Thai Panang Chicken Curry along with all my tips for making curry paste from scratch in a blender.
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ABOUT MARION
Marion Grasby is a food producer, television presenter and cookbook author who’s had a life-long love affair with Asian food.
Marion is a little bit Thai (courtesy of her mum) and a little bit Australian (courtesy of her dad).
Marion lives in Bangkok, Thailand and travels throughout Asia to find the most unique and delicious Asian food recipes, dishes and ingredients.
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Thailand’s famous Panang Curry. If you’ve always wanted to make this at home, then I have the perfect recipe for you. For this one, we’re going to make our curry paste from scratch. I love making Thai curry paste. I think it’s one of the best ways to Get to know a lot of different Thai ingredients. And also to figure out what Thai ingredients your Asian grocer has down the road. Let’s start off with the chillies first. For most Thai red chilli pastes, we use the dried red chillies for this rather than the fresh. I’ve had these soaking in some hot water for about 10 minutes or so. Just want to cut them up. We’re going to be using a blender today. I’ve got lots of little tips and tricks here for How we can best use the blender to make
a curry paste at home. Cause there’s a few little things that might catch you up. First tip is to chop things up quite small, Because that’s going to help your blade get everything really smooth. The second thing. This chilli water, just keep that for when we go to blend because We may need to moisten the mixture to help it get really smooth. You’ll see what I mean a little bit later. The next ingredient is galangal. Galangal looks like this, similar to ginger but not. It has a very beautiful pine forest citrusy high note to its aromas and flavours. It’s really worth seeking out, and it freezes quite well as well. You’ll see that there’s a little bits of pink on here as well. It’s another way to tell that, that’s your
galangal and not ginger. What you need to do is just peel the galangal, just a small piece. And then finely chop. Next we want some garlic, and then some
red Asian shallots as well. You can use French shallots here too. Now some lemongrass. I love that smell so much. What we need to do here is bruise the lemongrass. Just cut that end off because it’s often very tough. Peel off these outer layers cause they’re also really tough and fibrous. Now finely slice. I also want some coriander roots. Just take those off. If you’re using coriander at home, and you’re not using the roots. Just stick them in the freezer until you’re ready to make your curry paste. That way you’re not wasting any.
Now for the kaffir lime element. This should be one of the crucial flavours for a true Thai Panang curry. What I like to do is use both the leaves. And then also the fruit itself, which is this gnarly looking guy right here. With the leaves, you want to take those off the stem and then pull the stem out of the leaf as well. Roll those up, and then finely slice. The lime itself, the lime juice inside of here is really bitter. I’ve asked and asked my mum about what you can use it for, in terms of food. She said that in her village, they don’t use it for food. They just use it to put in their hair, funnily enough. But anyway, I have not tried it in my hair but you guys feel free. What we need here is the actual lime peel. You want to get as much of the peel as possible. Without too much of that white stuff underneath. Cause that will be bitter. A little bit’s ok. Just need 2 or 3 slices here. Just want a really fine chop on this. I know ingredient is going to be a bit hard for a lot of you to find. Don’t worry. If you can’t find the kaffir lime itself, then just use the leaves and just leave that out. But if you can get a hold of these, it really makes a big difference to the paste. And then shrimp paste. Yes, it’s kind of funky smelling. But it adds a beautiful saltiness and background umami Flavour to the dish. You don’t even know it’s there at the end. Just pop it in the paste and don’t worry about it. Now for my dried spices. A little bit of coriander and some cumin. The last ingredient you’ll find in some
recipes and not others. I’ve done my paste with and without, but there’s some peanuts here. But if you have allergies, you can totally leave these out. Won’t make a huge difference. Now let’s start blending! If we have a look here, this is one of the pitfalls of using a blender instead of a mortar and pestle To make your curry paste. Have a look and you can see that what we’re getting here is just a lot of chopped ingredients. We’re not getting a paste, we’re not releasing or smushing out all those beautiful essential oils, flavours And aromas from the ingredients like you would do in a mortar and pestle. So my tip is to add a little bit of liquid to this. A lot of people add oil. That… doesn’t work out quite so well Because for me, that then becomes like an emulsification. The oil thickens up, the ingredients thicken up and everything just becomes a wrong texture.
What you want is some of this chilli soaking liquid. Couple of tablespoons first. Because this is just water, when we go to
cook it out it will eventually evaporate and And cook out of the paste. So don’t worry
too much about how much you add. That’s better. But I can still see we’re just
getting a chop here so I’m going to add a little bit more. And that’s better. What I can see here is that, that blade is actually catching those ingredients And they seem to be turning over quicker and faster. Exactly what you want to look out for. This is the texture that you’re looking for. This makes enough for 2 amounts of Panang curry. Which is good cause you don’t want to do all that chopping just for one dinner. Share it out over 2. You can just store the unused curry paste in the freezer. Now comes the easiest part, and that’s the cooking! I just need a little bit of oil. Half of that curry paste. I want this curry paste to sizzle and cook out a little bit in the oil. Because the heat’s going to be releasing even more of the flavour, the aroma, and cooking out those raw aromatics Like the garlic and the shallots. All of this contributes to flavour. It’s what it’s all about. That’s had a minute or so, it smells amazing. Now I’m going to add in my chicken. This is chicken thigh, you could use breasts as well. But I’m going to do this the slow way. The darker meat suits this style of Panang a little bit better. Now we add the coconut milk. As I mentioned, there’s a couple of different ways to do Panang. One is really quickly, almost more like a stir-fry style. For that one you can use chicken breast, Prawns or seafood even. But I’m going to go with the more traditional slower cooked method here. This one’s really great for tougher cuts of beef or the chicken thigh. Pop a lid on, turn the heat down. Let that simmer away for half an hour. Mum! you’re not supposed to be checking, don’t open the lid! -Just checking… Listen to you mum. -Why you so bossy all the time? This is smelling so amazing. Let’s have a look. That’s just what we want. This longer cooked Panang style of curry has that really nice thick sauce And some of that red oil on the top. Just perfect. Now for the seasoning. Cause of course, we haven’t seasoned this yet with the fish sauce, and palm sugar. I like to do it at the end. I always like to taste first, get an idea of how things are going. For the palm sugar, you’ll see that usually comes in these hard blocks. You just need to shave that sugar so it dissolves quickly into the curry.
And then the fish sauce as well. Let’s see how we’re going. Almost there. To me, this style of curry should have a little bit more sweetness than usual. So I’m going to put a little bit more palm sugar in. Now we’re floating in that territory over the amazing. You know, the thing that I love about Thai curries is you bring all these huge flavours like fish sauce and Galangal, kaffir lime leaves, palm sugar, chillies. And you create something so harmonious and so beautiful at the end. Mmm… that is just delicious. To serve this up, dish out the curry first. Look at how thick and luscious that is. A little drizzle of extra coconut cream on the top. As I said at the beginning, the kaffir lime leaf flavour is really important here. I want some extra finely sliced leaves on
the top. Just a couple slices of chilli. There you go guys, a classic Thai Panang chicken curry. One of my favourites. I hope you love it too. That flavour… So amazing. Mmm… it’s just an explosion of everything that’s wonderful about Thai food.
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