This MASSAMAN CURRY is My Best One Yet!

Sawasdee ka, welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So this beauty is the world famous Masaman curry. Whenever I need a dish that is guaranteed 100% to be a crowd pleaser, especially a crowd unfamiliar with Thai food, this is my number one go-to dish. It is rich, flavorful, aromatic, and so indisputably delicious that it was once voted number one most delicious food in the world according to a poll by CNN. And I'm really not surprised because multiple people have told me that this was the dish that made them fall in love with Thai food in the first place. It's also really really easy. In fact this was the very first curry I ever made like in my life and I was only nine years old. So if nine years old me can do it, you can also. I've shared this recipe before many years ago but I've been working on improving it over the years and this version my friend is my best one yet. So let me show you how you can make this beautiful curry starting with the paste. As I said before, the heart of any Thai curry is the curry paste. So this is the most important element of this recipe. Now you can buy Masaman curry paste pre-made but it's not always available. But that's actually not a problem because I'm going to recommend you make a semi-homemade version using red curry paste as a base anyway. And red curry paste you can get just about anywhere. Now this is a trick that I discovered after realizing that Masaman paste is really just red curry paste plus a bunch of spices. So that's what we're gonna do. And even if you can buy Masaman paste pre-made, this hacked version is even better. First we're gonna toast our Masaman spices starting with cumin seeds which we'll toast separately because they're so tiny. Just keep them moving around in a dry skillet until they darken slightly and you'll be able to smell their wonderful aroma. And then remove from the pan. In the same pan we're going to add coriander seeds, cloves, and cardamom pods. You can use green or white cardamom here. Keep toasting until the coriander seeds brown slightly and again you should be able to smell it in the air. And then take them off the heat. I'm going to add all the spices into my Morton pestle and grind them into a fine powder. You can of course use a Add our two ground spices which are cinnamon and nutmeg. Then I'm going to add kapi or fermented shrimp paste and my store-bought red curry paste. The shrimp paste is optional but highly recommended because it adds a lot of umami. Pound everything together until it's mixed and that's it. Now I want to mention why our semi-homemade curry paste is better than store-bought. And the first reason is that commercial pastes have to be cost-conscious. So they don't add as much spices as I do when I make my own. So this is going to end up being more aromatic and you can add even more spices if you so choose. So this paste has now become customizable to taste. The second reason is most commercial pastes omit the shrimp paste in order to keep it vegan. Unfortunately shrimp paste is such a powerhouse ingredient that adds depth and umami to the final dish. So taking it away will make the final dish less delicious. So even if I'm dealing with a brand of curry paste that already has shrimp paste in it, I will still add more anyway to boost it. Finally I said this before and I will say it again but the quality of your red curry paste will make a big difference. It'll make or break the dish. So starting with a good brand is really important. Mae Ploy as I said before is my favorite. Aroi Dee is great. Avoid Thai kitchen because that is very very weak unless you're cooking for kids or someone who cannot tolerate any heat whatsoever. All right let's keep going. For this we're going to need bone-in chicken thighs or drumsticks but I prefer thighs personally. First thing we're going to brown the chicken. So in the pot I'm going to use to make the curry. I'm going to add a little bit of oil and I'm going to sear the chicken skin side down in one layer and don't overcrowd it and then don't touch them for three to four minutes until the skin is nice and brown. This is admittedly not a traditional nor critical step so you can skip it if you're just trying to get food on the table but browning adds flavor and if we have time why not? Once the skin is brown we can remove it from the pan and I'm not going to brown the other side because it doesn't brown quite as nicely but you can if you want to. And just keep an eye on the heat to make sure the brown stuff stuck to the bottom of the pot does not burn. Once the chicken is all brown I'm going to pour off the excess oil and render chicken fat which you can actually save and use to cook something else. Then add about half a cup of coconut milk and bring it to a boil, scraping the bottom to release all that yummy brown bits we worked so hard for. Once it's boiling add our curry paste and stir to mix it with the coconut milk and now we're going to saute the paste to cook off the raw herbs and develop flavor. You want to saute it for three to four minutes and if it sticks to the pot before that you can deglaze with a little more coconut milk and then lower the heat a bit. Eventually you might see coconut oil starting to separate from around the edges of the paste just like that, that means the paste is now frying in coconut oil which is the cue we are looking for. But if it doesn't separate after about four minutes you can just move on as some coconut milk has been processed to prevent separation. After the oil has been separated for about 30 seconds add the rest of the coconut milk, stir to get everything mixed up, scraping the bottom to make sure nothing is sticking. Then we're going to add some bay leaves, roughly half of our fish sauce, also about half of the tamarind paste, and then some chopped palm sugar. The other half we'll reserve for a final seasoning adjustment. We'll then add the chicken back in along with any juices collected in the bowl because that's all flavor. Bring it up to a gentle simmer and let it simmer for about 35 minutes. I'm going to partially cover it so it doesn't reduce too much but not completely cover it because I don't want this to boil. While our massaman is simmering let me get through a big FAQ around massaman. If you're wondering well can I use chicken breast instead or maybe shrimp or fish or even tofu, let me try to talk you out of it. So compared to other Thai curries, massaman is richer, thicker, and heavier on the spices and it really doesn't work as well with the lean and light proteins. They just kind of get overwhelmed by the richness of the sauce and they kind of just disappear. So in Thailand there is a reason why we only make massaman as a braise, meaning slow cooking sort of chewier cuts of meat like chicken thighs, chicken drumsticks, beef, and goat. You can also do this with lamb but we don't have sheep in Thailand so that's kind of not a thing but flavor-wise it would work. You can technically do this with pork like a pork shoulder braise would be really good with massaman but in Thailand because this is a Thai Muslim dish it is also just culturally not done. So you can put chicken breast in it if you want but I'm just saying that there is a reason why it is not done. All right let's finish it up. After 35 minutes we're going to add some veg which includes potatoes. I'm using Yukon Gold but any kind of waxy potatoes also work and avoid starchy potatoes because they disintegrate too easily in the curry. And then white or yellow onion which I cut into roughly one centimeter strips vertically. Now try to push everything down and if there's not enough liquid add just enough water to keep the potatoes barely submerged. Don't worry about submerging the onions because they will wilt down eventually. I'm also going to add half of our peanuts at this point, saving the other half for final garnishing. Simmer the potatoes gently for 10 to 15 minutes depending on the size until a fork goes through with no resistance. And that is it! It smells so good in here, I cannot wait. But there's one very important thing we still have to do and that is taste for seasoning. And this is so important and it's the reason why I only added half of our fish sauce and half of our tamarind because every brand of curry paste is going to have different levels of saltiness and also how much evaporation happened during the simmering time, how much water you added to keep everything submerged, all of that affects how much seasoning you need in total. I find the amount of sugar doesn't really vary but the amount of salt and tamarind does. So we're going to taste, now get rid of all this floating fat, don't taste that, that won't taste of much. Ah so good, such a nostalgic flavor. Okay it does need a little bit of fish sauce so I'm gonna add yeah almost all of it, oh I can probably add all of it. And remember also this is going to go on rice right so the rice is going to dilute it a bit. Now when you're thinking about whether or not to add tamarind, I want to kind of talk you through it a little bit. Tamarind is a sour ingredient but we are not adding tamarind in order for the masaman to taste sour. In fact it should not taste distinctly sour but we're adding it in order to brighten the curry, cut the richness of the curry and so when you're tasting, think about does it taste one-dimensionally salty? Does it taste dull or is it bright? Does it need a little zing? And if it does then you want to add a little bit of tamarind just until it brightens it up. If you kind of don't know what I mean, what you can do, it's a really good exercise, is to make this curry without tamarind, just don't add any. When you get to the tasting place, taste it, then add about you know half of the tamarind that the recipe calls for, then taste it again. That difference between zero tamarind and half a tamarind, that's kind of what you're looking for and then you can decide whether you want to take the zing a little bit further. It's super super important even though it's not something you can taste, it makes a big difference in how delicious your dish is. All right, I am happy with how much tamarind is in here so I'm not going to add any more. The only thing left to do is eat! By the way, the rest of the peanuts I saved for a final sprinkling for garnish and also because I like fresh crunchy peanuts that haven't soaked in the curry but if you don't mind not crunchy peanuts, you can add them all in in the beginning. All right, of course this is served with jasmine rice and potato. And by the way, some people love masaman with sweet potatoes. So you can do sweet potatoes but not yams, like not the orange watery yams that people like to use to make sweet potato casserole in the US, you know, because those are too watery and soft, they don't hold up well. So you want to use either Asian like Japanese sweet potatoes or yellow flesh sweet potatoes which are firmer and drier. All right, let's eat! The moment I have been waiting for. In Thailand we don't use knife, dinner knife, we don't need it because this chicken is so tender that you should be able to just tear it with the spoon. I need a moment. Potato, I have no words. It's it's everything that you want a dish to be. The chicken is tender and flavorful. There's so much happening. The sauce is not too sweet which I always find is the problem with most takeout masaman is it's too sweet but it should not be. It's just well balanced, aromatic, so much umami thanks to that shrimp paste that we added. I really really recommend trying out the semi-homemade curry paste version even if you can buy pre-made masaman curry paste. I promise you it's not going to be the same and it'll be really really good. This is a dish that is good today, even better tomorrow because everything will have a lot of time to, the flavors will have a lot of time to absorb and mingle and everything just so good. The recipe as always will be on hotthaikitchen.com. If you have any extra questions about how to store it, types of potatoes, any sort of details like that, please check the recipe post. 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