Kaeng hang le

A dry curry with no coconut milk, carried by ginger and tamarind and a long slow braise.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains curry paste, which usually contains shrimp paste, fish sauce, pork.

Ingredients

1.2 kg pork belly, in 4 cm cubes
4 tablespoons hang le curry powder
3 tablespoons red curry paste
80 g ginger, in fine matchsticks
6 tablespoons tamarind paste
3 tablespoons palm sugar
3 tablespoons fish sauce
2 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 head pickled garlic, sliced
80 g peanuts, roasted
500 ml water
2 tablespoons oil

Method

NO COCONUT MILK, AND A GREAT DEAL OF GINGER. The curry takes its body from pork fat and its character from ginger cut into matchsticks rather than pounded, so you meet it in pieces. Every other pork curry on this site is built on coconut; this one would be a different dish with it.
MATCHSTICKS, NOT GRATED. Grated ginger dissolves into the sauce and gives you heat with nothing to find. 80 g looks absurd and is correct.
Marinate the pork with the curry powder and paste for 1 hour. The powder is a dry spice mix and it needs time against the meat.
Brown the pork in the oil in two batches, 6 minutes a batch, until the fat has begun to render and the edges have caught.
Water, tamarind, palm sugar, fish sauce and dark soy in. Half the ginger in now.
Covered, at a bare simmer, 1 hour 30, until the fat is translucent and the meat gives completely.
LID OFF FOR THE LAST 30 MINUTES and let it reduce until the sauce is thick and clings to the pork rather than pooling. This is a dry curry and a wet one has simply not been reduced enough.
The rest of the ginger, the pickled garlic and the peanuts in for the last 10 minutes, so the ginger keeps some bite.
Taste for tamarind at the end. Sweet, sour and salty with very little heat -- the chilli is a background, not the point.
Better the next day, which is unusual among these and worth knowing.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Thailand · All recipes