Thai Red Curry Noodle Soup Bursting with Flavour

For this series we're going to focus on the Asian pantry. I'm going to show you the basic ingredients from around the continent to help you guys make quick and easy Asian recipes at home. This week's episode is all about the Thai pantry and I'm actually going to start from really basic ingredients and show you guys the beginner's guide to Thai cooking. No matter where you come from in Asia our food generally relies on that balance of flavour, texture and colour. And so when you're talking about flavour that's where the pantry really comes into play. Thai style saltiness definitely comes from fish sauce. Then you want to balance it out with some sweetness. Palm sugar, tamarind to give that sort of natural sour. Coconut milk works well with palm sugar to give you that natural sweetness. And then again, more savoury flavours and saltiness from things like shrimp paste. And your curry pastes are the start of really good Thai cooking. That's a ready-made Thai curry paste. I'm showing you this because if you haven't made a Thai curry before it's a really good place to start. Especially because you can read through every single ingredient that's in this. So we've got dried red chilli, garlic, shallots, a bit of salt, lemongrass, sugar, kaffir limes which I've got over here. And then some galangal and some coriander seeds, cumin, cardamom. Eventually you might progress on to making that from scratch. But for today I'm going to cook with these pantry ingredients and make those work with a really tasty Thai noodle curry. So with something like this Thai curry paste you can obviously use to make simple curries like I'm going to make. I'm actually making a noodle curry dish. But at the same time if I wanted to make a Thai fish cake I could use this red curry paste with some fish sauce and some palm sugar and you'd make it very simply with a bit of churned up fish and some herbs. So it's all very, very versatile. The Thai pantry, you start with this base like any other cuisine and then you just, you can cook hundreds of dishes with it. I'm going to go straight in with the Thai curry paste and start cooking this off. Even with something pre-prepared like this you do have to cook off the spices and really sort of release the flavours and the sort of aroma from the spices. So start with a bit of oil in the base of your pan and bring that to a good heat. Medium to high heat before you start to add your paste. So much like if you're cooking or making your paste from scratch you want to cook your paste through so you get the nice sort of fragrance from those raw ingredients. And these are all ready-made pastes. Yes, they have a bit of acidity regulator in them but the good ones shouldn't have too much extra salt or any sort of additional chemicals other than to keep that shelf life there. Once it starts to get a bit more bitty and your oil starts to separate a little bit from the actual paste then you can start to add more ingredients to it. We're starting to build up flavour already and I've only just started cooking so it's really, really simple pantry cooking this. I'm going to take a little bit of coconut milk and just lift any sticking of the paste off the bottom of the pan. So the whole point of this series is to show you really quick, simple dishes that are packed full of flavour. It's the basics of Asian cooking. Now my paste is already looking more curry-like. You'll find if you've deglazed the pan well with your coconut milk that you've pretty much got a clean base on that pan after a couple of minutes. Then you can start to add a bit more coconut milk. What we're trying to do is layer flavour into this dish and we want that balance of spicy, sweet, salty, sour and savoury all in one. If I tasted this right now, it would only really be spicy with a bit of natural sweetness from the coconut milk and creaminess. Yep, exactly that. All I'm tasting right now is quite an intense flavour from that paste. So I'm going to continue to add the rest of the coconut milk and then we're going to start to layer up those flavours. I want some savoury flavour to interact with the spices so I'm going to use a bit of shrimp paste here. Now shrimp paste is very salty and very strong. You would never ever eat this on its own. So anyway, half a teaspoon to one teaspoon of shrimp paste is plenty for a curry like this. Just try and press into it to make sure that it melts into that coconut milk and paste mix. So I've got spicy, a little bit of creamy sweetness from the coconut milk, savoury from my shrimp paste and if I want to, I'm going to make this slightly sweet-sour in flavour so tamarind is perfect for that. This tamarind concentrate actually comes from this sort of dry, brown, runner bean looking fruit. That's the tamarind and it's just melted through and then sieved. I don't want this too sour so a couple of tablespoons of tamarind paste or tamarind concentrate should do the job. It's already smelling absolutely delicious but I know it's missing sweetness now that I've added that tamarind or that sour so just taste that. Yeah right, so we've got spiciness, creaminess, a little bit of sour, needs to balance out with more sweetness. Palm sugar. Now palm sugar is a lower GI than everyday sort of cane sugar so it's much better for you and it's also got a nice sort of treacly flavour to it. I'm going to put about a tablespoon of palm sugar in to balance out those two tablespoons of tamarind concentrate. So I'm just showing you guys how to layer that flavour and get that perfect balance of flavour in your base sauce before we then bring in the texture and the colour for more of the fresh ingredients. Have a little taste of that. All that sweetness is really interacting with that tamarind. This is right. Some nutty, creamy flavour as well. The only thing I'm missing now is a bit of fish sauce but I'll do that right at the end because I've got other ingredients that I'm going to pop into here. Some kaffir lime leaves. These are also great. I would still call them pantry ingredients. They are fresh lime leaves but we keep them in the freezer so that they keep nice and fresh. So I've always got kaffir lime leaves in my freezer because it adds loads of flavour with one little ingredient. Straight in. And then chicken stock. Again, I mean we make our own chicken stock and we freeze it so we've got that in the freezer ready to go but at home it's very easy to get those good bags of chicken stock or vegetable stock and they work an absolute treat for all types of cooking. So make sure you've always got stock in your fridge, freezer or pantry. Now when it comes to stock, the big difference between, let's say, a stock cube, your stock gels or those jellies, those concentrated jellies of stock or a bag of stock and fresh stock made at home is that your concentrated stock cubes and the jellies have a lot of salt in them and sometimes have chemicals or MSG or added MSG and things like that to sort of enhance the flavour whereas your freshly made stocks and your bags of stock are much more natural, don't have added salt to them and therefore you can season your food as you like when you cook. So my curried soup is simmering away. I've seared my mushrooms and aubergine, just a little drizzle of oil over the aubergine before you sear it and the mushrooms I've got on a really high heat, smoking hot pan and pressed down into it. The last thing is the noodles and just compiling my dish, so really, really simple. Again, noodles or dried noodles, one of my favourite things from the pantry and it doesn't just go with Thai food but spreads across all types of Asian cooking. We've got some different types of vermicelli here, so this is a flat rice noodle and then my rice, white rice vermicelli. Actually, I'm going to use the rice vermicelli. With dry noodles, the simplest thing is soak them, don't boil them and when we soak them, thin noodles, maybe two to three minutes, those thicker sort of flat rice noodles might take eight to ten minutes of soaking and then when you cook them into the noodles, they don't go all sort of sticky and stick together. Keep nice and separate and still have that nice bite. My curry's ready, everything's set and ready to go. I've got some green beans here, so I'm going to pop those in first. They need about two to three minutes to cook up and then we'll start to put in your aubergine, your mushroom, your noodles and all we're going to do is garnish that with a bit of herb and some chillies. I'm going to make a bowl up your noodles. As I said earlier, it just needs soaking and then just reheating in the actual curried stock. Thirty seconds to a minute, get all that flavour into the noodles. I'm just layering this using our little basket here just so it's easier to take them out and present the dish. So that's cooked through and then my veg can come out over the top and then lastly, you just want to season that with your fish sauce. It's worth having a little taster first. Great flavour and just that layering of flavour from all those pantry ingredients. I'm going to go for about a tablespoon of fish sauce, no more. So your curried noodle soup and then just got topped up with a sprinkling of herbs. So some Thai sweet basil and some picked coriander leaves work well with this too. Nice, simple way to use up your Thai pantry ingredients. The great thing about noodle soups, especially with curried soups like this, is that the noodles really soak in the flavour. Mmm, delicious. So quick curried noodle soup with all those Thai pantry ingredients.