How To Make Thai Red Curry Paste

Red Curry Paste is the start of many great dishes. This recipe is a Thai version of this ingredient. Once you have made the paste all you need is a protein, a vegetable, maybe a fruit and some coconut milk and you have a fantastic meal that everyone will enjoy. The Curry Paste keeps well in the refrigerator or freezer and makes it easy to whip up a fantastic meal after work when you are pressed for time.

This recipe requires Curry Paste Base to already be made.

This recipe is naturally gluten free and vegetarian.

Watch a Video

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

Sweat the Whole Spices In a Dry Pan

We start this recipe by sweating our whole spices. We’ll put a dry frying pan on a medium flame and add our star anise, coriander seed and cumin seed to it. Let this cook stirring frequently for about five minutes until it becomes fragrant and starts to brown a little.

Grind the Whole Spices

Once our whole spices have cooked enough we will put them right into a mortar and pestle. You can use a spice grinder if you want but we kind of like the old fashioned way for this. Amazon has a big variety of mortar and pestle sets. We have the Jamie Oliver version.

Add Cinnamon and Hot Chile

We want to grind these up some before adding the cinnamon and hot chile. You can use whatever kind of hot pepper you want here; habañero, serrano, rocoto–just something hot. The juice from the fresh pepper helps with the grinding process as well.

Grind Everything Finely

We will just work this in the mortar and pestle until we have it all ground up.

Cook Curry Paste Base and Ground Spices in Coconut Oil

Next we will heat some coconut oil in a sauce pan over medium flame. Once the oil is hot we will add our Curry Paste Base and stir it in. As this starts to cook we want to add in our ground spices from the mortar and pestle.

Add Fish Sauce and Coconut Milk

Then we will add 2 tablespoons of fish sauce and 1/2 cup of coconut milk. We’ll stir that in and then let the red curry paste cook and reduce and thicken a bit. We can cook this for 20 minutes to a half an hour until it is nice and thick. Your kitchen should be smelling really good now!

When our curry paste has cooled we put some in a jar in the refrigerator and we freeze the rest in 2 tablespoon cubes for future meals. We use molds like the souper cubes and then put the cubes in a freezer bag so we have red curry paste whenever we want it. It is really versatile stuff.

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Here are some recipes that use red curry paste:

• Red Curry Chicken
• Red Curry Pork Tenderloin
• Red Curry Salmon
• Thai Coconut Curry Crab
• Chicken Satay With Peanut Sauce

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