Salim is sweet coloured mung bean noodles flavoured with jasmin. A traditional favourite of Thailand, although not very photogenic! There is a shortcut you can use if you don’t want to make the noodle, you can simply buy it and add colour it.

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This dessert is strands of sugary cooked egg yolk,flavored with rose water (or vanilla essence in water also works). It’s difficult to make. I’ve tried many times and this is the first time I’ve managed to get the strands to work.
The strands are streams of egg yolk drizzled through a fine sieve into a large pan of hot sugar syrup. The strands cook immediately and you end up with sweet golden strands of egg. For this to work, you needs lots and lots of egg yolk, the more egg yolks the better, so don’t reduce the quantity of eggs. Use the largest flattest pan you can find, the more spread out the strands the nicer they look. The duck eggs yolks in the recipe are larger and more yellow than the chicken, and help you achieve the golden colour.
In Thailand they use a piping bag with a special nozzle with many fine holes especially for this. But I don’t have one, what I found works is a large sugar shaker, filled with the egg mixture, you tip it upside down and the egg runs as streams through the holes, which I slowly moved forwards and backwards, left to right over the pan until all the mixture had gone through.
As with many Thai desserts, we flavour them with flower essence, using rose water or jasmin flower essence in water. However you can use vanilla essence in water or similar flavouring of your choice if you prefer.

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This dessert is a mung bean salty sweet dessert so typical of Thailand.

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Bi tua is a sweet reed with a bubblegum like flavour and green colour used in Thai dishes to add a unique flavour to the dessert. You can see it in the background of the photograph.

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The western tradition is that the dessert is sweet. The Thai tradition is slightly different, the Thai word for dessert is ‘kanom’ and covers all types of post main course dishes & snacks. This leads to some very strange desserts and this is one of them. The top layer is whiter and made from coconut milk and is very salty, the lower layer is very sweet and contains corn. The idea is that the two layers balance out, when eating this dessert you should take some from both layers with your spoon – a little sweet and a little salt.

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