry paste or herb paste. And in southern Thailand, like they're pretty bonkers. Like they really they'll combine. Fresh chilies, dried chilies, ginger, and black pepper all in the same paste. Oh, Speaker 3 (5:31) wow. Speaker 2 (5:32) And they even have a different word for it. You know, the word for spicy in Thailand is pet. But in southern Thailand, they say petron, which is like kind of like burning spicy, like a reference to ginger and pepper and things like that. I was going Speaker 3 (5:44) to say, because those are, like when we think of heat in food, we think of chilies. But when you talk about black pepper, when you talk about ginger, like it's Speaker 1 (5:52) a Speaker 3 (5:52) different kind of heat, right? It's not just the... chili heat, but like the warming heat of black pepper and ginger can certainly like kind of Speaker 2 (5:59) get up in your nose. Yeah, exactly. It's super spicy and also super salty. My theory about this is, you know, people, there's a lot of coastline in the South. They have access to salt. They have access to seafood and they have all these methods of preserving seafood, salting it and fermenting it and drying and all these sort of things that I think makes its way into the food. So they really love salty flavors down there. They love turmeric. It shows up so much in Southern Thai cooking, fresh turmeric specifically, which gives it amazing, you know, color and aroma. And they also love these kind of like, at least in Thailand, Southern Thai food is associated with these, I guess for lack of a better word, stinky ingredients, like stink beans. Oh, they call them that. They actually call them stink beans. Speaker 3 (6:52) Yeah. Speaker 2 (6:52) I think, yeah, I guess that's what they're called in English. In Thai, they're called satthar, or in Southern Thai, lukthar. And for people who aren't familiar,