Bangkok-style Creamy Tom Yum (ต้มยำกุ้ง)

Modern, urban-dwelling Thais enjoy their classic tom yum soup on the creamier side - and here's how you can too.

Most people who’ve dined at a Thai restaurant will have encountered the ‘tom yum’ phrase bouncing around the menu. Tom yum, or more phonetically accurate, ‘tom yam’, is a classic seafood soup from the Central-South of Thailand, especially in the coastal areas around the Gulf of Thailand. Consider it like a hunter’s stew, or rather, a fisherman’s stew, in which the catch of the day is put to work in a light, refreshing broth that’s hydrating, invigorating and very cheap to make. Tom yum, unlike its cousin ‘tom kha’, contains no coconut milk and sits much lighter on the stomach. Until now. This version of tom yum has been doing the rounds on Bangkok’s streets, enriched with evaporated milk and modernised with Thailand’s popular ‘MAMA’ instant noodles [BEST BUY]. Street vendors in Thailand often put their own inventive twists on classic Thai dishes in order to create a stand-out, signature product among other flash-cooking, street-side entrepreneurs. All it takes nowadays is a person of significant profile or outreach to notice their creative flair and launch them into a social media orbit. For better or for worse, this new-age lottery can be life-changing for small, humble vendors on Thailand’s streets. And so they’ll get up at dawn, travel across the city to their pitch, set up their cart and use their creativity to roll the dice on another day. This dish is a salute to ‘Jeh O Chula’, situated in the Pathum Wan district of Bangkok, who exploded in popularity with their creamy ‘O-Ho MAMA’ tom yum noodles. The brilliant thing is: they take 10 minutes to make! Let’s go!