DE CONSTRUC T
THAI GREEN CURRY
Fresh, vibrant and spicy, green curry has become one of Thailand’s popular culinary exports — yet its history is much more recent than you might expect
WORDS: REB ECCA SEAL . PHOTOGR APHS: ST EVEN JOYC E S T Y L I S T: ROS IE RAMSDEN
What are the main characteristics of a Thai green curry? Mildness? Sweetness? Bright green-ness? If you’ve eaten Thai food in Europe or the US, you’ll certainly have come across versions of the dish that tick all three boxes — but the real deal is entirely different. Take the sweetness, for example. For this,
one can partly blame a mistranslation. The Thai name for the dish, ‘kaeng khiao wan’, does mean ‘sweet green curry’, but in Thai ‘sweet green’ refers to the pale colour, rather than the flavour. This misunderstanding, combined with Thai chefs’ assumption that most ‘farangs’ (foreigners) can’t handle the level of heat they’d use at home, means most of us think of green curry as milder and slightly sweeter than its red cousin. “Red and green curry pastes are pretty
much exactly the same, but the key difference is that dried red chillies are used in a red, as opposed to fresh green bird’s eye chillies in a green curry,” explains Sebby Holmes, chef-patron of Farang, a Thai restaurant in north London. “Swapping the two ingredients shouldn’t make much difference at all to the spice levels; in fact, the use of bird’s eyes makes for a spicier curry.” Sebby adds that, traditionally, the only
sweetness comes from coconut milk; however,
some cooks add palm sugar, which dulls the flavour of the chillies, “taking the profile of the curry further away from the original”. Happily, though, things seem to be changing as our capacity for heat increases. “The Western palate has been generations
behind when it comes to chillies. We’re attracted to sweetness, from coconut cream and palm sugar, which gives us a welcome breather from spice — at least, this is what we see at Farang. However, I’ve seen a massive shift in desired spice levels among us ‘farangs’ in recent years,” he says. Somewhere along the line, the notion
also crept in that green curry gets its colour from coriander leaves. It’s unclear how this happened, but a quick internet search suggests up to half of English-language recipes include them — especially those by non-Thai celebrity chefs. In Thailand, coriander leaves are never used in green curry (although coriander root or, at a push, a few finely chopped stalks should feature in the paste). The leaves don’t just taste wrong, they also float in the broth and oxidise to an unpleasant brown within hours of being ground to a paste. Nevertheless, you’ll find coriander leaves as a main ingredient in many curry pastes in British supermarkets, along with added chlorophyll for a brighter hue.
Almost all chefs and food writers agree it’s
better to make the paste from scratch, rather than buying it in a jar. Andy Oliver is head chef at London’s Som Saa and previously trained in Bangkok. “The ingredients are fundamentally fresh ingredients,” he says. “A massaman curry might have a longer shelf life, because it has more dried ingredients, but not green. Something sitting on a shelf with a two-year shelf life is a serious compromise.” A fresh paste usually contains white pepper,
ground cumin, ground coriander, fresh galangal, lemongrass, shallots, green chillies, coriander root, garlic and kapi (Thai shrimp paste). Ideally, it also contains kaffir lime zest, which has a distinctive flavour, but as kaffir limes can be hard to find, many people make do with adding chopped lime leaves to the paste, instead of — or as well as — adding whole leaves to the broth. There are two ways to prepare the curry. The
most common is to fry the paste gently in a little coconut cream, until it looks oily and as though it’s curdled and split; the sauce is later loosened with coconut milk. Alternatively, the paste can be boiled in water, with coconut cream added later. Either way, green dots of oil should decorate the surface of the broth, as this shows the paste has released all its flavour.
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