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It's definitely worth putting the time in to making the curry powder for this delicious northern Thai curry. Welcome back to Walk Wednesday. I'm Jeremy from School of Walk, London's premier Asian cookery school. I can't wait to show you this one. It is so earthy and packed full of flavor. quite like to get a big chunk of pork belly for this dish with the rib on. The bone sort of holds the moisture in and adds flavor to the whole dish. And you can see even the little sort of knuckle or the joint pieces there. I'm just keeping on some of these chunks of pork. Of course, with this chopper, I'm not going to be able to chop through these solid bones. So, I take the rib off and just add flavor to the curry with those. Oh, look at those ribs.
The rest just large dices. This is a good piece of pork here. You can see we've got these lovely layers of fat, but it's not excessively fatty, which I quite like. Now, this Northern Thai curry is all about the curry powder. You could buy, you know, a shop bought curry powder or a mix of garam masala, but it wouldn't quite be the same as doing it yourself. The whole spices I've got here are a mixture of fennel seeds, cumin seeds, black pepperc corns, coriander seeds. Got quite a lot of cumin seeds and coriander seeds. Then I've got some cinnamon, clove, and star, which I absolutely love. And some green cardamon pods as well.
These are all going to be blitz powder in a second. But first off, I'm going to toast those. And what this sort of toasting or tempering of spices on a medium heat does is really sort of draws out the incredible oils, those essential oils from the spices. You you'll really start to smell the aroma of that mix of spices after about 30 seconds or so. Oh, got a hit of cinnamon and starinise there. You can see that's starting to smoke a little, which I don't mind. And the cumin seeds and the fennel seeds and the coriander seeds are starting to sort of get a deeper brown color to them. So that can go straight into a spice grinder.
See, it doesn't take long to make up a good amount of your own garam masala essentially. Oo. It's almost got this sort of citrusy sort of hit or aroma to it, which it's kind of what you want, which is why I like using, you know, these freshly ground spices. And that will work so well with the lime leaf, turmeric powder, and some nutmeg. That a mix. And I'll show you this. is perhaps a little bit more coarse than what you'd get if you were to buy it from a shop, but I don't mind that. I want that sort of rustic sort of edge to this dish, you know. Now, I'm going to make a very rough paste to start this curry off. I've got some shallots, some ginger, and loads of lime leaves. These are frozen lime
leaves. They've been defrosted so they come out nice and fresh. And some shrimp paste. I'm just going to blitz this as well because it's easy. Now, traditionally, you use Thai shallots for this, but you know, red onion or shallots like this work a treat, too. Cuz I'm going to put this all into the blitzer. Just a rough should of chop to start it off is absolutely fine. You know, this is a good show of how you can make something completely from scratch, which actually has quite a lot of ingredients in nice and easy and simple. And with the ginger, I'm going to use half of this for the paste.
This sort of light paste. And then the other half I'm just going to cut into nice fine matchixs to pretty much garnish at the end. like it's going to go with some pickled garlic which you can buy in the shops. Got this almost slight sweet sour flavor in that garlic in those garlic cloves which should go in for the last sort of 20 minutes or so. Lime leaf. Just going to take the stalks off this because they can be quite tough. Leave a couple of them to pop into straight into the curry hole. If you want, you can put some lemongrass in this as well. Totally up to you. But
my preference is to allow that curry powder to really stand out. Got quite a few cloves of this pickled garlic. So, I'm going to take a couple of them and pop them into the paste as well. I'm going to put some oil into this just to help make the paste. And that oil will seep out into the curry later on. Now with this curry powder, I'm going to kind of use it in different sort of parts of the curry to build flavor. So I'm going to mix a bit into this paste first. About a teaspoon. My shrimp paste can go in there as well. Just press that in to make sure you don't get any sort of clumps of shrimp paste. Next up, I'm going to marinade the pork quite simply with a bit of salt and two tablespoons of my curry powder.
Give that a good massage through. Kind of like a dry rub. right now. Of course, I'm cooking this into a curry today. But as I said, if you just rub this around with a bit of oil and then make kebabs out of this and slow cook them on the barbecue, it would be an amazing dish as well. From there, it is easy stuff. You know, you've done all your prep as long as you organized this dish. Pretty quick to cook. Well, it's a slowcooked dish. Quick to prep. Little bit of oil. Remember, we've got some oil already in the paste. And the first thing you want to do is fry your paste. And this is where I would say people perhaps don't take enough time on this step.
Slow down. Enjoy yourself when you're making your curries. You want to cook your paste really well to a point where you're cooking out the grassy sort of aroma, that sort of slightly more raw flavor. So, I'm on a medium heat. You just want to make sure you don't burn the paste, but you do want it to caramelize and almost stick a little bit on the bottom of your walk or your pan before you then stir it again. Well, this process of tempering that paste takes at least sort of seven or eight minutes, if not more. In the meantime, I've got my sauces where I've got even more flavor. It's going to be packed into this curry. Got couple of tablespoons of fish sauce. About 3 tablespoons of tamarind concentrate.
About 1 and 1/2 tbsp of ketchup manis. That's the sweet soy sauce. This is actually this Thai style sweet soy sauce. And that will kind of balance out the sourness a little to the tamarind. I've got some palm sugar here, which I'm going to mix one of these chunks in first, and then we'll see how much more I need when I come to season the curry at the end. I do want a little bit of palm sugar in here at the beginning to kind of caramelize around all that lovely pork. So once your paste has started to kind of separate out a little and the color of it is getting much sort of deeper and darker brown, that's when you're ready to add the next ingredients. Got my
couple of lime leaves here. And then I'm going to get the pork in at this point. I mean, just looking at this, you know this is going to be good. So I've worked the heat up. So, I'm just going to mix that paste well. Oh, that onion's making me cry. Get me some goggles. Just make sure that paste doesn't burn. You want to let that sort of do its thing and start to seal the pork a little before we add anything else. Going to have to give it a fold every couple of minutes just to make sure that the stuff at the bottom doesn't burn too much.
Now, I'm still on a high heat, a pretty high heat, not the highest, but sort of medium high. When you've seared your meat nicely all the way around, then you want to pour this sauce mix, which has that lovely sweet and sour flavor to it, all the way round and over. And this is by no means traditional, but crispy fried shallots or onions works a treat to just add to that sort of deep, savory, and earthy flavor. I'm going to give that a good mix. And when you do this, once you've poured your sauce in and it's bubbling away, give the bottom of your pan a really good scrape cuz any of that flavor that's stuck to it from that curry powder and your paste, you want to bring off and pull into the curry rather than at the
bottom of the pan. Now give that a couple of minutes to bubble away, start to caramelize as much as possible before you want to pour the stock in. You can use chicken stock or just some water or coconut water if you want to cover the meat. High heat. I can see that sort of dry smoke happening now. That's the spices wanting to burn. So, my stock's going to go in. You need enough liquid in there to fully cover your meat. I'm going to bring it to a boil and then bring it down to a low heat to simmer for about an hour and a half. The curry's had about an hour and a half now. Just under actually.
Just pressing into this pork and it needs to push a little bit further. So, I'll probably push it to a couple of hours. It's a good time to taste. Wow, that is punchy. And I can already taste with the tamarind in there that lovely sort of almost slightly pickled flavor. So, the pickled garlic can go in for the last 30 minutes to complement that. And then this raw ginger I'm going to pop in now as well. Keep that going. Another half an hour and that should be good. So, this has had a good two hours with that last half hour. Deep color of that sauce. Some coriander to garnish.
Other than having to wait for it to develop that flavor, this is really simple. This curry is purposefully fatty. Should just sort of have all come together with what I'm prepared for. A very punchy sauce. Now having tasted it before the pickled garlic went in that half hour of the pickled garlic bubbling away in the sauce completely changes the flavor of it. Kind of brings out the tartness and also the sweetness of the tamarind as well. Guys, you're going to love this. Have it with a nice bowl of steamed rice, some simple veg on the side. my northern style Thai pork curry. Don't forget to like, comment, subscribe. Ding, hit that notification bell for lots of different recipes all based on Asian cuisine.
