Refining Curry Paste

In the course of our travels, I have had the pleasure of many a cooking class that has expanded my capabilities and in general in increased the culinary. I have learned the secret to as close to authentic Italian pasta as one might hope and my class with the drill sergeant in Hong Kong totally transformed my Chinese wok cooking.

But if I look at one single bit of knowledge that has influenced my day-to-day cooking the most, I would say it is a combined knowledge from four classes throughout Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia) where I learned the secrets of making the curry pastes that are the foundations of each of these cuisines.

In the US it is pretty easy to find the Thai curry pastes (red, yellow, green) but they tend to be very heavy on the chile heat...way more heat than Wife and I can handle. As far as those of the other countries, I've not seen them. Fortunately, here in Albuquerque we can find the raw ingredients for all of them! But having the ingredients and turning them into usable pastes is another matter altogether.

Most of the ingredients are roots (ginger, galangal, tumeric), stems (lemongrass), tough leaves (Kefir Lime leaf) and bulbs (shallots and garlic). Traditional recipes call for you to pound these into a paste. Excuse me, but I am not a venerable Southeast Asian mother with arms like Popeye. Using a food processor doesn't get the flavors combined correctly and things end up to grainy.

After much trial and error I have finally come up with process that gets a pretty good paste. It is not ideal and takes more effort than I would prefer, but I do love the results.

1. Freeze all the roots, stems and leaves. This may seem a bit weird but after being frozen, the fibrous nature of them all starts to break down. Also when you go to the next step, the grate up much finer than in their unfrozen state
2. Grate all the roots and stems. By hand in with a micro plane grater is best. I have used the grating blade on m food processor for larger batches but you will end up pounding more.
3. Grate the bulbs too
4. Now all goes into a wooden bowl or a Thai style mortar. Pound with big ass pestle until it is getting paste like. However, there are still going to be large plant bits.
5. Back into the food processor with the regular blade. Process the hell out of it. Getting closer but still not quite right.
6. Back into the mortar. The pounding now starts delivering a pretty good result. It won't be as smooth as a commercial Thai paste but it will not have all kinds of large woody plant particles either.

I make enough so I can freeze a number of small packets for future use. I made a Malay curry paste on Saturday. Used it for Beef Rendang for dinner tonight and will use the rest for fried rice tomorrow.