Thailand, the fruit snack nation

Thailand's love affair with fresh snack food is enough to shock the most seasoned of palates thanks to an explosive use of extra ingredients.

In Thailand, nature has been generous to its people, letting them enjoy a wide variety of year-round and seasonal fruits. Add to this the fact that, in this country, cooking is a tradition that Thais cherish in their own sweet way, and the possibilities for locally grown snack food are endless.

Among the many offerings are durian and banana chips, three flavored mango, tamarind candies and durian toffees, as well as a long line of dehydrated and flavored fruits. They are - no pun intended - the fruition of Thai culinary efforts. The secret, which is no more, of the fine taste of Thai food, dessert and preserved fruits is not their honed intuition but their daring to be different, to experiment and explore beyond the boundaries of ordinary tastes.

Thai gourmet cooks, a cross-section of whom are rural souls, have had an immense impact on the universal law of cooking, championing the rights to combine the strangest ingredients: put sugar into sour curry, salt in dessert, jasmine into coconut milk or even bravely mix fruit paste with chili powder.

The five-flavored tamarind candy, a perfect example of this experimentation, is an intriguing discovery. Looking like small chocolates in shape and color, the brown candies are but a jumble of sweet, sour, salty, hot and mint tastes that surprise every tongue. Though the amount of chili powder is less than one per cent, its combustion with sour tamarind amazingly creates the hot and mint flavors that never existed naturally in any Thai fruit.

Mango, banana and durian are versatile fruits - whether fresh, dried, fried or flavored, they taste good. The inventiveness of Thais enables them not to waste the richness of fruits. During the hot season when the three are superfluous, they eat the ripe ones fresh, use the unripe bananas to make kluay charp or plastered banana, fried thin slices of banana slightly coated with sugar. The succulent flesh of over-ripe mango, banana, durian and pineapple are mashed to make sweet, soft candies.

About five years ago folks in Chantaburi and Rayong, which are well known as Thailand's fruit towns, started making experimental durian chips using the nearly ripe mon thong durian with thick flesh that can be sliced into thin pieces. Fried in coconut or palm oil, the crispy durian chips need no seasoning. With an inviting natural yellowish glow and natural sweetness, durian chips soon grew to be a popular snack. Chantaburi and Rayong now boast many factories, producing the chips for local markets and export. The durian toffees have also become favorites of children and adults around the country who have a sweet tooth. Two years ago one of the more innovative food companies even launched vacuum-packed fried mango, jack- fruit and pineapple chips, which are especially pleasing to palates that enjoy original flavors, fragrances and colors.

Mango manages to be delicious in every form and most often manifests itself as the number one in a range of fruits of similar sauces. While sweetened and salted mangoes are common, mango heads the row of three-flavored fruits followed by rose apple and guava. A parade of best-selling dehydrated fruits: apple, cantaloupe, guava, papaya and pineapple is also fronted by the ever-popular mango. Some of these cloaked in condiments, such as sugar, salt and chili, are calledyee, a recently minted word to identify these snacks.

Again, mango yee leads a line of yee fruits, equally best selling, which are farang yee (guava), sapparot yee (pineapple) and cantaloupe yee. Bananas grow in all regions and, given the simple fact that it's easier to peel a banana than a mango which requires a knife or more particularly a durian, comes a Thai expression "as easy as peeling a banana". The large numbers of banana species double up as ingredients for chips of delightful tastes in most of Thailand's provinces. The golden banana of Chantaburi is just sliced and fried. It needs no seasoning, like durian chips, because of its natural sweetness and natural light yellowish shade. Sukhothai, Thailand's first capital, which is rich in history, is today rich in banana, too. Its native people have a special recipe for crispy banana with honey. Long slices of unripe banana are fried in a batter of oil, butter, honey and caramel. Kluay lep mue naang, which grows in abundance in the southern town of Chumpon, is used to make banana chips in five flavors with a definite local bent - sweet, salty, torn yarn, paprika and barbecued. The paprika banana is a delicious fantasy, popular among teenagers. The un-sliced ripe bananas that are roasted, called kluay tak, have a natural sweet taste. These banana bonuses are simply packed in plastic bags or boxes and sent to Bangkok for sale.

But your visit to these towns is a good chance to conduct your own taste test. Even for Bangkokians there are souvenirs to take home.

It is easy to find snack fruits in Bangkok as you might run into a street vendor with his pedal cart, which is mounted with glass containers full of sweetened mango, guava yee and pineapple yee. At food markets or weekend markets where people go shopping, large bowls half- covered with perspex display assorted fermented, dehydrated and sweetened fruits. Even the shelves in supermarkets, department stores and mini marts at petrol stations or bus stops are bulging with packets of durian chips and other flavored fruits. On the reverse side of one plastic packet are four cartoons with captions that outline the best times to savor the snacks: while listening to music, traveling, feeling sleepy and stressed. Basically, at any time as is evident along most Thai streets.

If you have over-indulged in spicy Thai food or have had too much of another good dish, these voluptuous snack fruits are a respite from prepared meals and a fruitful way to get rid of boredom. As the cartoons show, just put a tiny piece of pungent mangoyee or tamarind candy in your mouth when you feel stressed or sleepy, and see how quickly it can buck you up.