Uwajiwhat: A-OK Coconut Milk

Sometimes it seems like every Seattle street corner has teriyaki, Tully’s, or a Thai restaurant. Everyone’s got a favorite place for Thai food (ours are actually in Issaquah and Tukwila), though we prefer to cook and eat it at home. Thai cooking is fairly easy once you get the hang of it.

One of the staples—used in soups, curries, stir-fries, drinks and desserts—is coconut milk. Sure, it’s simple to make on your own, as Mark Bittman recently demonstrated. But it’s simpler still if you buy the can.

Trader Joes’s sells the light stuff, but we fancy higher fat for fuller-bodied taste. Once at the Asian store, you’ll face a dizzying array of choices. Test them, if you’d like. We did, as part of the amazing Kasma Loha Unchit’s Thai-cooking class (in Oakland... sorry!). Mae Ploy tends to be the consistent winner, both for taste and for having the most separated cream. (We also like that it comes in a larger can – just the right size for our curries, or for our friend who uses it as a fire extinguisher for our spicy hot dishes.)

But also up there and more readily available is Chaokoh. As Kasma would warn you, be careful when buying this brand, as it’s easy to confuse the good stuff with the similarly packaged Chaodoc. Her mnemonic tool for remembering: Chaokoh is A-OK, while Chaodoc will send you to the DOC.