Delicious Thai Green Curry Recipe | With a Secret Ingredient that will blow your mind

A vibrant classic, bursting with flavour, this is our complex yet harmonious Thai green curry with fish balls and prawns. Hello guys, welcome back to What Wednesday. Today we are making a dish that is at the absolute heart of the school of wok. This is a Thai green curry. Let's get started by making the fish ball mix. So we've got here some white fish, you can use any white fish. Actually mackerel is quite nice to use, something with a little bit of fattiness to it. We're going to add a few other ingredients here. So we've got a little bit of salt and a little bit of sugar, about a teaspoon. We've got a little bit of sesame oil for that lovely nutty aroma. Corn starch or any starch, you could use potato starch here. And to bind we're going to use our egg and we are just going to blitz really well. We'll let this run for a good few minutes here until we end up with something really smooth. We're going to add in a little bit of ice here. The ice is going to help our mixture get really nice and smooth and we're going to keep blending a little bit longer. So after about five minutes of blitzing we've got a really nice smooth paste that we are going to just pop into a bowl. And the good thing about these fish balls is you can make them and then you can freeze them. They store really well and you can use them in so many different ways. You can use them in any kind of curry, you can put them on a skewer, grill them or deep fry them. Mashed potato is a good reference point for this. Let's prepare these fish balls now. So we've got our mix ready to go. I've got a pot of water here, warm water just sort of bubbling under the boil there and I've got some water here to apply to my hands. And the way we do this is we take a little bit of our mix at a time and you're just going to squeeze your fist together and use a spoon to form a little ball shape. And they go straight into the hot water which should help them to keep their shape. If you're going to store these, if you're going to freeze these, still do this part. Cook them first and then cool them down, freeze them and you can just use them from there. And you'll see here they kind of sink to the bottom. I'm going to bring them to the boil and so we're going to cook them for about three minutes until they all float to the top. Okay so three minutes later they're nice and boiled at the top. Let's give them a good drain and we'll set aside and we'll make a start on the star of the show which is our green curry paste. With any Thai curry the most important part of the dish is the paste itself. That is where we're going to put all of our energy, all of our care, all of our attention. If we get the paste right everything else becomes really really easy. I'm going to start chopping these and I'm going to put them in an order on my plate here. That's going to be the order in which they're going to go into my pestle and mortar later. So we're going to start with our green chillies. Green chillies are the most important thing in a Thai green curry because they're going to give us our heat, our flavour but crucially our colour as well. So I've got some big green chillies here. These are fairly sort of mild. I'm going to use about five of these. I want plenty of green colour in there and I'm also going to add in a couple of Thai bird's eyes as well to really kind of up the heat in there. This should be a fairly sort of fiery curry but if that's not for you you can just leave these out. So these chillies, I'm just going to give them a rough chop down and we start with the chillies because they are actually quite hard to break down and we want them to have had plenty of time for the cell walls of these chillies to break down and for the colour to release into the paste. So that is why we start with those. Just gives you that more pleasing final product. Now guys I know this looks like a lot of chilli but please do not fear. It should be hot but it shouldn't be like below your head of spicy. All right next we've got our lemongrass which we're just going to take the ends off, give it a little bash and we just want to remove the first kind of hard woody outer layers of the lemongrass and we'll just cut it in half. With things like lemongrass they are quite tough so I'm going to give these a nice fine chop. It's just going to make my life easier when we get to the pestle and mortar. Okay next our galangal which we're just going to slice, cut into matchsticks and then dice. So Thai green curry is a dish that really is at the heart of School of Wok. It's one of our most popular menus on our corporate events and one of our most popular public classes too and even though we must have made it hundreds of times we're still not sick of it. So just going to finely chop these. Okay next here we've got our lime. So this is our kaffir lime and usually we would use the leaves, the fresh leaves. These are a little bit easier to find in Asian supermarkets. You can either get them fresh or you can find them in the frozen section as well. If you can find these, these are even more flavourful and what we do is just take a tiny little bit of the zest from the lime and like even that much is going to give you such a boost of that like citrusy flavour in your curry. A couple more ingredients here. So we've got our lesser ginger. So I like the galangal it's in the ginger family but it has a much more kind of milder sort of herbal medicinal quality to it. This one we're just going to give a rough chop to. Thai green curry weirdly is one of those dishes that has popped up again and again throughout my life. I remember trying it for the first time as a teenager and being like wowed by the flavour as someone who'd grown up in Devon and had experienced mostly salt and pepper. To think that food could taste that good was like a big moment for me. We've got a little bit of garlic just peeled. Last but not least a few Thai shallots here. There's a lot of aromatics at play here and I think really what makes Thai green curry so good is that it is at the same time very complex but also harmonious. It's about finding the kind of balance in the flavours. No one thing should overwhelm the dish. Got a couple of other things to prepare for our curry here. So we've got some Thai aubergines here. So with these we're just going to remove the stem and we're just going to cut into bite-sized pieces. We've also got here some pea aubergines. So we're just going to pick these off the stem and these have the most incredible kind of fresh grassy flavour and they're also there for the sensation of pop, of something popping in your mouth. And last but by no means least we've got some of those fresh lime leaves. So for these what we're going to do is just fold them in half and just pull the stem out of the middle. Okay and you can smell by doing that how much more of that lovely citrusy lime aroma is released by doing so and then we're ready to make our paste. We've got our pestle and mortar ready to go. What we're going to start with here is a little bit of salt. It's about half a teaspoon. You don't need loads but what the salt does is it acts as an abrasive which helps to kind of break everything down. Chillies are going to go in to begin with and there's a little bit of technique to this. Often I think we can fall into the trap of thinking that we're just kind of mashing everything together. We're starting with our chillies. We're going to work our way around. A couple of minutes of pounding on each ingredient and then we add the next one and so on and so forth. As we go now we're going down and forward, down and forward, down and forward and repeating. You can use your other hand here as a bit of a guard and you just want to gently rotate the mortar as you go as well and that's going to give you a fairly even pace without having to think too much about where you've been pounding. This is a really great dish if you hate your neighbours. Not that I hate my neighbours. If any of you are watching this I like my neighbours. So guys after the first couple of minutes this is what we're looking for. So everything is starting to break down. We can then get our lemongrass and galangal in and continue and each time you add a new ingredient you're just trying to get the paste back to where it was before you added that last ingredient okay. Okay and we're going to keep working our way around our plate until everything's nice incorporated and what you want to end up with is what I would describe as smooth guacamole okay. That is what you're looking for, that kind of texture but thanks to the magic of editing you will now see my paste finished. Okay guys so we're getting pretty close now. We've got a really nice colour and consistency to our paste. The final thing we're going to add is the all-important shrimp paste. This is what's going to give the curry its real depth of umami flavour okay. About a teaspoon going in and I think this is the most crucial ingredient. I think if it's missing this then there's there's just something missing and no matter how much fish sauce you add you just can't replicate that that uh real kind of depth of funky flavour. Right in the eye. Today is trying to break me and Lance. All right okay guys so time to cook this curry out and the way this starts is with coconut fat. So if you have a little jar of coconut oil at home you can use that but actually there's enough fat here in the coconut milk to do the job for you. So what I'm doing is taking the top part of the milk so the cream part and I'm adding it to my pan and we are going to use the rest of that water so keep that don't throw it away but we're just starting with the cream part to begin with. We need to get this up to a boil. At the moment this is basically flat and it's water so what we need to do is we need to evaporate the water and we'll be left with the fat and we're going to use that to cook out our curry paste. There's actually two reasons why we use the coconut milk here. Number one is that fat's going to imbue more of that lovely sweet coconut aroma to the curry. Number two is if I put in some vegetable oil here if I heated it up and I chucked in my curry paste and the temperature was a little bit wrong and I burnt my paste that's it. Game over. Start again get the chopping board back out get the pestle and mortar back out. We definitely don't want that. So guys this is what you're looking for. We're seeing this fat start to split now. You see how these little bubbles of oil start to appear at the top of our curry. It also will kind of change sound it will go from like a kind of simmering to more of a frying sound. Okay at this stage we're going to add in our paste. I probably need about half the amount I've made and I'm going to freeze the rest. Now we're going to let this fry off for about four or five minutes here. What we're looking for is we want that oil to kind of split and be bubbling away. In terms of the aroma it's going to go from a very sort of raw aroma where you know maybe those onions and garlic are still making your eyes tingle a little bit to a bit more of a kind of sweet aroma yeah. And the other thing we're looking for here is to really kind of deepen the colour of our paste. It's gone from a light green to a much darker green. Okay now just for the last 30 seconds here I'm going to add in my lime leaves and just fry them off as well and my paste I'm really happy with the colour of it smelling really kind of sweet. We're going to go in with the rest of our coconut milk. You can do this kind of gradually. I'll just give you a really nice smooth sauce. Green curry shouldn't be sort of super thick we want it to be fairly sort of soupy. What I've got here is a little bit of chicken stock which I'm just going to use to thin out the sauce a little bit. And now let's bring that back up to the boil and then we're going to let it simmer and really now it's a case of just poaching the other ingredients through in this sauce. We've already done the hard work of creating the flavour so it's just a case of cooking everything to its required level of doneness. We're going to add our aubergines in first and we're going to let these simmer away for about five or six minutes. Depends on how much kind of bite you want there to be in the final dish. If you want them a little bit softer you can leave them cooking for another couple of minutes. Now what we're going to do before we go any further is just add our seasonings. So we're going to go in with about a teaspoon of palm sugar now there should be some sweetness to this curry, it shouldn't be overly sweet but there should be a kind of sweetness in the background. I want to give that a good stir through and a fish sauce I'm going to go with about a tablespoon to begin with and I've got a little bit left if I need to adjust and what we're looking to do is to just bring out all the flavours that were in that pace. Final steps what we're going to do is just add back in our fish balls just to heat through another couple of minutes and last but not least our prawns which are going to go in and again just need a couple of minutes simmering away to cook them through. So our curry is ready we're going to serve this up into our bowl and to garnish we're going to use some fresh Thai basil, a really nice sweet almost kind of slightly aniseedy flavour to it. Don't be shy with this you want plenty of this over the top just for a little pop of colour some of our red chilli which just looks really good in contrast with the green and that is it guys our Thai green curry with fish ball and prawn. So I'm going to try it with a little bit of rice of course and let's get one of those fish balls in there you can see the sauce it's really great we've got that really nice kind of balance of flavours got that nice kind of harmony going on the texture of the fish ball is really nice really kind of bouncy and for me it's got the perfect level of spice with those two bird's eye chillies in it's got a really good kick to it but it's not uncontrollably spicy. There we have it our Thai green curry with fish balls and prawns if you've enjoyed watching today don't forget guys to like and subscribe to the channel and to leave your comments down below and thank you so much for watching we'll see you next time on What Wednesday.