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Thai Green Chicken Curry
Who doesn’t love a good Thai green curry? It’s fiery, full of flavour and absolutely delicious. This particular recipe starts with a homemade curry paste that’s far tastier than the shop-bought stuff. Combined with coconut cream, kaffir lime leaves, Thai basil, fish sauce and some aromatics, it makes for a bright Thai green curry that’s loaded with flavour. Be warned, it’s very hot – packing a whopping 20 green bird’s eye chillies, it certainly isn’t for the faint-hearted!
- Prep Time: 40 minutes
- Total Time: 1 hour
- Yield: 4 1x
Ingredients
Scale
For the curry paste:
- 20 green bird’s eye chillies, chopped (see Notes below the ingredients)
- 6 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
- 1 echalion shallot, chopped
- 8 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped
- 40 g fresh coriander stems, chopped
- 1 stalk lemongrass, thinly sliced
- 10 g galangal root, thinly sliced (no need to peel)
- 1 ½ tsp ground white pepper
- ½ tsp coriander seeds
- ½ tsp cumin seeds
- ½ tsp sea salt
- 1 tsp shrimp paste
For the curry:
- 100 ml coconut cream
- 4 chicken thigh fillets (boneless, skinless), cut into bite-sized pieces
- 150 ml chicken stock
- 1 tsp fish sauce
- 1 tsp palm sugar
- 3 kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped
- 10 – 14 Thai basil leaves, roughly torn
Instructions
- Prep all of your ingredients. Proper mise en place is helpful when cooking a recipe with this many elements.
- Place the curry paste ingredients, minus the shrimp paste, in a food processor and blitz until finely chopped. The finer the better; it’ll make the subsequent pounding process easier and shorter.
- Transfer the contents of the food processor to a mortar and pound with a pestle until a paste forms; this will take some time. Consider it your workout for the day!
- Once it begins to form a paste, add the shrimp paste and pound with the pestle to combine.
- Onto the curry itself. Place the coconut cream in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally, and cook until the cream begins to split, that is, until the coconut oil begins to separate from the coconut milk.
- Add the curry paste and cook, stirring constantly, until aromatic, around 2 minutes, then add the diced chicken thigh fillets and toss to coat in the paste.
- Add the chicken stock, fish sauce, palm sugar and lime leaves and stir to combine. Bring the curry to a simmer. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is cooked through, 8 to 10 minutes.
- Stir in the Thai basil and remove the saucepan from the heat. Taste and season with salt, fish sauce and/or palm sugar, as needed.
Notes
Note: this makes for a very hot curry. To make a milder curry, deseed and devein the chillies. It will still be hot though!
