Vegan Thai food is relatively easy to cook at home and order while dining out.
Thai cuisine never contains cheese and hardly ever contains other dairy products because coconut milk and coconut cream are used instead.
Traditional Thai food is loaded with fish sauce, shrimp paste, and egg — all of which can be found ubiquitously in virtually every Thai dish. Despite this, Thai cuisine doesn’t treat meat as an absolutely necessary part of most dishes and many Thai dishes can be easily prepared without the fish sauce, shrimp paste or egg. Meat in a dish is typically replaced with tofu or veggies.
Staple Thai Foods & Dishes
Staple vegan Thai foods include jasmine rice, coconut, coconut milk, coconut cream, rice noodles, tamarind pulp, mango, lemongrass, chili peppers, Thai basil, palm sugar, and lime.
Staple vegan Thai dishes include stir-fry, a variety of noodle dishes, soups, and sticky rice.
Dining Out at a Thai Restaurant
Dining out at a Thai restaurant can be a bit tricky as a vegan. This is because many Thai foods are traditionally prepared with animal products like fish sauce, shrimp paste, and egg.
The good news is that most Thai restaurants are familiar with veganizing their dishes and can easily leave out animal products in most cases.
What to Ask
- Can you make any of your dishes without fish sauce?
- Do your curries contain shrimp paste?
What to Order & How to Order It
- Pad Thai
- Pad See Ew
- Pad Kee Mao
- Tom Yum
- Tom Kah
- Yellow, Green, or Red Curry
- Fried Rice
- Stir-Fry
- Sticky Rice & Mango
Ask your server to leave out egg, fish sauce, shrimp paste, clam juice, or any kind of meat from your dish.
Some places will offer to swap tofu or veggies in place of the meat that would ordinarily come in a dish. If they don’t offer, just ask and they’ll usually accommodate you.
You can order a (very) sweet beverage called Thai iced tea which is strongly brewed spiced black tea topped with condensed milk, but make sure to ask for non-dairy creamer or skip the creamer entirely. Some restaurants even offer Thai iced coffee, which is also incredibly sweet.
Vegan Thai Food Recipes
You’ll enjoy a lot more variety by making Thai food at home, because you control every ingredient that goes into a dish. There are plenty of traditionally non-vegan Thai foods that can easily be made vegan at home.
Most Thai food cookbooks and recipe blogs have a variety of easily-veganized recipes. Just replace certain ingredients and you’ve got a vegan dish. If you’re fine with looking past the pictures of dishes containing meat and can focus on veganizing the recipes themselves, you won’t have a hard time finding loads of resources for making vegan Thai food at home.
Below are Thai cookbooks that are exclusively vegan:
Cookbooks
- Vegan Thai Kitchen by Sarah & Renoo Jansala