Thai Cooking

For quick and easy...

MAE PLOY Red or Green curry paste......70g to 1 tin of coconut milk....2 chicken breast....whatever else you fancy.

MAE PLOY Tom Yam Paste.....80g to 700ml water and a few spoonfuls of fish sauce....half a lime squeezed. I add mushrooms and 300g tiger prawns.

I also put chillies in everything.
 
Love Thai food.

Not so sure about the 'snacks' though... :eek:

5345345fsd.jpg
 
It's all about the ingredients. Either make the base pastes from scratch using fresh! coriander galangal etc or buy a really quality paste. The ready-made sauces from the supermarkets are garbage. Some of the little touches may seem unnecessary but make a big difference - e.g. kaffir lime leaves. You might think that all Thai fragrant rice is the same but there's a big difference etween good and bad. Blue Dragon stuff in the supermarkets should simply be poured down the drain.

Mae ploy is cheap and not great. Nittiya pastes are much better. Get yourself to a good asian cash'n'carry and look around.

Good Thai food is all about flavour, colour and freshness. Some Thai food has no chili at all and some will burn your taste buds for a week but heat is not a prerequisite.

The cooking part is not all that hard but as said, the end results will totally depend on how good your ingredients are.
 
I made a massaman curry a while ago, the paste is a little involved but you can freeze it so it keeps for a long time.

Grind the following in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar:

2 tbsp fennel seeds
2 tbsp coriander seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
seeds from 5 black cardamom pods
10 cloves
4 star anise
cinnamon stick, around 5cm long

Then put a large frying pan on a medium heat
Add 400g of chopped shallots
a whole bulb of garlic
a galangal (can use ginger if you can't get this) about 5cm long
1 tsp shrimp paste
dried chillies that have been soaked in hot water, use as many or as few as you like depending on how spicy you like things (I used about 20 in mine and that makes it hot, but not massively so)

Cook for 10-15 minutes or until everything is nicely coloured.

Once this is cooked put it in a food processor with the spice mixture, two lemon grass stalks chopped up and 4 kaffir lime leaves also chopped up.

That makes a good 20 portions, but it freezes very well so is something you need to do very infrequently.

One you have the paste you can use it in pretty much any massaman curry recipe, it really is the paste that makes the difference.
Something like this is pretty much how I do it:
http://www.thai-food-online.co.uk/massaman-curry-recipe.asp
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom