Ginger and broccoli in pad see eiw, Thai basil and tamarind sauce in som tam, and peanut butter drenched in every stir-fry possible. If you've ever visited YouTube in search of how-tos on Thai cookery, it's a given you've done some head-scratching, if not outright offensive interpretations of beloved dishes.
Thankfully, though, there's Pailin Chongchitnant -- a Thai YouTuber based in Canada who's become the go-to source for all things pertaining to Thai cooking. With her bubbly personality, high-quality production and authentic easy-to-follow recipes, she's turned a passion into a dream job. Her channel, Pailin's Kitchen, has received millions of views and almost 440,000 subscribers since launching in 2009.
With an educational approach to Thai cooking, the channel has done so well she was invited to host the TV series One World Kitchen for two seasons. Additionally, with non-stop requests from her fans, she published her first cookbook, Hot Thai Kitchen: Demystifying Thai Cuisine With Authentic Recipes To Make At Home, which last month won Silver Prize in the Taste Canada Awards Regional/Cultural Cookbooks category.
Pailin Chongchitnant. Pailin Chongchitnant
"I didn't have plans to write a book at all because I thought it was redundant," said Pailin in a Skype call from her Vancouver home. "But people asked for it. I said, 'No! Why would you want a book?'. Then it occurred to me that a book is an entirely different experience, and it's not interchangeable with videos. So when I decided to write a book, I wanted to make sure I was offering something you couldn't get from watching my videos alone."
Offering the big picture of Thai food, Pailin's goal with the cookbook was to have people understand the basic principles of Thai cooking, making them less reliant on following recipes.
"The first half of my book is basically like a Thai Food 101 textbook," she said. "There are no recipes till the second half of the book. I really wanted to talk about the big picture of Thai food -- the cultural aspects of Thai food, how people eat, and the main ideas of the dishes. What are our curries all about? What do our salads look like? And I find that understanding that makes the recipes easy. Now you realise the salads are just variations. The dressing is almost the same. And curries -- it's just paste and coconut milk. So once you get that, you feel a lot more confident in making your own Thai [food]."
Falling in love with cooking and its creative process at a young age, Pailin knew that she would devote her life to food. After graduating high school in Thailand, she went to the University of British Columbia to study nutritional sciences, then to San Francisco to further her culinary skills at Le Cordon Bleu.
Working in restaurants after graduation, her dream was to eventually have her own cooking show, her inspirations being Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson.
"When YouTube [became] available, I jumped on it," she said. "Before that, if you weren't on TV, you couldn't have a cooking show. So it was sort of my outlet. I love to cook. I love to teach. And I was a little bit frustrated with the state of Thai food in North America. There wasn't anything good. There wasn't anything authentic and I thought I could do my part in educating people about what Thai food is really supposed to be like."
A screenshot of Pailin's Youtube Video. Pailin Chongchitnant
Cooking, shooting, and editing everything herself with a distant hope that somebody would discover her for a TV show, Pailin didn't expect that YouTube would eventually be her main source of income.
"When I started, YouTube wasn't something you could make money with. It was just a platform for sharing," she said. "So I started purely for fun. There was always a dream that somebody would find me and put me on TV. That was always a dream that I never really expected to come true."
Then, YouTube evolved, and with her popular cooking videos, it suddenly became a viable platform for making a living. Pailin is still a one-woman show, directing, editing, and managing everything herself (with a little help from friends for the camera work). The bulk of her time is spent editing videos, grocery shopping and testing recipes to add to the 400 videos already up in her channel.
Pailin's cookbook Hot Thai Kitchen. Pailin Chongchitnant
"You would think I would run out [of dishes] at some point," she said. "The obvious choices are gone, but I still have ideas. For a long time I was afraid of running out, but it's occurring to me now that food is so vast. So I don't think it's possible for me to run out. I'll run out of creative dishes, sure, but I'll never run out of actual dishes."
"That's sort of the goal as well," she continued. "[To show] people that Thai food is more than curries and stir-fried noodles. That's another thing about Thai restaurants here. They all have the same menu. You get yellow curry, green curry, and you get pad Thai and a bunch of spring rolls. I think to the average consumer, when they think Thai food, that's really all they're thinking of. So I think venturing into obscure dishes is a good thing."
Funnily enough, one of her most famous videos, with more than a million views, isn't any famous Thai dish, but her mango jelly recipe, which she created herself.
"That was completely unexpected," she said with a laugh. "I had no idea what happened there."
With a TV series and an award-winning book already in the bag, Pailin wants to continue making YouTube videos and is thinking about writing a second book.
"[The Taste Canada Award] makes me feel that all that effort was worthwhile," she said. "And the whole thing made me more thankful for my viewers more than anything, because it was them asking for the book. There were a lot of people helping me with the book and the award had me reflect upon that. I think life and career are a journey, and it doesn't have to end anywhere. [I want to continue to] inspire people to cook."
Watch Pailin's cooking tutorials at www.youtube.com/ PailinsKitchen or www.hot-thai-kitchen.com. Hot Thai Kitchen is available at major bookstores.
Pailin Chongchitnant at the Sharjah International Book Fair in the UAE. Ahmed Nadeem Sarraj
