Thai Red Curry Recipe with Chicken & Sweet Potatoes
This Thai Red Curry is quick simple and delicious and works on the Thai cooking principle of sweet, sour and hot. This recipe uses ginger instead of galangal - I didn't have any, and lime juice instead of Kaffir lime leaves as I didn't have any of them either. But these changes still give you something awesome and better than a takeaway.
The thing is with Thai and Malaysian food is to make the paste or rempah, that you fry before adding anything. If you do this your dish will be miles better than you will taste anywhere but Thailand.
Red Curry Paste ingredients:-
2 cloves garlic
1 shallot/small onion
Fresh chillies to taste
Dried chillies soaked in hot water - these should be large red Kashmir chillies, failing that use dried.
Grated ginger 2 tbl spoon - Galangal is preferable
Cumin seeds - one tablespoon slightly toasted in a dry frying pan for a minute.
2 Tbl spoon grated Turmeric - if you haven't got it leave it out.
1 Tbl spoon Paprika - this is for colour
1 tbl spoon of rapeseed oil - use as it helps everything liquidise better.
Blitz all the above with a hand blender to form a paste.
Main ingredients:-
2 chicken fillets, cut into strips
1 Sweet potato - cit into bite sized pieces
1 Red bell pepper - cut into strips
A Cup of Chicken Stock
Lemon/Lime juice about 1 tbl sp
Salt and sugar to taste
Small tin coconut milk
1 piece of Lemon Grass cut into two inch pieces
Basil too finish.
Method:-
In a hot frying pan or wok in a little oil add the paste and cook it for about five minutes without burning it, though it may stick here and there to the pan, turn down the heat and keep at it. The oil will come out of it. Then throw in the chicken and brown slowly, then add the sweet potatoes, move about. Then add the chicken stock, deglaze and simmer for five minutes, add the lemon grass.
Then add the sliced red peppers (they should be slightly crunchy at the end) and five mins later add lemon juice, taste and season to taste. Then add the coconut milk and as soon as you think the sweet potatoes and chicken are cooked, switch off and serve with basil leaves on top.