Tag Archives: massaman curry

Thai cooking class where I was told I’m “hilarious”

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A recent visitor to the Thai cooking classes described me as “hilarious” in her travel blog (and she wasn’t even referring to my chubby face or the fact that my shirttail always seems to come untucked out of my pants).  I appreciated the compliment as I try hard to make the Thai cooking classes both informative and fun.

 

I had a visitor to the Thai cooking class named Nadine Sykora, a twenty-something Canadian who has created her own niche as a video blogger / world traveler / Internet personality.  Nadine has made hundreds of videos and has a huge number of subscribers on YouTube and Facebook.  I was so impressed she had the self- confidence and creativity to make informative and often very funny videos and blog posts.

 

Nadine was invited by the Contiki travel tour company to enjoy and document many trips, including a visit to Thailand.  Contiki offers travel adventure trips in over 40 countries for travellers ages 18 to 35.  Nadine and a group of jolly and inquisitive Contiki visitors joined in on a Thai cooking class.  We made Southern Thai Massaman curry (the recipe for this dish is included in this blog) as well as some other dishes.

Chef Nadine

Make it Simple, Make it Informative and Make it Funny
I try to make the class informative and entertaining by stressing the basic techniques of Thai cooking with some jokes thrown in to keep the attention of the students.One thing I emphasize is “it is easier to add heat to your cooking pan than subtract – keep the heat under the pan on low to medium so the ingredients don’t burn – burned curry paste will make the whole dish taste bitter” when making a dish such as Massaman curry.  I tell the students “If you have your heat too high, then the ingredients will burn and then tears will fall down like rain” as I gesture to my eyes.  After the third repetition of this crying act the students usually chuckle.  We take our laughs where we can get them and I get the point across that not all Asian cooking has to be done on the highest heat – sometime achieving the most flavor in a Thai dish is a marathon and not a sprint.

Nadine artfully decorated her Massaman with toasted peanuts and coriander leaf

Nadine has inspired me to make more videos and more blog entries – thanks Nadine and best of luck in your travels!
You can learned more about Nadine at her website:  www.nadinesykora.com
You can learn more about Contiki tours at their website: www.contiki.com

The Dutch Came to Thailand and We Conquered the Challenge of Thai Cooking for Kids

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Write a Thai cookbook for use in the Dutch school system – could it be done without sacrificing the balance of flavors and the use of fresh ingredients that makes Thai food so compelling?  I thought I could do it and so agreed to help a team of Dutch chefs use my teaching kitchen as a laboratory for creating a cookbook to be used in the Dutch school system to teach students from ages 12 to 17 the basics of Thai cooking.

Peter, Tummy, Jaap and sous chefs Jeap and Jirapa celebrate their success

After six months of planning by email, we met in Thailand at my Thai cooking kitchen on Koh Phangan in southern Thailand.

I teamed up with expert Dutch chef and cooking writer Peter Schwank and his serene wife Elena along with their partners Jaap Van Duijvenbode and his vivacious wife Bella to try and translate the immense breadth of Thai cooking into 25 easy-to-follow recipes with photos to illustrate each step of the cooking process.

We spent three intense weeks pursuing our goal, with extensive debate, experimentation, trail by error cooking, filming and a lot of bad insider jokes as you get when you stand cheek and jowl with someone for three weeks.  As their books are written in Dutch, I got a crash course in Dutch cooking terminology, too.

We braved rain, heat, mosquitoes, and dozens of trips to the fresh food market to get the right ingredients.  They rigged up a lighting system to take photos of the elegant Elena serving as our “supermodel” to demonstrate how to cut and prepare each ingredient and the cooking steps.  Each ingredient was carefully measured and the cooking time recorded so the recipes could be reproduced by students in a classroom.

Chef Tummy enters the market to hunt for fresh ingredients

The book outlines what ingredients and cooking implements are needed for each dish to make the cooking process simple and fear-free. The resulting recipes are flavorful and custom-designed so Dutch school systems can get the ingredients and help the students make Thai food that is authentic. 

In addition to traditional Thai curry dishes using coconut milk, we added some delicious but less known dishes such as Northern Thai naam phrik ong (a pork and tomato dip) and the ancient dish of shrimp stirfried in a paste of garlic, peppercorns and coriander.   

We had to balance authenticity with the availability of Asian ingredients in Holland and temper the traditional fire of Thai food for palates that favor savoury and sweet tastes.  Some of the common ingredients in Thai cooking such as fresh lemongrass and galangal are in limited supply or available only in dried forms in Holland, so we had to adjust and adapt the recipes.

Ingredients common in a Thai market can be hard to find in Europe, sad to say

 But in the end, it was mission accomplished. 

 I learned so much from these professionals about cookbook writing that my head is spinning, but their vast experience in making other cookbooks made the process easy. 

This Dutch team has many other publications and shared lots of ideas on how I could better write, teach and publish about Thai food.  I sincerely thank Peter, Jaap, Elena and Bella for their great spirit, professionalism and many great meals and jokes.  You can see their website at www.werkportfolio.nl.  I’ll look forward with pride to seeing the book when it is published later in the year.

Thai Recipe: Massaman Curry with Chicken, Potatoes & Onion

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The Spoon Says Eat Me! Massaman with Chicken, Onions, Potatoes and Coconut Milk

The Spoon Says Eat Me! Massaman with Chicken, Onions, Potatoes and Coconut Milk

 

This traditional Southern Thai dish is easy to make.  Once you have mastered the technique, you can customize the dish for your own preference for spicy, salty, sweet and sour/tangy flavors.     

 A video on how to make this dish can be seen on www.YouTube.com under the cheftummycooks page.

Thai Name:  Kaeng Massaman Kai (literally “Muslim style Chilli Paste with Chicken”)

INTRODUCTION

 A short history and language lesson: This dish is commonly called “Massaman curry” where Massaman notes the Indian or Persian origins of the dish made by people of the Muslim faith.  But there is no curry leaf or curry powder in the Massaman chilli paste itself.  The name “curry” comes from the word “kari” in Tamil language in India, where it means “sauce”. This Indian word became incorporated into the English language to mean food cooked in a flavorful paste of fresh and dried ingredients.  In Thai cooking these pastes are called “kaeng” where fresh and dried ingredients are pounded into a paste; but not all Thai pastes contain the curry leaf or curry powder. That is why I call the Thai pastes “pounded chilli pastes” instead of the common word “curry”.   

  • This sweet and spicy southernThailand dish shows it’s Indian and Persian origins with the use of fresh ingredients such as potatoes, onions, plus a paste made from dried chillies and dried spices such as coriander seed, cloves, cinnamon as well as other dried spices, plus pounded shallots, garlic, galangal and other fresh ingredients in the paste.  Many of theThailand’s Muslims live in Southern Thailandand this dish is widely cooked in the South with chicken or beef.
  • If you like the taste of curry powder, you can add curry powder at the end of the cooking process to help give this perfumed dish its characteristic Southern Thai taste. 
  • To allow the rich flavor of the spices to marry with the chicken and potato, this dish can be cooked ahead of time and served reheated the next day.
  • Metric System Users:  Some Thai recipes use small quantities of ingredients that are difficult to measure if the cook doesn’t have an accurate measuring scale in the kitchen. So, we use measuring spoons to approximate the quantity  of ingredients in the recipe.  Remember that 1 Imperial teaspoon is the same as the amount in a 5 ml measuring spoon and 1 Imperial tablespoon is the same amount in a 15 ml measuring spoon.  Thai cooking should be a balance between the spicy, salty, sweet and sour flavors in the ingredients.  This type of volume (versus weight in grams or ounces) measuring gives the cook in a home kitchen enough accuracy in measuring the ingredients.  Most cooks will change these traditional recipes to suit their own taste as they experiment and create Thai food at home.

 INGREDIENTS

  • 2 tablespoons / 30 ml vegetable oil (soybean oil, canola oil or palm oil all work well)
  • 1 cup potato (enough to fill a 250 ml measuring cup), peeled and cut into 1 inch / 2.5 cm pieces, cooked until nearly soft in a pan of water, about ten minutes, then drain off the water
  • 1/2 cup onion (enough to fill a 125 ml measuring cup), cut into 1 inch / 2.5 cm pieces
  • 1 – 2 tablespoons / 15 ml – 30 ml Massaman chilli paste, to taste
  • 2 tablespoons / 30 ml tamarind juice (see Tummy Tip below)
  • 1 tablespoon / 5 ml palm sugar (you can substitute cane/castor sugar)
  • 2.5 cups / 625 ml coconut milk
  • 1 tablespoon / 15 ml fish sauce
  • 2 tablespoons (enough to fill 30 ml in a measuring spoon) cashew nuts or peanuts, unsalted and dry roasted over low heat in a dry pan until fragrant, about one minute (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon / 15 ml curry powder (optional)
  • 1 tablespoon (enough to fill a 15 ml measuring spoon) coriander/cilantro leaves

METHOD STEP BY STEP

Making the Massaman

  • We cook the potatoes in advance to make them soft; if you put large chunks of raw potato in with the uncooked chicken, the chicken will be over cooked by the time the potatoes are soft enough to eat.  So take the skin off the potato as is suggested in the Ingredients section above and cut into pieces.  Cook in a pan of boiling water until you can pierce the potato with a fork. Don’t over cook the potatoes – fork tender (al dente as the Italians say) is enough to make them softer, but still retain their shape and a little bite or resistance to the teeth when they later cook with the chicken and coconut milk.
  • Place a wok or saucepan on the stove over low-medium heat and let it warm for 30 seconds.  Put the vegetable oil in the heated pan.  After the oil has heated about 10 seconds, add the Massaman chilli paste.  Stir fry the paste in the oil until fragrant, about 30 seconds.  If your pan has gotten too hot where the paste starts to burn, lift it off the stove so the chilli paste doesn’t burn and make the whole dish bitter instead of fragrant. 
  • Add the chicken pieces and the onion pieces to the wok.  Stirfry the chicken, onions and Massaman chilli paste, turning the chicken pieces so they are coated with the curry paste.  Stir fry about 1 -2 minutes until the chicken is coated well with the curry paste and the outside of the chicken has cooked.  This will help seal in the juice inside the chicken pieces so the pieces remain tender.
  • Add the potatoes and the coconut milk to the wok. Continue cooking over the low heat for 5 minutes, occasionally stirring the chicken, potatoes and onions. Even though the cooking pan is over low heat, the coconut milk will start to boil lightly.  We cook this dish over low heat so the chicken remains tender and doesn’t get dried out and tough.  After five minutes, cut into the chicken pieces to see if they are cooked through; the chicken should be a uniform color all the way through.  Depending on the heat under your cooking pan and the thickness of the pan you may have to cook the chicken pieces longer than five minutes.  After you are satisfied that the pieces of chicken are fully cooked, turn off the heat under the pan.
  • You can customize the dish for your own preference for adding a tangier taste with the tamarind juice, a saltier taste with the fish sauce and a sweeter taste with palm sugar.  Remember it is easier to add than subtract these flavors, so add a little and taste the dish.  Add these ingredients to your own taste. Now taste the dish to see if it pleases your own preference. You can adjust the dish by adding small portions of the tamarind juice, fish sauce or palm sugar until you achieve the balance your prefer. Every cooks’ palate is different so you must rely on your own tongue and preference to customize the dish to your own taste. 
  • The Massaman should be a balance between spicy from the chilli paste, sweet from coconut milk and palm sugar, sour/tangy from the tamarind water and salty from the fish sauce.
  • Once you are satisfied you have achieved this balanced flavor, place the Massaman in a serving bowl.
  • Sprinkle the curry powder on top of the cooked Massaman, if you like that taste.
  • Sprinkle the toasted nuts on top of the Massaman, if using.
  • Add the coriander leaf to the top of the serving bowl to add a little green color.

 

Here is the glory of Massaman topped with peanuts and a little coriander

TUMMY TIP:  Tamarind seedpods are sold in specialty Thai and Asian ingredient stores.  The seeds pods are covered with a tangy date like pulp.   In a bowl, for each ¼ cup (enough to fill about 60 ml) of tamaring seeds and pulp, add ½ cup / 120 ml of warm water.  Soak for 10 minutes and stir occasionally to separate the tamarind pulp from the seeds.  Strain the tamarind liquid from the seeds by pressing the pulp and seeds with a spoon through a strainer.  This strained tamarind water stays fresh for only about a day, so make it as you need it.  You can freeze the tamarind water, but it will lose some the flavor and aroma as it sits in the freezer.