Hot, hot chicken in a flash
Let me present to you the world’s most spectacularly successful, quick as a flash and wonderfully flavoured dish; a dish for cooks large and thin, old and young, keen and dull; for the flamboyant and the flat, for singles, doubles, triples and more.
It’s a curry which takes the same time to cook as it does to uncover the takeaway menu you filed away in a safe place, and can never find when you desperately need it. It needs nothing more than a few chicken breasts, a little Thai curry paste and a tin of coconut milk. Any extras depend on your ingenuity.
I am almost embarrassed to put it down on paper, it is so simple… if you have a cache of Thai curry paste in your pantry. If you do, then you’ve probably made this dish, and hundreds like it already; if you don’t, you should.
The pre-prepared paste is the key to the simplicity and pace of the dish. Curry pastes are the backbone of Thai cooking, providing all the heat and many of the nuances of this marvellous cuisine. These pastes are a little like Indian spice mixes — you can expect a different recipe from each of your neighbours, but the basics are much the same — chillies, chillies, chillies, chillies, lemon grass, shallots, garlic and spices. I have seven books on Thai cooking, including one in English and Thai, and each of them has a variation on the theme. The only one of these published in Thailand, The Best of Thai Cuisine by Sisamon Kongpan, is the only one which does not list curry paste as a separate item.
Ms Kongpan, a teacher at the Department of Home Economics in Bangkok, prefers to list the required spice mix for curries with the appropriate recipe.
This is her mix for a curry paste to go with chicken:
- 5 dried chillies,
- 10 cloves garlic,
- 1 teaspoon sliced galangal,
- 1 tablespoon sliced lemon grass,
- ½ teaspoon sliced kaffir lime zest,
- 1 teaspoon coriander root,
- 5 black peppercorns,
- 1 tablespoon roasted coriander seeds,
- 1 teaspoon roasted cumin seeds,
- 1 teaspoon salt,
- 1 teaspoon shrimp paste.
Ms Kongpan isn’t one to offer modern methods to get your mix into a paste. She says: ‘Place chilli paste ingredients in a mortar and pound until ground and mixed thoroughly.’ For people with grinders and whizzers, the way to go is to grind the dried ingredients in a special coffee grinder (spices only) until powdered, then add to the rest of the ingredients in the whizzer until a paste forms. Most of the other writers, including Char- maine Solomon (Thai Cookbook) and Mogens Bay Esbensen (Thai Cuisine), suggest at least a cup of shallots or onions as part of the paste. Chillies vary from five (Ms Kongpan) to ‘twenty to thirty’ (Mr Esbensen). Mr Esbensen must have a diamond palate. He also says you can add more chillies, without affecting the heat of the paste — if you remove the seeds. Apparently the chillies he used at Port Douglas were somewhat milder than the incendiaries available in Bangkok.
Even so, there’s a lot of bad press about chillies. To me they are the greatest of flavour enhancers, and frivolous use of them for fire is folly.
All that detail is fine, but for most of us, making curry pastes is a little bit like making tomato sauce. We’ll get around to it eventually. The good news is that pre-made curry pastes of very good quality and flavour are readily available at Asian stores and large supermarkets. I suggest you try them first before you get stuck into the fine detail of your own curry paste. They keep very well, and it’s a rare household which will make more than one of these curries a week. And then, when you make your own, you’ll know what you’ve got to beat.
1 chicken breast per person (this recipe is just as appropriate with fillets of firm fish)
1 dessertspoon red curry paste (that’s hot!)
200ml coconut milk — Note that coconut milk is at the top of ingredients not recommended for those who have cholesterol problems (it has a high level of saturated fat). If that’s you, just swap the coconut milk for low-fat yoghurt. If you use yoghurt, it will curdle a little; that’s fine. Note, too, it’s a good idea to add a little sweetness to the yoghurt: that, to me, is what makes coconut milk such a wonder in these sorts of dishes. For sweetness, you can add, at the top of the list, a split vanilla bean; at the middle, a little honey; at the end, some sugar. Please yourself, and your budget.
1 stem of lemon grass, chopped — Even though this is included in the paste, fresh lemon grass really does enhance the final product.
½ clove garlic, sliced finely — If you makeMs Kongpan’s paste, you will have no need for the garlic.
½ cup fresh herbs, chopped or picked from the leaves — Thyme is excellent in this dish, as are tarragon, basil, and the most commonly used Thai herb, coriander.
1 onion, chopped finely
1
Remove the skin from the chicken and pull away the underfillets for another day. Slash the chicken breasts several times three-quarters of the way through the breasts.
2
Whizz the curry paste and coconut milk/yoghurt together quickly, and add the sliced lemon grass, sliced garlic and herbs. Pour the mix over the chicken breasts, and leave for a couple of hours, turning the breasts here and there.
3
Heat the oven to 200°C. Cook the onion gently in a little oil, until softened, about 10 minutes. (You can leave this out, but the crunch and sweetness of the onion is a winner.)
4
Pour the sauce/marinade into the onion pan, add the chicken breasts, and gently bring to a boil. Boil for a minute, stirring to ensure there is no burning or sticking, and then place in the oven.
5
Cook for about 10 minutes, or until the chicken is just done and the sauce has thickened.
6
Serve the chicken with enough sauce to hold the breast. This dish is delicious in the traditional way, with steamed rice; extra delicious in the Aussie way — with baked potatoes, steamed spinach, and cauliflower and white sauce, tinted with nutmeg. Try the latter, and see.
WINE: Depending how carried away you get with the chilli, you can swing from water to tea to a good New Zealand sauvignon blanc.