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Kao Soi Gai is one of the famous Thai dish from the Northern Part of Thailand. It has a perfect flavour combibination of salty, creamy, spicy and a touch of sour from Thai lime.

In This post I will be writing recipe for Kao Soi from scratch. The recipe is include homemade Kao Soi Curry paste.

The topic in this post will cover:
1) Kao Soi dish story
2) Essential ingredients in Kao soi and the reason why it won’t taste the same if you are using other Thai curry paste to make the dish.
3) Recipe and instruction of how to make Kao Soi dish.

Kao Soi dish story

Kao Soi came from the Northern Part of Thailand, Chiang Mai city. It’s a kind of dish where everyone who visit the city must eat.

However, the dish wasn’t first created by Thais. It came from muslim Chinese people who came from Yunnan. In Thai we called them Hong Chinese.

Century ago, Hong Chinese came to South East Asia to trade, fabric, spices, and other animal product. On the way back, they would cary Thai products, back to their country.

The trade was big later on so they build 3 main trading root and Chaing Mai was one of them

They later decided to migrate to Thailand and build village and live there. That is when the Northern Thai food start to have influence from Hong Chinese People.

Today, Kao soi has change its apperance and flavour so much. When you ask elderly, they would say it taste good but nothing similar to the Kao Soi in the history.

Personally I think it’s beautiful how food adapts and change as time past by. I think this is how Thai food get sophisticate in flavour; influenced by food culture from around the world.

Essential ingredients in Kao soi and the reason why it won’t taste the same if you are using other Thai curry paste to make the dish.

Kao Soi has a very unique flavour and aroma. It is easy to make if you have all of the right ingredient. I have seen many recipes trying to substitute Kao Soi paste with curry powder or yellow curry paste. It will work and it will taste yummy, however it will also missed out on key ingredient.

The key ingredient that I’m talking about is black cardamom. I’ve never known of this spice until I start to make Koi Soi dish. It has a deep and heavy smell, unlike the green and Siam cardamom. The flavour of and scent of black cardamom is quite strong, you won’t need much to add a good touch of aroma and you also can’t missed it out.

Luckily, black cardamom is nowadays available online, therefore anyone can get it easily.

If you are going to make Kao Soi dish, it’s worth investing on the spice, even though you probably will only be using 3 pods out of the whole bag for the dish.

How to work with black cardamom?

Black cardamom has tough outer skin. You have too peel out the outer skin first, and you only need to use the seeds inside. For me, it looks like a tiny coco pod.

Once you remove the skin and pick all of the seeds, you can toast the seeds before grinding in curry paste.

Toasting spice is most of the time beneficial because it brings out extra aroma and create toasty smell which also add another dimension of flavour to the dish.