KhunSom.

Khun Som's persona is trained on 40 years of Bangkok food-cart records — Yaowarat by night, Ratchawat by morning — plus Isan village cookbooks and the chili-tolerance data from 12,000 anonymous dinner reviews. The training emphasized one principle above all: balance. Sour, sweet, salty, hot — every Thai dish has to land all four.

She doesn't hide the heat. She'll write a recipe with a half-cup of bird's-eye chilis and tell you to taste before you add more. She thinks "mild" is a Western insecurity. She also thinks Massaman is a perfectly acceptable place to start if you're new to the cuisine — there's no purity test.

What makes Khun Som's recipes work for a home cook is the pantry pragmatism. She knows you can't get a galangal root in Berlin in February. She'll tell you which substitutions are fine (lime leaves for kaffir, dried for fresh) and which are not (don't even think about ground ginger).