Nam phrik ong

A simmered dip rather than a pounded one, cooked down with pork and tomato until the oil separates.

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

Ingredients

300 g minced pork
500 g cherry tomatoes, halved
12 dried long red chillies
8 garlic cloves
6 shallots
2 tablespoons fermented soybean paste
1 teaspoon shrimp paste
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon palm sugar
3 tablespoons oil
100 ml water
1 bunch coriander

Method

SIMMERED, NOT POUNDED, and that is what separates it from the two other nam phrik on this site. Num is grilled chillies pounded smoky and thick; kapi is raw aromatics pounded thin and fierce. This one is cooked for half an hour with pork and tomato until it becomes a thick red sauce you could almost eat with a spoon.
Soak the dried chillies in hot water 20 minutes, then squeeze them out and pull the seeds from most of them. The colour comes from the skins and the heat from the seeds, so you can tune one without losing the other.
Pound the soaked chillies, garlic and shallots to a paste with the shrimp paste. This is the only pounding in the recipe.
Fry the paste in the oil over a medium heat, 4 minutes, until it darkens and the oil runs red.
Pork in, broken up, 5 minutes.
Tomatoes and soybean paste in, pressed with the spoon as they soften.
Water in, then down to a low simmer, uncovered, 25 to 30 minutes, stirring now and then.
IT IS READY WHEN THE OIL SEPARATES AND POOLS RED AT THE EDGES. Before that it is a wet tomato mince; after it, the tomatoes have broken down completely and it holds together on a spoon.
Fish sauce and palm sugar at the end. Taste for salt -- soybean pastes vary enormously between jars.
Coriander over it. Serve warm with pork crackling, raw cucumber, blanched greens and sticky rice.

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