DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We eat Thai food nearly every week. There are two Thai restaurants in town, one of which makes good curry, and the other of which makes good money. (It is closer to Main Street, serves smaller portions, and charges a buck more per entree. The curry there isn’t any good, but the dinner crowd is bigger, proving that the commercial real-estate mantra is not “Quality! Quality! Quality!”)

Lately I’ve been playing with Thai curry recipes, to save the expense of eating out so often. (Yeah, I’m bitching about a $6 plate of curry. If it makes you feel better: I usually order an appetizer too.) I’ve tried five recipes. Most of them were pretty good, except for the versions that call for fish sauce, a liquid so vile that a single tablespoon can overwhelm three pounds of vegetables, fresh garlic, chilis, and coconut milk. I don’t know what orifice they squeeze that stuff from, but it is so far beyond disgusting that I’ve just gone out to find a new word to describe it… something unfamiliar and therefore undiminshed by past use (e.g. “you’ll love this new detergent!”), and with a hint of the biblical to support connotations of horror: mephitic. Fish sauce is mephitic. You heard it here first.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve made all these curry recipes, and although most of them were good, none of them were curry. There’s a particular flavor profile that is characteristic of restaurant curry, that I’ve not been able to match at home.

The problem with my curries is the paste. I use an inauthentic substitute, mass-produced for the American market and (apparently) dumbed-down for the American palette: Thai Kitchen Red Curry Paste. The resulting dish is vaguely reminiscent of Thai curry, but basically wrong. It’s missing something (don’t say “fish sauce”). Or, it has something extra that isn’t needed, some sort of sodium benzoate or chemically brewed flavoring agent that isn’t quite true.

A reasonable person might ask, “if every time you make curry with that Thai Kitchen stuff, you end up disappointed, why do you keep using it?” Answer: it’s the only curry paste I could find. Also: the jar isn’t empty yet. Finally we remembered, on one of our frequent trips to SF, to visit a Thai grocery store. We found an actual imported curry paste, with actual Thai-language writing on the label. We grabbed a packet each of red, yellow, and green.

The verdict? These packets make a rich, spicy, Thai dish that is… not exactly curry. They’re very good, and I’ll never buy Thai Kitchen brand curry paste again because these are so much better. Yet I’m still searching for the perfect curry recipe. I suspect that no commercial preparation will match what I can get in a restaurant, so I’ve begun experimenting with scratch recipes too. If you happen to have a grandmother from Thailand and access to her secret recipe book, please please please send me her curry recipes.