Red Thai Curry Paste

Today we will have a thai dish and the curry supply is gone! Now it’s time to make your own curry paste. A recently purchased Thai cookbook explains how to do it. And thanks to the appropriate supply of fresh ingredients, I go to work in good spirits.

I take

• 15 dried chilies
• 1 shallot
• 10 garlic cloves
• 2 walnut-sized pieces of galangal root
• 4 stalks of lemongrass
• 6 kaffir lime leaves
• stems of a bunch of cilantro
• 1 tsp white peppercorns
• 2 tsp cilantro seeds
• 1 tsp. cumin seeds
• 1 tbsp. shrimp paste (you can get it at the Chinese store. Smells awful!)

I stick largely to the original, only the cilantro root I replace with the stalks, because today of all days the Chinese store has no cilantro with root.

The recipe is very simple: cut everything very small and then pound in a mortar. There is one special feature: dried chilies are freed from the seeds and then soaked in water. This is how the paper-thin husks of the dry chilies become reprocessable in the first place. The author is in good spirits that he can get it all done in half an hour.

Luckily I have a stone mortar, with a porcelain or my fancy mono metal mortar I would have been completely screwed. In contrast to the other work with the mortar is not pressed or turned here, but “hammered”. This is the only way to get the sometimes very tough fibers softened. Especially stubborn are lemongrass and kaffir lime leaf.

Since the mortar is rather small, I have to work in portions and mix together afterwards.

The result looks neat and smells very aromatic. The shrimp paste is toned down by the other spices. However, the whole operation took me almost two and a half hours, and I didn’t feel like I was being particularly clumsy…. I’ll keep an eye out for a larger mortar when I get a chance, maybe that was the bottleneck.

8 tablespoons full it turned out, enough for 4 dishes. I’ll freeze the curry in portions and save 2 spoonfuls for tonight’s dinner. Fortunately, I remember before I start cooking that you only need 1 tablespoon for 2 people. The fish curry would have been a bit spicy otherwise!

The remaining lime leaves are frozen and the shrimp paste goes in two tupperware containers placed inside each other in the fridge. I will try more curry variations if successful.

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