Thai Green Curry

This is a pretty standard Thai green curry recipe with the added spin that the chicken is fried separately and the curry is poured over the top after, an idea I stole from Bang Bang in Portland, although theirs is way the frick prettier than mine is.

I've never made curry paste before, except for one time I made Rendang. I usually just use those Maesri cans:

I used this recipe this time, more or less exactly as written:

https://www.recipetineats.com/thai-green-curry-paste-recipe/

I managed to locate every ingredient on the list, although some things were harder to find than others. If you can't find kaffir lime leaves, you could just omit them, it wouldn't make a huge difference. The hardest ingredient to find was dried shrimp paste, but only because in the US it doesn't look like whatever google says, and there is very little english text on the package. This is what I got:

FYI, that stuff smells so bad you will almost give up on putting it in your food. Like seriously, it smells like a large animal zoo shit. It's also the common ingredient in most Thai curries, so think about that the next time you order one!

Before you go and buy all this stuff, a word of caution: aside from the aforementioned poop jar, the recipe also contains lemongrass and galangal, and you should be aware that there is no amount of knife skills with which you will chop either of those things into small enough pieces where they won't irritatingly stick in your teeth and be terribly chewy, even if you cook them for hours. You NEED to use a food processor or a blender (or a mortar and pestle if you're a cave person) or you are going to be unhappy after all the work you put in.

After you make the curry paste, in order to turn it into delicious curry, all you have to do is:

1. Heat up a wok or stainless steel pan to medium-high.

2. Add some heat resistant oil (grapeseed, canola, peanut, etc).

3. Stir fry about 4 tablespoons of the curry paste for 1-2 minutes. I stopped before it started to brown, you don't really want to brown this.

4. Add like half a 16 oz can of coconut milk. If you have one of the good cans that has the thick shit on top, make sure you get all of that in there.

5. Add 1 tbsp soy sauce, 1 tbsp fish sauce, some sugar (1 tsp but really to taste), and add lime juice 1 tsp at a time and carefully taste before adding more.

6. Add a bunch of thai basil and kaffir lime leaves if you got em.

Turn the heat down to medium. Consider removing the lime leaves and basil after 5 minutes, especially the lime leaves because they are inedible.

Toss the veggies in if it tastes right. If you don't want to fry the chicken like I did, toss that in there too. Cook until everything is done.

If you never made curry before, consider just using the maesri can instead of bothering with the homemade stuff. It is like 80-90% as good as making it yourself. You still need to follow the steps above with the can, you just don't need to follow the linked curry paste recipe. I did a side-by-side taste test between the homemade curry paste and the can and my observation was:

1. Most of what makes green curry green is cilantro, and the homemade version tastes very heavily of it and is fresh and herbal as a result. The can completely lacks this quality.

2. The can has lime juice and sugar in it, which is a good thing actually because you have to add those things sooner or later anyway.