Khanom: A Guide to the World of Thai Desserts

Thai sweets are called khanom, a word that covers a huge range of foods: steamed cakes, custards, jellies, fried snacks, sweet soups and little parcels wrapped in banana leaf. Some are rich and sticky, others light and cooling. Many are bright with natural colours from pandan leaves, butterfly pea flowers and pumpkin.

Most are not served at the end of a meal in the European way. Khanom are eaten as snacks through the day, bought at markets in small bags and boxes, and given as gifts and offerings. A Thai meal at home might finish with fresh fruit, while the sweets come later in the afternoon.

The building blocks

A small group of ingredients appears again and again in Thai sweets:

• Coconut: the cream and milk give richness, and are often salted lightly so that the sweetness tastes rounder. Grated coconut is used fresh as a topping or filling.
• Palm sugar: soft and caramel-like, it gives many sweets their warm brown colour and depth.
• Pandan: the long green leaves add a sweet, grassy fragrance and a green colour, and are used to wrap and line some sweets.
• Sticky rice and rice flour: glutinous rice and its flour give the chewy, soft texture behind many khanom.
• Beans: mung beans, black beans and others are cooked into sweet soups or made into smooth pastes.
• Tapioca and other starches: used for jellies, pearls and the chewy coatings of some sweets.

That pinch of salt matters. Many Thai sweets balance sugar with a little salt, especially in the coconut cream, which keeps them from tasting flat.

Mango sticky rice

Khao niao mamuang is the Thai dessert best known abroad. Sticky rice is steamed and then soaked in warm coconut milk sweetened with sugar and seasoned with salt, so the grains turn glossy and rich. It is served beside slices of ripe yellow mango, with a spoonful of salty coconut cream over the top and often a sprinkling of crisp fried mung beans.

It is at its best during mango season, which peaks in the hot months from around March to May, when fragrant varieties such as nam dok mai are plentiful. Outside the season it is still widely sold, but the fruit is rarely as good.

The golden desserts and their Portuguese connection

A group of sweets made mainly from egg yolks and sugar stands apart from the coconut and rice tradition. Their names begin with thong, meaning gold, after their bright yellow colour:

• Thong yip: egg yolk cooked in syrup and pinched into a small flower or star shape.
• Thong yot: golden drops, small teardrops of egg yolk batter poached in boiling syrup.
• Foi thong: golden threads, fine strands of yolk drizzled into hot syrup and gathered into nests.

These desserts are closely related to Portuguese convent sweets made with egg yolks and sugar, and foi thong in particular resembles the Portuguese fios de ovos. Portuguese traders and settlers were present at Ayutthaya, the Siamese capital, from the sixteenth century, and the egg sweets are generally thought to have arrived through that contact.

Thai tradition credits much of this to Maria Guyomar de Pinha, a woman of mixed Portuguese, Japanese and Bengali descent who lived in Ayutthaya in the seventeenth century and was the wife of Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek adviser to King Narai. She is remembered in Thailand as Thao Thong Kip Ma and is said to have worked in the royal kitchens and taught these sweets there. Historical records about her life are limited, and how much of the story is documented fact and how much is later tradition is not certain, but the Portuguese link itself is widely accepted.

Because of their golden names, these sweets are thought to bring prosperity and good fortune. They are given at weddings, house blessings, ordinations and other celebrations, often as part of a set of auspicious desserts.

Market favourites

A walk through any Thai market will turn up dozens of sweets. A few of the best known:

1. Khanom krok: a batter of rice flour and coconut cream cooked in a cast-iron pan with small round hollows. The bases turn crisp and the tops stay soft and creamy, and they are often finished with spring onion, sweetcorn or taro. Two halves are usually pressed together to serve.
2. Bua loy: small, chewy balls of glutinous rice flour in warm, sweetened coconut milk. The balls are often coloured with pandan, pumpkin or taro, and some versions add a soft-boiled egg.
3. Lod chong: short green noodles of rice flour coloured with pandan, served in coconut milk with palm sugar syrup and crushed ice.
4. Tub tim krob: crisp rubies, small cubes of water chestnut coated in tapioca flour and coloured red, served in sweetened coconut milk with ice.
5. Khanom chan: a steamed layered sweet of rice flour, tapioca flour and coconut milk, made in alternating colours. The word chan means layer, and the sweet is linked with rising in life, so it is often made with nine layers, nine being a lucky number in Thai culture.

Many other sweets are sold alongside these: steamed cups of coconut pudding, pumpkin custard, banana steamed in leaf, and small pastes of mung bean shaped and painted to look like tiny fruits. Most are made fresh each morning and sold out by the afternoon.

Sweets for merit-making

Khanom have long had a place in Buddhist and household ceremonies. Sweets are among the foods placed in monks' bowls on the morning alms round and taken to the temple on holy days. Particular sweets belong to particular occasions. Khao tom mat, sticky rice with coconut milk and banana wrapped in banana leaf, is associated with the end of Buddhist Lent, when it is made and offered at temples. Kraya sart, a sticky mix of puffed and roasted rice, beans, sesame and peanuts bound with sugar, is made for the Sart festival in the tenth lunar month.

Seen this way, Thai sweets are less about indulgence than about sharing. They are bought for colleagues, carried to relatives and offered at the temple. Pick up a few unfamiliar ones at a market, find a seat, and try them side by side. It is one of the most rewarding ways to learn what Thai cooks can do with coconut, sugar and rice.