Cooking Lesson – Massaman Curry Paste (พริกแกงมัสมั่น)
The ingredients for Massaman Curry Paste are much easier to obtain than the ingredients for the distinct Thai curries. Massaman Curry is influenced by the tastes of the Indian cuisine. Indian spices are much wider spread and most of them are readily available even in a normal supermarket in the western world.
Another difference to other Thai Curries is, that most ingredients are roasted in a pan before being pounded in the mortar. You will enjoy the fragrance of the spices filling your kitchen. You can safe time by using a blender but since the blender is cutting the fibers in opposition to crushing and separating the fibers, the result is not as satisfactory taste wise as doing the hard work with pestle and mortar.
Of course you can always buy the ready made paste, but after preparing this curry paste yourself and tasting the result, we are pretty sure that you will try to find the time for doing it yourself.:-)
- The ingredients for the paste are: Lemon grass, galangal, garlic, red onions, ginger, dry chilies, black pepper, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, cardamon, bay leaves, cinnamon, whole cloves and dried red peppers.
- Roast the coriander seeds, together with the cardamon, cumin seeds, black pepper, cinnamon and bay leaves until it all smells nice and the color changes.
- For the best taste use pestle and mortar to grind the roasted ingredients to powder. However, nowadays there is usually a blender used, which saves an enormous amount of time and elbow grease. Remove the powder mix and put aside.
- Add the dried peppers, which were soaked in water and some salt
- Add all the remaining ingredients
- Add the powder mix with the paste
- Now it's time to put all the ground ingredients together with some oil in the blender
- Cook in the pan, use what you need for your Massaman Curry and keep the rest in a jar to use later
Like in most recipes for our cooking classes we do not list exact amounts - just have a look at the ingredient pic and the phase pic to get an idea. If you attended our cooking class it should not be a problem at all.