6 Thai Dinners You Can Make At Home - Quarantine Cooking - #StayHome #WithMe - Marion's Kitchen

My ultimate Thai beef salad. This one comes straight from my mum's recipe book. This is a childhood favourite of mine. I can't wait to show you guys how to make it. There are a couple of really key things that we need to get right to get this Thai beef salad like perfection. First of all, we're going to start off with the marinade and the dressing. I'm using some palm sugar here. This is a really firm palm sugar, generally the type of palm sugar that you get outside of Thailand. It just requires a little bit of shaving. Shaving the palm sugar like this helps it to dissolve more easily in the marinade and the dressing. I just want a little bit of that sugar for my marinade. The rest I'm going to set aside for later for the dressing. I want some fish sauce as well. This marinade is where I go a little bit rogue from my family recipe. My mum would just straight out grill the steak. I like to add this little extra step. I'm going to add a little bit of black pepper as well. I'm using rib eye steak or also called scotch fillet steak today. You could use any kind of cut of steak that you prefer. The steak goes in there. Guys, this is an intense marinade. That fish sauce is strong and pungent. I don't need that sugar to work its magic for very long. It only needs a couple of minutes. While that beef is marinating, I'll do my dressing. Dressing is very simple. We take the palm sugar that we shaved off earlier. If palm sugar is not something you can find locally, you could use a light brown sugar or even just some regular white sugar will be fine. We want again some fish sauce and then some lime juice. I'm just squishing down on it a little just to release all those juices inside. Just mix that through and just squish the palm sugar with the back of your spoon just to help it keep dissolving as it sits here on the bench top as well. Time to get the steaks cooking. I'm just heating up my pan. I'll add a little bit of oil. Time for that magic moment where meat meets pan. I love that sizzle. I'm going to leave this first side on quite a high heat so we can get some really good color going. That's looking really good. See how just that little bit of sugar has really helped us get that beautiful caramelization on the outside of that steak. Now it's time for part two, which is where we try to cook the meat through evenly through the center. I'm going to turn the heat down. What I'm looking for is the kind of pressure you would feel when you push down on that part of your palm. I'm just going to keep turning and flipping every so often until I can feel that meat. That's going to be a nice medium rare. I'll take that off and I want to let that rest for a good 5 to 10 minutes. In the meantime, we can get our salad ingredients ready. First up, we just want a small onion. Cut that into thin wedges. We want a tomato. When I was little, my mum used to use cherry tomatoes as well. You could totally use those. Some cucumber. I like to take the seeds out for this one because I think the seeds tend to make the salad a little watery. I like to chop my cucumber into irregular little pieces. Now for the herbs. This is one of the things that I just love about Thai salads. The herbs are not some little garnish that goes on top. The herbs form part of the salad. They're like another vegetable. Don't be shy with the herbs. I've got some coriander that I'm using. I love to use the stems as well. I'm chopping those up along with the leaves. I want some spring onion as well. The major herb flavor for this salad is mint. I'm going to pick off some nice leaves of those. Then some chilies. I'm using this large red chili which really has more of a capsicum flavor. Now our beef has had ample time to relax. I want to slice this as fine, as thin as you can get it because the lime juice and the dressing will continue cooking and soaking into the meat as well. We just add our beef into the rest of our ingredients. Just give that dressing one final stir. You can see that that palm sugar is dissolved nicely in there. Then start spooning that over. I like to go with about half of the dressing first and then just give this a bit of a mix and see where we're at. Now for the part where things get really pretty in that bowl. Now it's time to eat. Look at that. Look at all those colors. That beautiful steak. Traditionally, you would serve this with some rice on the side but that's totally up to you guys. This one is a restaurant classic but boy do I have an epic recipe for you guys to make at home. Sweet, tangy, glossy sauce. Beautiful toasty cashews. This is my Thai cashew chicken. Cashew chicken is one of those dishes that's sort of like sweet and sour. There are so many different versions, so many different variations of how sweet, how sour. All the different things. This one is my version. I hope you enjoy it. Mine is probably more on the slightly tangy, not so sweet side. Because I'm me, I'm going to be adding in some chilies because, you know, I'm me. Let's do the chicken part first of all. I'm using chicken breasts here, which is odd. Usually, I'm a thighs and legs girl, as you guys know. But I do know a lot of you like to use chicken breasts. I do quite like it in this one. Always, for me, directly season the meat. Seasoning flour, to me, is such a waste of time. So many recipes do call for seasoned flour. I just think, if you want some seasoning, get it straight on, whatever you want to season. I'm just going to mix that through. I want some corn flour on here. For all my American friends, that's cornstarch to you. It's the same thing, just called a different name. Let's just mix that. I want to make a really quick sauce here. Really simple ingredients. You want to get the right balance of sweet and tangy here. So I want some soy sauce and some dark soy sauce. I've got dark sweet soy sauce, but it's mainly for colour here. So just a regular Chinese dark soy sauce is fine as well. And some white vinegar. And some sugar. I almost forgot. A little dash of corn flour as well in here. It's going to help us thicken up and get our sauce all shiny and glossy. Just give that a mix. Now we're ready for our chicken. Essentially, we're going to be cooking the chicken twice. First of all is a bit of a shallow fry. I've got some oil in my wok here. Just going to have a look. We've got some nice little bubbles here. That tells me we're good to go. And just kind of dust any excess flour off that chicken. And then into the oil. Now I don't need this chicken to get really dark. I'm not doing a deep fried chicken here. I just want a kind of nice sealed coating on the outside of that chicken. And that is going to soak up all the sauce. That's when we come to do the stir frying later. That's looking pretty much right. I'm going to take that chicken out. It is important when you're cooking chicken breast that you don't over fry in this first step. Because that's when you get really dry chicken breast at the end. First cook on the chicken done. Now we're going to bring everything together. I want to get my wok heating up. Oil. Some garlic. Some onion. I like to get my cashews in here straight up. Because I want them to kind of toast and get nice and golden in there. See how we're getting that really nice colour on those cashews? It's just what I'm looking for. Now I'm going to add in some dried chillies. These are optional. But I love that kind of deep savoury, almost smokiness that you get from dried chillies. And these ones aren't very hot. So they're not going to make it too spicy. It's going to add some flavour and colour. I'm just chopping them straight in with some scissors. Now some capsicum. I love all the colours in this dish. So bright and cheerful. Now in goes my chicken. And our sauce. Now just keep stir-frying this for a minute or so. Until that sauce thickens up. The sugar will dissolve. Everything will magically turn shiny and glossy. Now for some greenery. I want some spring onion. See what I mean about the glossy? Beautiful. To my liking, this isn't a super saucy stir-fry. It's like a sticky kind of stir-fry. So that looks perfect. Time to get that on a plate. Wok-charred, savoury, chewy noodles. Pad See Ew is all about the details my friends. Here it is guys. Pad See Ew Woon Sen. Or stir-fried soy sauce glass noodles. Pad See Ew literally translates simply as stir-fry soy sauce. The ingredients for this one are very simple. But it means that the devil is in the detail. In order to make one that's really really beautifully perfect. So stay with me guys. Let's do the chicken part first. I'm going to add a little marinade here. I've got some chicken thigh. I'm a staunch thigh girl when it comes to stir-frying for Asian dishes. Chicken breast would be fine too. And some soy sauce. I want some sesame oil here. Sesame oil isn't always included in a Pad See Ew. But I like to put it in here because it'll give you a little bit of the smokiness that you would get from a really high restaurant style Pad See Ew. Just in case you don't get your wok or your pan hot enough. And then a little bit of white pepper. To me, the white pepper and the soy sauce are the two most important things for this dish. Let's give that a mix. It doesn't need long to marinate. Just leave it there while we get the rest of our stuff organized. Next thing I'm going to do is prep the noodles. These are the noodles I'm using. These are cellophane or glass noodles. They're also called bean vermicelli noodles, bean thread vermicelli noodles, mung bean noodles. There are a lot of names for them. But these are much easier to find than the fresh rice noodles that you would traditionally use for a Thai Pad See Ew. But these ones give you the closest texture because they're chewy and they're nice and soft. I recommend these if you can't get the fresh rice noodles. The thing with these noodles though is they cook in the fastest time. I reckon they're the fastest cooking noodles that you can possibly get a hold of. You need to do this carefully, otherwise you'll end up with a soggy mess in your wok later on. I've got some hot water here. It doesn't even have to be boiling. I'm going to pour that on top and soak the noodles rather than boil them. A lot of you guys have trouble with these noodles. I know because you've written in and told me about it. So here's the foolproof way to do it. Don't go and check your phone or start scrolling through Instagram or something. These will cook in literally like 2 minutes. I just like to use my tongs here and loosen them up as they're soaking. Now just when they're softened, lift them out and just pop them on the side here, ready to stir-fry. The next thing we need to do is get our stir-fry sauce ready. Again, as soy sauce is the main ingredient here, I have some soy sauce. This one is a regular Chinese light soy sauce. You also want a dark soy sauce to give you some colour here. I'm using a sweet dark soy sauce here. You can see it's nice and thick. If you're in Indonesia or Australia, your most common sweet dark soy sauce will be ketup manis. Some fish sauce here as well. A little dash of sugar too. Give that a mix. One more thing which is a non-negotiable for me whenever I'm eating pad see eel and that is chilli vinegar. If you're not putting this on the end of your pad see eel noodles, you are missing out. It's really simple to do. I just want some red chilli, just some nice slices. Add that into just some regular white distilled vinegar. This is always the condiment you'll find here in Thailand for pad see eel on the street or in a restaurant. You really got to make it at home as well. For the green vegetable part of our noodle dish, I'm using young Chinese broccoli. That's also called gai lan. These are younger stems. You can see they're quite thin at the end here. I quite like the younger, sweeter Chinese broccoli for this one. If you can only get the bigger Chinese broccoli, that's fine as well. Just thin out the stems a little more. You can also use broccolini too. That's a good one to use. In terms of slicing here, what you want to do is angle your knife so that you're slicing on the diagonal. That way, you are thinning out those stems a little bit so that they'll cook quicker in the wok. I did say the devil was in the detail when it comes to a really good pad see eel. That comes down to chopping vegetables too. The leaves, just in big chunks. One last thing to get ready is our eggs. Time to get all the magic happening in the pan. I'm using a wok. You can use a large frying pan as well. Just want some oil in there. Some garlic and my chicken. Already that smell is so intoxicating with garlic and the soy sauce and the chicken. Just stir-fry that until the chicken is just cooked. Now you want to add in your eggs. Just swirl your pan a bit and get that egg cooking on the hot surface. I like to let things get a little charry here. That, to me, is the other kind of flavour of pad see eel. You have the soy sauce, things a little bit charry. You have the pepper. That's what makes it really special. Start to mix that through. Got some good colour there. Now my green vegetable. That only needs like half a minute because we've thinned out those stems so they cook really quickly. You want them to keep nice and crunchy. Now my noodles. It'll kind of look like a noodle pancake at this point because that's what happens when noodles cool down. When we add our sauce and give everything a mix, you'll see it will magically transform. Just kind of keep mixing here until every strand of noodle is beautifully coated and coloured. You can see just how light and fluffy and not sticky those noodles are. Last, but certainly not least, a little sprinkling of some more white pepper. There you have it. The simplest of stir fries and yet get every detail right and it really will be magical, guys. I promise. Let's serve this up. Now don't forget your chili vinegar. Fragrant, savoury, spiced rice and chicken. This one is a Thai food classic and I'm going to show you how to make my version at home. This is Kao Mok Gai. I love this one. It's very unique because it has a very different flavour profile to most Thai dishes. This one has lots of rich, dried spice flavours and curry powder flavours. It's really awesome. Let's get going on the marinade paste first. We start off with quite classical Thai ingredients first of all. We want some garlic and some coriander root. Now some ginger. A little dash of salt here and you just want to pound this to a smooth paste. This is the kind of situation that you're looking for here. I'm going to get that straight out into a big bowl. Now come some of the ingredients that you don't usually find in Thai cooking. This dish has its origins in the Muslim community here in Thailand. Some of the ingredients are not as familiar to our Thai everyday cooking. I'm going to add in some yogurt and some curry powder. Again, I think a lot of people think of Thailand, they think of curries but we don't often use curry powder as an ingredient. We generally rely on fresh ingredients like lemongrass and galangal and chillies for our curry paste. There are some dishes with curry powder, obviously this is one of them. I want some fish sauce and some turmeric. The turmeric here really is one of the defining flavours and colours of this dish so it's really important. I just give that a mix. I'm going to add in my chicken pieces here. For me guys, it's got to be dark meats for this one. It's got to be drumsticks and chicken thighs because they tend to remain juicier while they're cooking in your big pot. Give that a mix. If you're really organised, it would be great if you could leave this to marinate overnight but I generally tend to not be that organised or have that much time so I'm going to pretty much use mine straight away. The traditional thing to do here would be to deep fry that chicken. I'm going to do it in a little bit more of a convenient way today. I'm just going to shallow fry it in a little bit of oil. Take your chicken pieces. The only way to do this really is with your hands so you're going to have to get a little dirty here. Just scoop off most of that marinade because I'm going to use that marinade a bit later and get your chicken straight into the pan. The idea here is that we want to get a really beautiful deep dark colour on our chicken pieces. One, it just looks great. Two, it starts to develop a really beautiful flavour when you get that caramelisation. You'll see. Remember, don't throw that marinade away. We need that for later. A couple of minutes and let's turn these guys over. That's perfect. Look at that beautiful colour. A couple more minutes on this second side. Now just transfer that chicken out of the pan. It doesn't need to be cooked through. It'll finish cooking a bit later on. Would you take a look at that gloriousness happening in the bottom of that pan there? That is some good chicken fat and we are not going to waste it. I just want a good few spoonfuls of that. I'll just get this pan cleaned up so we can continue on. I've got my clean pan. Pour that chicken fat back into there. Now let's go in with some onion. Always when I'm sweating down onions like this, I add a little dash of salt. You'll notice that throughout a lot of the dishes that I cook, there's some seasoning that happens every step of the way. We seasoned our paste at the beginning, we added fish sauce into the chicken, a little bit of salt here and that really helps to develop the flavors in the finished dish. Once these onions have had a few minutes to soften up in here, these onions are soft, a little sweet now. I'm going to add in some tomato. I want to give this tomato a little bit of time to get all mushy and make friends with that onion. See how that tomato is a little bit pulpy? Now we want to add in the rice. This is a Thai jasmine rice. Any long grain rice will do. I'm going to sprinkle in some crispy fried shallots. That chicken marinade we saved earlier, that goes in here. This dish reminds me so much of an Indian biryani. In fact, a lot of people call this Thailand's version of biryani. Now some spices. You want a cinnamon stick, some green cardamom pods and a couple of bay leaves. Some chicken stock. Already those beautiful spices are really making my kitchen smell delicious. Now we nestle those chicken pieces back into the pan. Nice and snug in there. Now put the lid on. Turn the heat down a smidge. I just want a gentle bubble on that liquid. In the meantime, we're going to make a little minty sauce to go on at the end. You would have heard me say this before, but it's often the condiments that make the dish here in Thailand. Don't skip this one. What you want is a big old lot of mint here. Some coriander. A little spicy kick. I want a green chilli here. This one's fairly fiery. Now some white vinegar. Dash of sugar. A little pinch of salt. Blend that till it's really nice and smooth. This is what you're after. That beautiful, fresh mint smell is so lovely. That colour, so joyful. Mmm. I love that so much. It is just like an instant brightener. That beautiful tangy vinegar infused with all those herbs and just that little touch of sweetness. That little touch of spice. Perfect. The only part about this dish that sucks is waiting while the smell in your kitchen is so delicious. I wish you guys could smell this. Let's take a look. Beautiful. That rice has soaked up all of that flavour that chicken has cooked through. My little trick here is to just fish out the chicken and pile it up in a corner over here. That gives us a little bit of space to fluff up our rice. Before I get to that though, I'm just going to pull out some of these spices that I can see. The cardamom pods, bay leaves, cinnamon stick, and then using a fork, just get in there and fluff that rice. I start off by scooping the rice on the top. Have a look down the bottom there. You can see we've got some really dark, crusty bits of rice. That's my favourite bit. I just like to scoop that up and mix it through. Any really dark bits, take those out and leave those on the side. I sneak them and serve myself. That's looking good. We are ready to go, my friends. Pile up a nice bit of that gorgeous sunshine yellow rice, a couple of pieces of chicken, and the finishing touches. A little sprinkling of coriander, some more crispy fried shallots, and that epic green sauce we made earlier, and then a little dash of sweet chilli sauce. That, my friends, is one homemade chicken rice dish that is so comforting. Even just the smell of it cooking is ridiculously comforting for me. Let's have a look. I like to get the perfect mouthful always. A little bit of chicken, some rice, don't forget those sauces. Spicy and Thai salad, they're like best friends. This one is one of my very favourites, one of my childhood favourites actually. You guys are going to love this one. When I was growing up, I would have had a large style salad at least once a week, twice a week. My mum used to make it with pork, with duck, with all sorts of stuff. I'm going to make a chicken version today. First of all, we are going to make a chilli powder because loads of you have been writing in and saying you can't find a chilli powder that looks similar to mine. The one that I'm using here in Thailand, you can see lots of little seeds in there, plus the chilli powder as well. We're going to make this so that you guys can make it at home as well. Start off with chillies. You've got the large dried red chillies here. In Thai, we call these pritipha. Then you've got the smaller ones. In Thailand, we call these ones pritindha. Overseas, they're commonly called bird's eye chillies. Look out for those. Anyway, let's start with the large chillies. I'm just going to use some scissors to cut them into little small pieces. Then my smaller little spicy guys. You want to get these into a dry frying pan. Then just heat them and roast them until you don't know when it happens because you'll start to sneeze and you can really smell those chilli fumes. I'm starting to get some of those fumes in here. What that tells me is that we're getting to the point where we've released the aromas and the essential oils in those chillies. That's just what we want. It's getting hot in here. I'm going to use a little coffee grinder to grind these up. It's a dangerous business. You can see that we've got a really beautiful powder here, as well as some seeds as well. This is just a really good texture. I like the level of spice in this type of chilli powder as well. The other essential ingredient for any larb salad is the roasted rice powder. If you've ever tried to make larb at home and it hasn't tasted quite like the one you had at your really good Thai restaurant, it's because you've left this ingredient out. What you need is some raw sticky rice. It's also called glutinous rice. You can use regular long grain, but I do find that it's a little tougher to break down and can be a little bit too crunchy. Try to find the sticky rice. You want to get that straight into a dry frying pan as well. Keep these guys dancing around in the pan until they're a beautiful dark golden colour. You can kind of smell, it's almost like a popcorn kind of smell. It's very toasty and nutty. These are looking really beautiful. I'm going to use my mortar and pestle now to grind them to a fine powder. This is the kind of texture that you're looking for. Now let's get the rest of our stuff going that we need for this salad. I'm going to get the dressing done first. I've got some palm sugar here. This is what palm sugar will look like when you grab it from the store. It's kind of like a firm block. You just need to shave the palm sugar. Shaving it with a knife means you're also softening it so it'll dissolve in the dressing. For this one, if you can't get palm sugar, you can just use normal white sugar. To that, I'm going to add some fish sauce and some of that chilli powder. Be a little cautious here because we can always add more chilli later. A little dusting of the rice powder as well. Just press down on my limes. Release all the juices inside. I'm just going to squeeze a couple of tablespoons in here. I like to finish my seasoning at the end when I can taste everything together. I'll leave some lime slices aside for that. This is just classic Thai food magic happening here. The sweet, the sour, the salty, the spicy. All the good things. For the salad itself, I also want some little red Asian shallots here. You could also use red onion as well. Let's talk about the herbs. I think this is another crucial part of this salad that you need to get right. First of all, I'm going to start off with some spring onion. Here in Thailand, we have a type of coriander that's called, in English, sawtooth coriander. You can see why it's called sawtooth. It's got this ridged edge. If you can find this herb in an Asian grocer or a Thai grocer, please go ahead and try it. It has the most amazing, beautiful, almost medicinal, slightly bitter flavour. You can just leave it out if you can't find it, but look out for it. Sawtooth coriander. Then I want some regular coriander as well. I know a lot of you are not huge fans of coriander, and you're in luck because if not, you can leave it out for this salad because the most important herb, I think, is actually the mint. Now, time to cook our chicken. The way we're going to do this might be a little bit unconventional by Western standards, but traditionally, the meat for a larb salad is generally poached in some water, some liquid. I'm going to use chicken mince here. I'm going to add some liquid into the pan. Just a little bit of water. I'm going to add my chicken mince in here. The whole idea here is that we don't want to fry the meat. We don't want any browning. Just want the meat to cook through without colouring. You want to be breaking up that chicken as it cooks in the water. Often when I'm doing the pork version of this, I don't bother with the water because there seems to be so much fat and juice in the pork that it cooks itself. I just put it into a dry frying pan. With the chicken, I think it's particularly important because otherwise it just browns too much. That doesn't take very long at all. Now what I want to do is scoop the chicken into a bowl. I don't want too much of that liquid though. I'm just going to leave that behind in the pan. While the chicken is really hot and steamy, I like to add in the red shallots. Then also a little bit of dressing. I just give that a bit of a mix first because I find that heat softens the harsh onion flavour. Time for all those beautiful herbs. My mint. Then more of that dressing. Give that a really good mix. Then we're going to do some final seasoning. Those fresh herbs on the dressing and the chilli and everything. It's just like this massive explosion. Great. I'm going to add a little bit more dressing and then a little bit more of this roasted rice powder for me, I think. The rice powder does two things. It adds a really beautiful almost nutty kind of flavour. It also makes sure that the dressing and everything thickens up a little bit and really coats all of those bits of chicken. For me, it's just not quite spicy enough. This is supposed to be a really super hot, hot, spicy dish. Obviously, if you want to keep it mild, leave the chilli out but I'm going to add more. Now we're really good. So good. To serve it all up, we're going to do it the traditional way so you guys can see how we would eat it here in Bangkok. What we like to do is have a little bit of cabbage on the side. These guys here are called snake beans. You can see they've got kind of like a rough edge here. You could just use green beans as well and some cucumber. I'll put my salad out on the plate. A little bit of extra mint. The whole idea here is that the chicken is really super hot. Then all these bits and pieces like the cabbage and the beans and the cucumber, that'll cool down your palate in between mouthfuls of the chicken. Thailand's famous Penang curry. If you've always wanted to make this at home, then I have the perfect recipe for you. For this one, we're going to make our curry paste from scratch. I love making Thai curry paste. I think it's one of the best ways to get to know a lot of different Thai ingredients and also to figure out what Thai ingredients your Asian grocer has down the road. Let's start off with the chillies first. For most Thai red chilli paste, we use the dried red chillies for this rather than the fresh. I've had these soaking in some hot water for about 10 minutes or so. Just want to cut them up. We're going to be using a blender today. I've got lots of little tips and tricks here for how we can best use the blender to make a curry paste at home because there's a few little things that might catch you up. First tip is to chop things up quite small because that's going to help your blade get everything really smooth. The second thing, this chilli water, just keep that for when we go to blend because we may need to moisten the mixture to help it get really smooth. You'll see what I mean a little bit later. The next ingredient is galangal. Galangal looks like this, similar to ginger but not. It has a very beautiful pine forest citrusy high note to its aromas and flavours. It's really worth seeking out and it freezes quite well as well. You'll see that there's little bits of pink on here as well. It's another way to tell that that's your galangal and not ginger. What you need to do is just peel the galangal, just a small piece and then finely chop. Next we want some garlic and then some red Asian shallots as well. You can use French shallots here too. Now some lemongrass. I love that smell so much. Now what we need to do here is bruise the lemongrass. Just cut that end off because it's often very tough. Then peel off these outer layers because they're also really tough and fibrous. Now finely slice. I also want some coriander roots. Just take those off. If you're using coriander at home and you're not using the roots, just stick them in the freezer until you're ready to make your curry paste. That way you're not wasting any. Now for the kaffir lime element. This should be one of the crucial flavours for a true Thai Penang curry. What I like to do is use both the leaves and then also the fruit itself which is this gnarly looking guy right here. With the leaves you want to take those off the stem and then pull the stem out of the leaf as well. Roll those up and then finely slice. Then the lime itself. The lime juice inside of here is really bitter. I've asked and asked and asked my mum about what you can use it for in terms of food. She said that in her village they don't use it for food, they just use it to put in their hair, funnily enough. Anyway, I have not tried it in my hair but you guys feel free. What we need here is the actual lime peel. You want to get as much of the peel as possible without too much of that white stuff underneath because that will be bitter. A little bit's okay. Just need 2 or 3 slices here. I just want to really fine chop on this. I know this ingredient's going to be a bit hard for a lot of you to find, don't worry. If you can't find the kaffir lime itself then just use the leaves and just leave that out. But if you can get a hold of these, it really makes a big difference to the paste. Then shrimp paste. Yes, it's kind of funky smelling but it adds a beautiful saltiness and background umami flavour to the dish. You don't even know it's there at the end. Just pop it in the paste and don't worry about it. Now for my dried spices, a little bit of coriander and some cumin. Then the last ingredient you'll find in some recipes and not others. I've done my paste with and without but there's some peanuts here but if you have allergies you can totally leave these out. Won't make a huge difference. Now let's start blending. If we have a look here, this is one of the pitfalls of using a blender instead of a mortar and pestle to make your curry paste. Have a look and you can see that what we're getting here is just a lot of chopped ingredients. We're not getting a paste, we're not releasing or smooshing out all those beautiful essential oils and flavours and aromas from the ingredients like you would do in a mortar and pestle. My tip is to add a little bit of liquid to this. A lot of people add oil that doesn't work out quite so well because for me, that then becomes like an emulsification. The oil thickens up, the ingredients thicken up and everything just becomes a wrong texture. What you want is some of this chilli soaking liquid. Couple of tablespoons first. Because this is just water, when we go to cook it out, it will eventually evaporate and cook out of the paste. Don't worry too much about how much you add. That's better, but I can still see we're just getting a chop here. I'm going to add a little bit more. That's better. What I can see here is that that blade is actually catching those ingredients and they seem to be turning over quicker and faster. Exactly what you want to look out for. This is the texture that you're looking for. This makes enough for two amounts of penang curry, which is good because you don't want to do all that chopping just for one dinner. Share it out over two. You can just store the unused curry paste in the freezer. Now comes the easiest part and that's the cooking. I just need a little bit of oil. Half of that curry paste. I want this curry paste to sizzle and cook out a little bit in the oil because the heat is going to be releasing even more of the flavour and the aroma and then cooking out those raw aromatics like the garlic and the shallots. All of this contributes to flavour. That's what it's all about. That's had a minute or so. It smells amazing. Now I'm going to add in my chicken. This is chicken thigh. You could use breast as well but I'm going to do this the slow way. I've done something that suits this style of penang a little bit better. Now we add the coconut milk. As I mentioned, there's a couple of different ways to do penang. One is really quickly, more like a stir-fry style. For that one, you can use chicken breast or prawns or seafood even. I'm going to go with the more traditional slower-cooked method here. This one's really great for tougher cuts of beef or the chicken thigh. Then pop a lid on, turn the heat down and let that simmer away for half an hour. You're not supposed to be checking! Don't open the lid! Listen to your mum. This is smelling so amazing. Let's have a look. That's just what we want. This longer cooked penang style of curry has that really nice thick sauce and some of that red oil on the top. Just perfect. Now for the seasoning because of course we haven't seasoned this yet with the fish sauce and palm sugar. I like to do it at the end. I always like to taste first to get an idea of how things are going. For the palm sugar, you'll see that it usually comes in these hard blocks. You just need to shave that sugar so it dissolves quickly into the curry and then the fish sauce as well. Let's see how we're going. Almost there. To me, this style of curry should have a little bit more sweetness than usual. I'm going to put a little bit more palm sugar in. Now we're floating in that territory of the amazing. The thing that I love about Thai curries is you bring all these huge flavours like fish sauce, galangal and kaffir lime leaves, palm sugar and chillies. You create something so harmonious and so beautiful at the end. That is just delicious. To serve this up, dish out the curry first. Look at how thick and luscious that is. Then a little drizzle of extra coconut cream on the top. As I said at the beginning, the kaffir lime leaf flavour is really important here. I want some extra finely sliced leaves on the top and just a couple of slices of chilli. There you go guys, a classic Thai Penang chicken curry. One of my favourites. I hope you love it too.