Lanna food: why northern Thai cooking is not the Thai food you picture

Ask anyone to picture Thai food and you get green curry, pad thai, coconut milk and a spoonful of palm sugar in almost everything. That picture is real, and it is central and southern. Chiang Mai sits seven hundred kilometres north of it, in a mountain valley that spent six centuries as the capital of a separate kingdom, and the cooking here was built on a different set of constraints: no sea, no coconut groves, a genuine cool season, and rice you eat with your hands.

This article is about the why rather than the what. Four decisions (the rice, the fat, the salt and the tools) account for almost every difference you will taste, and once you can name them a northern menu stops being a list of unfamiliar words. If you would rather start with the plates themselves, the five that belong to the North are in a companion article, linked further down.

Lanna was a kingdom, not a region

Lanna means the land of a million rice fields. Founded by Mangrai in 1296, it ruled the North from Chiang Mai for six centuries with its own language, its own script, its own court and its own kitchen. Bangkok did not become a capital until 1782. The North was only absorbed administratively into Siam at the very end of the nineteenth century, and the railway from Bangkok arrived in the 1920s. For most of its history, this city's neighbours were not Thai.

Put the mountains on the map and the reason becomes obvious. The valleys run north to south, and so did the trade: down from Yunnan, through Shan State, into Chiang Mai and on towards Luang Prabang. Caravans carried tea, salt and cotton along those routes for centuries, and what travelled with them stayed. Burmese slow-cooked curries, Shan fermenting habits, Yunnanese Muslim noodles, Lao sticky rice. What did not arrive was the Gulf coast.

So the useful comparison is not Thai food with the heat turned down. Lanna cooking is a highland, landlocked, Tai kitchen with closer cousins in Shan State and Laos than in Bangkok, and a good half of what follows is simply what any kitchen does when the sea is a mountain range away.

Sticky rice is the plate, not the side dish

In the North, rice means khao niao: glutinous rice, soaked overnight and steamed in a conical basket over a pot. It comes to the table in a lidded woven basket, the kratip, and it is eaten with the right hand. You take a small amount, press it into a ball between your fingers, and use that ball to pick up the dish. Jasmine rice and a spoon are the central Thai default; here they are the exception, and the difference reorganises the entire meal.

Because the rice is a tool rather than a bed, nothing has to be soupy: no sauce needs to soak into anything. Dishes can be dry, dense and heavily salted, since each mouthful is mostly bland rice carrying a small quantity of something intense. That is precisely why the North's signature category is the nam prik, a pounded chilli dip eaten with raw vegetables and rice, and why a northern curry served on its own in a bowl looks oddly small.

It also explains a seasoning level that surprises people. Taste a spoonful of nam prik noom alone and it is aggressive. Taste it as it is meant to be eaten, a fingertip's worth against a ball of rice, and it lands exactly right. If a northern dish seems too salty, the usual cause is that you are eating too little rice with it.

Why there is almost no coconut milk

This is the question northern food raises fastest, and the answer is agricultural rather than culinary. The coconut palm is a coastal lowland tree: it wants heat all year round, sandy and salt-tolerant ground, and no cold snaps. Chiang Mai sits at around 310 metres in a valley ringed by mountains, with a cool season where the hill nights drop into single figures. Coconuts have never grown here in quantity. For most of Lanna's history coconut milk was something carried up from the plains, not something poured by the ladle.

A Lanna curry is therefore built differently. The paste is pounded in a stone mortar: dried chilli, shallot, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, fermented soybean. Then water, not coconut milk. Then time. The body of the dish comes from the paste breaking down and the pork fat rendering out over an hour or more, which is why northern curries look thin and taste concentrated, the exact opposite of a thick but mild central curry.

The famous exception proves the rule. Khao soi is a coconut curry, and it is not really a Lanna dish: it came down the caravan road with Chin Haw traders, Yunnanese Muslims, and the version Chiang Mai serves today was assembled in town in the twentieth century. It is the northern dish everyone knows precisely because it is the northern dish that most resembles what visitors already expect.

No sea, so the salt comes from somewhere else

Central and southern Thai cooking leans on two things from the coast: nam pla, fish sauce, and kapi, fermented shrimp paste. Neither belongs to a landlocked valley. What the North had instead was soybeans, freshwater fish from the Ping, and rock salt from the inland wells at Bo Kluea, over in Nan province.

The result is thua nao: soybeans fermented, pounded and dried into thin discs the colour of leather, then toasted over charcoal until they smell of stock and roasted nuts. It does the job kapi does further south, providing the savoury floor a dish is built on. You will see it stacked in the market, and you will find it crumbled into nam prik, into curries and into stir-fried greens. Visitors often describe northern food as smoky without being able to say why; most of the time, this is why.

The freshwater half of the same logic gives pla ra, fermented fish, and nam pu, a black paste made by pounding rice-paddy crabs and boiling them down for hours. A spoonful of nam pu goes into the northern papaya salad, which is why it tastes deep and salty where the version further south tastes sweet and peanutty. None of this is an exotic flourish. It is what a kitchen does when the nearest sea is a week away by cart.

Salty and bitter, only rarely sweet

Central Thai cooking is usually described as a balance of four tastes, with sugar as the arbiter that rounds everything off. Northern cooking largely leaves the sugar out of savoury food. Sweetness belongs to the sweets, and even those tend to be roasted rice, coconut and palm sugar rather than syrup. Set a central pad thai beside a northern curry and the difference is not heat, it is sugar.

What takes its place is bitterness, which the North treats as a taste rather than a fault. Bitter greens, bitter melon, bamboo at the wrong end of its season, the herb-and-bile note in some beef and offal dishes. It is an acquired preference and it is entirely deliberate: a northern cook who tastes a dish and finds it merely pleasant will often add something to roughen it up.

Sourness arrives through fermentation rather than through a squeeze of lime at the end: sour bamboo shoots, pickled mustard greens, tamarind, whatever sour fruit the season is giving. And chilli, contrary to the region's reputation, mostly reaches the table separately. The heat of a northern meal is a decision you make with the dish of dried chilli in front of you, not one the kitchen made on your behalf.

The wild shelf: food that is gathered, not farmed

Walk to the far end of Warorot market in the morning and you reach a section that looks like the forest floor: bundles of leaves with no English name, pale mushrooms in the green season, bamboo shoots, coiled ferns, small bitter fruits, banana flower, and in April, red ant eggs sold by the cup. Very little of it is cultivated. The North's vegetable shelf is still partly a foraged one, and it turns over every few weeks.

This is the part of Lanna cooking that survives translation least well, because the ingredients often have no equivalent abroad and no name to translate into. It is also why a northern menu can look repetitive on paper and taste different in June and in December: the curry is the same curry, and the greens in it are whatever the season handed over.

One of these deserves singling out. Makhwaen, a hill relative of Sichuan pepper, gives the northern sausage and several curries a note of citrus and resin and a faint numbness on the lip. It appears in essentially no cooking south of here. If a northern dish tastes almost familiar but carries one note you cannot place, this is usually the one.

The morning market, and the rest of the eating day

Visiting Warorot: the building, the stalls and the hours

Pound, grill, steam, simmer: the wok comes last

The defining tool of a northern kitchen is the stone mortar, not the wok. Almost every category of dish begins with pounding: the paste for a curry, the chillies and shallots for a nam prik, the herbs and spices for a laap. Pounding does something a blender cannot, bruising and tearing rather than slicing, releasing oils and leaving texture behind, which is why a hand-pounded paste and a machine-made one do not taste the same.

After the mortar comes charcoal. Grilling is the North's default heat, and not only for meat: the chillies, shallots, garlic and aubergines of a nam prik are charred whole in the embers before they are pounded, which is where that smoky, faintly bitter backbone comes from. Then steaming, in a bamboo basket set over the same pot as the rice, the cheapest second burner ever devised. Then long, slow simmering for the curries.

Stir-frying exists here, but it is Chinese in origin, it arrived with traders, and it is not what a Lanna dish is. That matters when you order: a curry that took ninety minutes and a stir-fry that took four are not two versions of the same thing, and a kitchen that does one of them well is not necessarily the kitchen that does the other.

A meal is a tray, not a plate

The formal version of a northern meal is the khantoke, a low round tray of woven bamboo and lacquer set on the floor with the diners around it. The dinner-with-dancing version sold to coaches is a twentieth-century invention; the tray is not. What matters is the format it enforces: several dishes in the middle, one basket of sticky rice for every one or two people, and nobody with a private plate of their own thing.

The composition is fairly stable. Sticky rice. One nam prik with a plate of raw and blanched vegetables to dip in it. One curry. One grilled or fried thing, usually pork. Something sour or pickled. Everything arrives at once, there are no courses, and you eat across the tray rather than down a single dish. Portions look small because the point is to have five things rather than one large one.

This is why a solo traveller ordering one bowl often walks away unconvinced. A single northern dish, eaten alone, is missing the four other flavours it was designed against. Two people ordering three or four small plates and a basket of rice pay about the same and get the cuisine as it actually works.

What all of this means at the table

Read a northern menu with those four decisions in mind and it stops being opaque. Anything called kaeng will be thinner and saltier than you expect, and it will not be sweet. Anything called nam prik is a dip, not a soup, and it needs rice and vegetables to make sense. Laap in the North is not the Isaan salad with lime and toasted rice powder: it is dry, dark, heavy on spices, and it can contain blood, so it is worth asking before you order. Sticky rice comes in its own basket and is meant to be handled.

Two practical habits follow. Eat early, because the best curry and khao soi kitchens open at dawn and stop when the pot is empty, often well before three in the afternoon. And order more small things than feels natural, because the format assumes that you will.

With that in place, the plates themselves are the easy part. The five that belong to the North and nowhere else, with what each one actually is and where to eat it in town, are in the companion article just below.

Read nextLanna food: five dishes to eat before you leave ▸