A blog about food in Thailand
and elsewhere.
The deep south
13 Comments
On my most recent trip I spent a week in three of Thailand’s southernmost provinces: Songkhla, Pattani and Narathiwat. Due to a violent insurgency that’s been brewing since 2004, there’s not a lot of folks visiting these parts, but there’s still a lot of interesting things to see…and eat.
Every big city in the south has a night market. Hat Yai’s:
featured a few stalls selling curries, grilled seafood and khanom jeen (fresh rice noodles served with curry). There were also several stalls selling kai thawt hat hai, Hat Yai-style fried chicken. However where it concerns the local dish, the residents I talked to consider Kai Tod Daycha, with three branches around town, the best:
Hat Yai-style fried chicken differs from elsewhere in its spice-laden marinade, and Daycha served the eponymous bird over fragrant yellow rice, or with a side of som tam (papaya salad).
In addition to Muslim-style food, there are also lots of ethnic Chinese in the south, and at a cafe in Hat Yai I had a wonderful bowl of ba kut teh:
pork ribs cooked in a herbal broth and served with sides of rice and deep-fried bits of dough. And yes, that’s an entire head of garlic there in the broth.
Moving south, Pattani also has a much smaller, but still interesting night market serving a mix of Thai-Muslim and Chinese dishes:
The city also has one of the most vibrant morning markets in the region:
Most people in Pattani are ethnic Malays and there were more conversations in Yawi (a Malay dialect) than in Thai. In addition to language, breakfast is also very different in Thailand’s deep south. Undoubtedly the most popular morning meal in these parts is khao yam (pictured at the top of this post), rice, often cooked with a type of purple flower, and topped with a bunch of finely-sliced herbs, roasted coconut, and a type of fish sauce called budu. The thin red strips are a kind of flower called dawk dala.
Another ubiquitous breakfast, especially in Muslim areas, is roti, a type of crispy pancake associated with Thai-Muslim cooking, and often served with a curry dip:
Thai Muslims really love sweet food, and will often put a tablespoon of sugar or three into the dip. In fact, despite southern Thai food’s reputation as the hottest regional cuisine in the country, I found that many dishes featured sweet as their leading flavour. In Songkhla they like a dish called tao khua:
thin rice noodles and deep-fried crispy bits swimming in an insanely sweet sauce.
After a meal like that, I rarely felt a need for dessert, but really fell for khanom kho:
These are soft balls of dough and coconut meat surrounding a tiny cube of raw sugar. The combination of the soft, fluffy outside and the crunchy inside was amazing.
13 Comments for The deep south
yuuuuummmmmmm
whatcha doin down there aye?
anyway….I’m homesick and am counting the days till I can get back to soi 15.
I made a fairly disastrous thai meal last night out of pure desperation
your pics are making me drool. I think a weekend trip to KL may be in order when I get back
all the best with your travels and looking forward to whisky and chicken wings at Tuba again some day soonish
Thank you for Thai-food-blogging. Being in the States, I really miss food from homeland. Everytime I go back to Bangkok, I always had gastronomic feasts. Keep writing. I’ll definitely keep reading and taking notes on places to eat for my next trip ; )
P.S. Beautiful photos. It’s not easy to artistically take close-up shots of food yet you make them look fabulous.
Nice photos! I was down there just a few months ago myself.
Pattani is a great town for food, and is the only place I have been to besides BKK that one can easily find kwatiyow kaeng and samosas – though not the Indian type with potatoes, but the ones with beef, sort of like mataba.
Hey..You picked a good choice. Haiyai is my hometown, and I miss it there a lot.
Also, khao yam is my favorite food – awesome picture.
Have you ever visited ‘Yor Isand’ in Songkhla. That might be another nice place to stop by.
Have a great time!
That crispy pancake thing is similar to what we have in Singapore. Here it’s better known as roti-prata.
Great blog! Love reading both your entries.
Cheers from Singapore. =)
Sylvia
Ha, these foods look all too familiar! The first rice dish is nasi ulam in Malaysia, and the herbal soup is Bak Kut Teh (Chinese pork bone tea soup) and the last one is onde-onde, but the Malaysian version has gula melaka (dark palm sugar). I guess because of the south, the foods are Malay-influenced.
Oh, the roti is roti canai in Malaysia. 
bee, the first dish isn’t nasi ulam but nasi kerabu, a Kelantanese specialty. The blue rice, tinted with dried pea flowers (Clitoria genus) gives it away. That’s torch ginger flower on top.
Yum yum!! Thank you for writing and taking such a great pictures about Thai food. You sure help me with my homesick. Especially, this post about Pattani. You can hardly hear any review about this part of the country due to recent violent. But we do have unique and great food.
that’s all Patani Malay seafood which similar to Kelantanese food…
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