Monday, February 16, 2009

Green Curry Chicken

If you are looking for huge complex flavors in a simple to prepare dish, curries are a great place to start. Here is a taste of the green curry that I made. I used a canned green curry paste as my base and its primary ingredients are ground green chiles, shallots, ginger, garlic, and lemongrass. The heat of this dish can be altered to taste based on the amount of curry paste you wish to add. We prefer ours a little spicy so we use a ratio of 4 teaspoons of curry paste to 1 can of coconut milk.

My ingredients were sliced chicken breast, red onion, red, orange, yellow, and green bell pepper, baby eggplants, Thai eggplants, lemongrass, ginger, garlic, kaffir lime leaves, cilantro, Thai basil, lime, green curry paste, chicken broth, and coconut milk. Perhaps the hardest to find ingredient in the list is the lime leaves but they are worth a trip to an Asian supermarket. They have an intense citrusy lime aroma that is hard to compare.


I started by simply stir frying all the vegetables in a very hot wok until they began to soften. Then a couple teaspoons of the curry paste and all the other aromatics such as lemongrass, garlic, ginger, and kaffir lime leaves go into the wok. Heating the curry paste up with the vegetables will give it a chance warm up and bloom its flavor a little bit.

Next we add the chicken broth, coconut milk, basil and cilantro. Once this mixture comes to a simmer we add the sliced chicken breast allow it to poach in the liquid until it is done. The lemongrass stalks can be removed from the mixture and a fresh sprinkle of basil and cilantro can be tossed in to finish the dish. I served it with lime wedges and a fresh scoop of rice from the rice cooker.

1 comment:

  1. Curry dishes like these are so simple when you have the pastes on hand. My favorite brand is Mae Ploy.

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