Thai red curry

April 25, 2010 at 2:00 pm | Tags: , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

In the back of my fridge is a slowly shrinking bag of green mush that I've been guarding jealously. It's the remainders of the half-kilo of handmade green curry paste that we purchased from our favorite restaurant in Chiang Mai, longer ago than I should probably admit (OK, it was a year and a half ago). How could I use it generously when I knew that once it was gone, the only replacement I'd find was something imported in little plastic tubs whose quality and flavor were complete unknowns?

Now, the biggest barrier to making fresh Thai curry in Israel has been lifted -- fresh galangal is here, and I've bought a nice, fat root that should last me a while.

Mind you, there are still other challenges, as there are whenever you try to prepare a foreign cuisine. Beyond the question of whether foreign flavors meet local tastes, there's the whole matter of ingredients -- looking at this list of Thai vegetables, you'll probably notice a whole lot that you'll never find here (well, not yet, at least).

But negatives aside, we now have access to nearly all the main aromatics, the things that set the taste. So I whipped up my very own batch of curry paste, and while they might do it a bit differently in Thailand, it happened to taste quite good. And that's the most important thing. Continue reading Thai red curry...

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Cooking Thai in Israel: Galangal and turmeric enter the market

April 22, 2010 at 12:00 am | Tags: , , , , | 17 Comments

Traveling through Thailand in 2008, we fell in love with the cuisine -- fresh vibrant vegetables prepared with an exotic array of spices. So exotic, in fact, that you couldn't find them all here. Determined, I asked a few random Thai women at the Carmel Market where they found fresh galangal, a key ingredient in curry pastes and soups, and they told me you simply couldn't find it here.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I passed by Carmela's stand at the Carmel Market last week and there, next to the ginger, was a pile of strange, burly roots -- not just galangal, but turmeric to boot.

The roots, which have been here for about a month, were imported from Thailand by the Tekoa mushroom farm. The people at Tekoa told me that the imports are still in a trial stage, and it's too early to say what will happen. But for now, the fact is that both fresh galangal and turmeric are available here in Israel, which opens up a world of dishes from Thailand and other Southeast Asian cuisines. (My next post: Thai curry paste!) Continue reading Cooking Thai in Israel: Galangal and turmeric enter the market...

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All content and photos copyright 2008-2010, Liz Steinberg, at Cafe Liz (food.lizsteinberg.com). All rights reserved. Please seek permission before republishing.