A good green curry starts with the paste. Yes, you can use store-bought, and it will be fine. But if you make your own, the difference is staggering. Fresh green chillies, lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime zest, and shrimp paste pounded in a mortar — the aroma alone is worth the 20 minutes of work.
The coconut milk technique matters. You split the can into thick cream (the solid top) and thin milk (the liquid bottom). The cream goes in first, cooked until it "cracks" — the oil separates from the solids. This is when you fry the curry paste. The thin milk goes in later to build the sauce.
Ingredients
- 400ml coconut milk (full fat, not light)
- 3-4 tablespoons green curry paste
- 300g chicken thigh, sliced (or tofu for vegetarian)
- 200g Thai eggplant, quartered
- 100g bamboo shoots
- 8-10 Thai basil leaves
- 4 kaffir lime leaves, torn
- 2 tablespoons fish sauce
- 1 tablespoon palm sugar
- 2-3 Thai bird's eye chillies, bruised
- Jasmine rice for serving
Method
- Open the coconut milk without shaking. Scoop the thick cream from the top into a wok — you should get about 100ml of thick cream.
- Heat the cream over medium-high heat until it begins to separate — oil pooling on the surface. This takes about 3-5 minutes.
- Add the curry paste to the cracked cream and fry for 2-3 minutes, stirring constantly, until very fragrant.
- Add the chicken and cook for 3-4 minutes. Pour in the remaining thin coconut milk. Add eggplant, bamboo shoots, kaffir lime leaves, and chillies. Simmer gently.
- Cook uncovered for 10-15 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the eggplant is tender.
- Season with fish sauce and palm sugar. Remove from heat and stir in Thai basil. Serve over jasmine rice.
Curry Paste from Scratch
Pound in this order: salt and chillies first (breaks them down), then hard aromatics (galangal, lemongrass), then soft (garlic, shallots), then shrimp paste last. A food processor works but produces a coarser paste with less flavor extraction. The mortar crushes cell walls that blades miss.
A proper homemade paste takes 15 to 20 minutes of pounding. The finished paste should be smooth enough that you cannot feel individual fibers. Store extra in ice cube trays — each cube is roughly 2 tablespoons, perfect for one batch of curry.
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