How To Make The Curry Paste Base

This is the Curry Paste Base that we will use to make both Red Curry Paste and Yellow Curry Paste, the building blocks for many delicious meals. The base can be made the day before and stored in the refrigerator. This recipe uses a couple ingredients that you might have to hunt for. If you can’t find them locally we have links to them online. Any pre-planning you have to do will be worth it, we promise.

This recipe is naturally gluten free.

Watch a Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Curry Paste Base and both Red Curry Paste and Yellow Curry Paste:

Assemble the Ingredients

We’ll start by assembling our ingredients starting with the chiles. We use New Mexico Chiles and Guajillo Chiles for our curry paste. These are both the smooth skinned style of chiles. Some of the other ingredients you will need are shrimp paste, powdered cilantro root, galangal and kaffir lime zest and juice. Cilantro root is also known as coriander root and kaffir lime is also called makrut lime. When we can find kaffir limes we zest and juice them and freeze it in 2 tablespoon amounts in Souper Cubes for future use. We also freeze galangal root since we have to buy more than we need.

Organizing Your Spice Cupboard

When we started purchasing spices for curries and other exotic dishes we realized that we needed a better way to organize our spice cupboard. We searched for ideas and discovered Vertical Spice which really solved the problem for us. Their units come in various sizes and we were able to customize it so we didn’t have to alter the cupboard itself at all. We are so happy with our spice cupboard now. Here is what it looks like:

Remove Stems and Seeds From the Dried Chiles and Soak Them

So back to our recipe. We need to remove the stems and seeds from our chiles. Then we will put them into a bowl and cover them with hot water. We’ll let them soak for at least 15 minutes or a half hour is better.

Toast the Shrimp Paste

While the chiles are soaking we are going to toast our shrimp paste. We’ll tear off a 4 inch piece of foil and put a generous teaspoon of shrimp paste in the middle of one end. Then we will wrap the foil around the paste so it is loosely contained.

Using the other end of the foil as a handle we hold the shrimp paste over a flame to toast it. If the foil gets too hot you can use tongs to hold it. You will smell when the shrimp paste is toasted. We want to get it fragrant enough that the neighbors complain. Then we can just set it aside and let it cool for a while.

Prepare the Other Ingredients

We can also use this time to chop up our other ingredients. They will be a lot easier for us to blend up if we make them into smaller pieces. We will peel and chop the garlic, shallots and galangal and zest and juice the limes if they are fresh. You’ll want to cut the lemon grass into thin slices as well. With lemon grass, we just use the bottom third and discard the tops.

Blend the Chiles

Once the chiles are soaked we will put them in a blender with a half cup of the soaking water. We want to get these blended fairly smooth before we add our other ingredients.

Blend All the Ingredients

Then we will add all our other ingredients to the blender. It really doesn’t matter what order we do this in, they all have to go in anyway. Don’t forget our shrimp paste. It should be cool enough to unwrap and add to the blender.

Now we just need to blend this all until it is smooth. You can add a little more soaking water if you need to but don’t add too much. We want this to be a paste rather than a liquid. Just keep working it until it is all smooth.

Storing Your Curry Paste Base

When you are all done it should look like the picture below. Put it in a container while you get the red or yellow curry ingredients together.

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