Tom Yum Goong Recipe (Creamy Style!) ต้มยำกุ้งนำ้ข้น | Thai Recipes

Sawasdee ka, welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen. So today I am making a sort of a remake but at the same time it's a different version of this very popular dish we all know about and that is Tom Yum Goong. So the version I'm showing you today is what we call Tom Yum Goong Nam Khon and Nam Khon means a thick broth. So it's sort of a creamy version of the standard Tom Yum and it's become really popular in Thailand in the past several years. So I want to make sure I get you guys all caught up with the trend. Alright, let's get started. So when making Tom Yum Goong, you gotta really pay attention to your goong or your shrimp. So I always use head-on, shell-on shrimp because see all this like orange stuff in the shrimp head? That is good shrimpy flavor, the shrimp tamale basically, I call it shrimp foie gras. And that's gonna go into our broth and it's gonna add so much flavor and shrimpiness. And the shell, we will also use to make the shrimp stock which will be the base for the soup. Now, what you want to do with this is you want to first take off the head and you just grab it and twist and the head will come off easily. Throw that into your stockpot. Now I want to show you a little trick for deveining shrimp without having to cut the back open. And you can do this before or after you peel the shrimp. And you can usually see a vein right through it and ah! And I take the toothpick, I poke it at the second joint under that vein. I pull it and then you'll be able to grab the end of the vein and just pull it right out. Isn't that cool? When I first discovered it, I was like, oh my god, that's so cool. And now I love deveining shrimp because it's so satisfying. And I used to hate it. It used to be like one of those things I absolutely hate doing. Now I'm like, oh yeah, this is so fun. Anyway, and then once you're done that, you just peel the shrimp, throw the shell into your stockpot. All right, so I've got my shrimp in the pot here. And I want to start by just sautéing the shrimp. So you want to cook it until all the residual water evaporates and then you'll start to notice that the shrimp tamale is starting to stick to the pot. And I want to get that a little bit caramelized, get the shrimp fat a little toasty. I find it adds a nice flavor to it. If you don't have shell on shrimp for whatever reason and you want to just start with some unsalted good chicken stock, you can. I do have a recipe for how to make your own delicious Thai-style chicken stock as well. I'll put the link right up here. Ooh, look at that. I'm starting to get some nice browning of the shrimp stock, of the shrimp tamale. Mmm, smells like Thai barbecue shrimp right now. Ah, yes. So now I'm going to deglaze this with water. And then I'm going to scrape off, first of all, all the little bits off the bottom. And then I'm going to let this simmer for 15-20 minutes. I mean, the shrimp shells are so thin, it doesn't take that long. So while the shrimp stock is simmering away, let's take a look at our tom yum trinity, which is what I call the three herbs that go into tom yum, okay? So of course, lemongrass, and I'm just going to review how you prep this. With lemongrass, I just want to use the bottom half. This is where the flavor is strong. This is where the flavor is weak. I save this part for stock, but if you're not going to save it for anything, you can just throw it in. Bang this so it's crushed, so that way the aromatic juices come out. And you can use the back of the knife, or if you've got a mortar and pestle handy, you can use the pestle as well, which is a little more effective. And now you've released the aroma from the cells, the galangal. So this is what galangal looks like. It smells to me like pine, like a pine forest after the rain, is what I like to say. A lot of people say, oh, just use ginger, and like, you can. You can throw ginger in there. But you'll end up with something that tastes very different. It's not going to be bad, it's just not going to be tom yum, okay? So just remember that. And finally, we have kaffir lime leaves, or bai makrud. I don't think I've ever referred to it in Thai, but there we go, bai makrud. And you just want to give them a rough tear to allow the aroma to come out. Mmm, smells so good. If you don't have kaffir lime leaves, they do sell them dry and frozen, which you can use. If you really can't find it, lime zest does a decent job as a substitute. Lemongrass also comes frozen, it also comes dry. If you're using dry, make sure you use more of it, okay? So for the chilies, I'm just going to give them a quick pound, just so that I don't have any big chunks that people are going to accidentally eat. You can also just finely chop it. And I'm just using two, because I'm feeding this to Adam, and you know, I don't want to make it too crazy spicy. And there you go. Mmm, so the shrimp stock has done simmering, and look at this beautiful orange color broth. Ah, that's where all the flavor is. And now I'm going to fish out all the shrimp. All the herbs go in. All of these, again, you will not eat. They're really tough and chewy, they're for infusion purposes only. So you can leave it in, that's what we traditionally do. But if you want to make it easy for people to eat it, you can fish it out after they're done simmering, okay? And so they're going to take about five minutes. I also want to add my chilies right now, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to rinse my mortar with this broth, so I make sure I get all of the chili bits out. Ooh, mmm, spicy juices. Okay, oh, it smells so good in here right now. For easier navigation, I'm going to remove just some of these herbs. Not all of it, because I do like to have it around just as a visual representation of the flavors that are in here, but it can be a little cluttered. So now, the part that's going to make this soup a nam kwon soup is evaporated milk. Yes, traditionally, we don't use dairy in our cuisine at all, and you know that I rarely use dairy in my cooking, but it's become sort of a trendy thing these days to use evaporated milk as a creamy agent. You can also do coconut milk, but coconut milk will add a coconut flavor, which then sort of turned it into something a little different, that may be something you prefer. But evaporated milk, I find, adds a neutral creaminess, it doesn't end up tasting milky at all, and it just immediately turns a creamy, creamy orange. Ssamjang always has some sort of mushrooms in it. Traditionally, it's usually straw mushrooms. I can't get straw mushrooms here. My second favorite is oyster mushrooms. I can't get oyster mushrooms these days. They didn't have it at the store, so I settled with my third favorite, which is beech mushrooms or shimeji mushrooms, which are still really good. There's nothing wrong with these. I just personally prefer oyster or straw. Now, I'm just gonna let this cook for about a minute. So while the mushrooms are cooking away, I wanna show you this ingredient here, and that is chili paste, Thai chili paste or Thai chili jam. This is a very key ingredient in tom yum with shrimp. I have a recipe for how to make it if you cannot find it, and it usually comes in a glass jar. It's mostly sweet, but also has a really nice roasty aroma with chilies and shallots and garlic in it. I get a lot of questions about whether you can leave this out, and the answer is yes, but. And that but being this is a pretty major flavor of tom yum goong, so you can leave it out. Your soup will be delicious, but it will be something pretty different, like it'll be a very light and easy-to-drink kind of soup, whereas this just adds, boom, like a punch of flavor. There are many other types of tom yum that doesn't use chili paste, so you're definitely not wrong. But if you're going to do that, add a little bit of sugar to balance the salt and the acid, because this chili paste is quite sweet. Alright, now the mushrooms look done. I'm going to add the fish sauce, and the chili paste. So here's the chili paste, what it looks like out of the jar. Alright, so that's going in, and as you can see, I am adding quite a bit. So as I said, it is a major flavor component, so do your best to find it or make it. It's actually not that hard. I'm going to stir that in and let all of that dissolve. Now at this point, it's going to smell pretty milky, and you might be freaked out, like oh my god, it's so milky. Do not worry, that milkiness kind of goes away at the end for some strange reason. Mmm, does that not look so good or what? Ooh, look at that! Alright, so now the shrimp are going to go in, and shrimp take so little time, so really like 30 seconds for shrimp this size in this hot broth is more than enough. And that is it, almost done. So I'm going to turn this off now, and then we're still missing a key ingredient, and that is lime juice, but I want to wait for it to just kind of cool down a little so it's not boiling or simmering, because I find that because there's milk in here, if I add the lime directly in while it's boiling hot, it curdles. It's going to curdle anyway, but I find that if you let it cool, it curdles less. I'm going to stir in the lime, and I also find that if I'm stirring while I'm adding the lime juice, the curds are smaller, and it looks better like that. Mmm! And now to finish it off, some greenery, some sawtooth coriander. You can just do cilantro, but I thought I'd do something different, introduce you to a new herb. So sawtooth coriander looks like this. Okay, it's long, it's got serrated edges, it's got this beautiful minty cooling aroma. So if you've never had it before, I would recommend you give it a try, it goes really really well in tom yum. Taste, taste, taste, taste, taste. It's a soup, you always want to taste and adjust seasoning at the end. Mmm! Ah, so good. Alright, let's dish it up. Oh, look at this. And you can eat this with rice, or you can just have it on its own. What my mom likes to do is she puts the rice right into this bowl and eat it like a rice soup. I love doing that too. Mmm! Oh! It's so full of flavor, it's like BAM! Flavor in your face! It's sour, it's sweet, it's salty, all those herbs really come through. Man, and it's almost, you know, if you love the regular tom yum, the nam say, or the clear broth tom yum, this would just be a little bit richer, a little bit more voluptuous. Definitely, definitely a must try. So I hope you give this recipe a go, it's super easy. The recipe as always will be on hotthaikitchen.com. 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