Kaeng khae

A thin herbal curry with no coconut, built on more green leaves than anything else.

Chicken. Not vegetarian — contains chicken, curry paste, which usually contains shrimp paste, fish sauce.

Ingredients

• 400 g chicken, in small pieces
• 1 litre water
• 5 tablespoons northern curry paste
• 100 g cha-om, torn
• 100 g pak chee lao leaves
• 150 g green beans, in lengths
• 100 g pea aubergines
• 100 g pumpkin, in small cubes
• 100 g wood ear mushrooms
• 2 tablespoons fermented soybean paste
• 2 tablespoons fish sauce
• 2 stems green peppercorns

Method

1. THE LEAVES ARE THE DISH, not a garnish on it. There is more green matter here than meat, and the curry is thin and bitter-herbal rather than rich. Treated as a vegetable curry with herbs added at the end, it comes out as neither one thing nor the other.
2. NO COCONUT MILK. Like the kaeng pa already on this site, this one is water-based, and adding coconut to soften it removes exactly the bitterness it is built on.
3. Dissolve the paste in a ladleful of the water first and whisk it smooth before the rest goes in. With no fat in the pan there is nothing to fry it in.
4. Simmer the paste in the water 10 minutes before anything else, so it cooks out.
5. Soybean paste in, which is most of the salt.
6. Chicken in, 10 minutes.
7. Vegetables by hardness: pumpkin 8 minutes, wood ear and aubergines 5, beans 4.
8. CHA-OM LAST AND BRIEFLY, 2 minutes only. It is strong and faintly sulphurous and long cooking turns that into something unpleasant.
9. Pak chee lao and the peppercorn stems in off the heat.
10. Fish sauce at the end. It should taste green, bitter, salty and hot, with no sweetness at all. If that sounds unbalanced, it is the balance this curry has.

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