10 Years of Hot Thai Kitchen with Pailin Chongchitnant
In Episode 135 of the Kitchen Confidante Podcast, Liren welcomes back Pailin Chongchitnant to chat about 10 Years of Hot Thai Kitchen.
10 Years of Hot Thai Kitchen
On the podcast, I recently chatted with a returning guest, Pailin Chongchitnant, the best-selling and award-winning author of Hot Thai Kitchen and the creator and host of the popular YouTube cooking channel, Pailin’s Kitchen.
Born and raised in Thailand, and based in Vancouver, Canada, Pailin is a professionally trained chef. Pailin has made it her life’s mission to show everyone how to create authentic Thai dishes, wherever they may be.
You may remember our conversation in Episode 67 back in 2023, where we explored her journey as a chef, the balance of flavors at the heart of Thai cooking, and how to make Thai cuisine more approachable for the everyday home cook. In this episode, we catch up on her cookbook — a 10th anniversary edition of the book that started it all.
Listen to the full episode or keep reading for some of the highlights from our conversation.
Tell Us More About the 10th Anniversary Edition of Hot Thai Kitchen
Hot Thai Kitchen was first published ten years ago and has never stopped selling. It consistently performs alongside my second book, Sabai, and because it has such longevity, it felt like the right time to give it a refresh. Over the past decade, my skills as a chef have grown, I’ve found better and more efficient ways to do things, and many ingredients that were hard to find in North America are now much more accessible. The update felt like a great way to celebrate this milestone.
What makes the original book different from most cookbooks is that half of it isn’t recipes at all. It reads more like a fun textbook — it lays the foundation of what Thai cuisine actually is. When people learn to cook Thai food one recipe at a time, it’s like receiving puzzle pieces one by one. It takes a long time before the bigger picture comes into focus.
I wanted to give readers that bigger picture first. Instead of just teaching a single green curry recipe, I talk about Thai curries in general — the techniques, the ingredients, and the tradition behind them. Same with Thai salads. When you understand what Thai salads are as a category, the steak salad recipe suddenly makes sense in a much deeper way.
“Food doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in the context of culture, people, and tradition. Understanding that — how a dish is made and eaten in its culture — really makes a difference in how you approach it and how you serve it.”
That cultural foundation of the book is solid enough that it didn’t need much updating. Thai cuisine is rooted in tradition and history, and those fundamentals haven’t changed.
One thing that has evolved significantly since the first edition is ingredients. For anyone new to authentic Thai cooking, the ingredient list can feel overwhelming — unfamiliar names, unknown sources, no idea where to begin. The book has an extensive ingredient section, and I always recommend reading it before diving into the recipes. It makes everything that follows so much more approachable.
The QR codes linking to my YouTube channel were a little ahead of their time when the book first came out, but now people are really using them — and they make a difference.
“Sometimes with a cuisine you aren’t familiar with, you can’t fully see it from just reading about it. But when you see it in action, it clicks.”
Pailin Chongchitnant
The 10th-anniversary edition also includes a brand-new chapter called House Specials — dishes that are uniquely mine. Some are childhood recipes you won’t find on any restaurant menu. Others are originals I created, including Hot Thai Chicken. This recipe came about because I would often mispronounce the book title as “Hot Thai Chicken” instead of “Hot Thai Kitchen,” and I decided it needed to be a real dish. It’s fried chicken tossed in a sweet chili and lime sauce, and the first time I tasted it, I shocked myself with how good it was.
These are not dishes you’ll necessarily find in Thailand — they’re recipes I created. But once you understand the basics of Thai cuisine well enough to start improvising, that’s exactly what becomes possible. And that’s ultimately what this book is designed to give you.
This book is for anyone who wants to truly get good at Thai cooking — not just make an occasional weeknight recipe, but really understand it. Even Thai home cooks have told me they’ve gotten something from seeing their own cuisine from this building-blocks perspective.
Sabai is my favorite Thai word. It is a popular term that essentially means “comfortable.” It can be used simply to describe a chair or refer to a way of life, meaning to be at peace, comfortable, relaxed, not worried, and anxiety-free. I named my new book Sabai because I want it to be a resource for people who want to cook Thai food but are intimidated by it and don’t want it to be complicated or difficult.
If you look at my recipes online, it can be challenging to tell which recipes are doable on a weeknight. By contrast, you can always grab the book off the shelf, turn to any page, and know everything is doable. I hope this resource will help people make Thai food on a more regular basis and work Thai recipes in their everyday rotation rather than reserving Thai recipes for an occasional weekend project.
Hot Thai Kitchen: Demystifying Thai Cuisine, 10th Anniversary Edition, by Pailin Chongchitnant (Appetite by Random House, 2026).
Learn more
Listen to the full podcast episode with Pailin, learn more at HotThaiKitchen.com, and follow her on Instagram at @HotThaiKitchen.
Related posts
Episode 67: Sabai: 100 Simple Thai Recipes for Any Day of the Week With Pailin Chongchitnant
Pai’s Mango Coconut Tapioca Pudding
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