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A vibrant classic bursting with flavor. This is our complex yet harmonious Thai green curry with fish balls and prawns. Hello guys, welcome back to W Wednesday. Today we are making a dish that is at the absolute heart of the school of walk. This is a Thai green curry. Let's get started by making the fish ball mix. Um so we've got here some white fish. You can use any white fish. Um, actually mackerel is quite nice to use, something with a little bit of fattiness to it. We're going to add a few other ingredients here. So, we've got a little bit of salt and a little bit of sugar. About a teaspoon. We've got a little bit
of sesame oil for that lovely nutty aroma. Cornstarch or any starch. You could use potato starch here. And to bind, we're going to use our egg. And we are just going to blitz really well. We'll let this run for a good few minutes here until we end up with something really smooth. We're going to add in a little bit of ice here. The ice is going to help our mixture get really nice and smooth. And we're going to keep blending a little bit longer. And so after about 5 minutes of blitzing, we've got a really nice smooth paste that we are going to just pop into a bowl. And the good thing about these fish balls is you can make them and then you can freeze them. They store really well and you can use them
in so many different ways. You can use them in any kind of curry. You can uh put them on a skewer, grill them or deep fry them. Mashed potato is a good uh reference point for this. Let's prepare these fish balls now. So we've got our mix ready to go. I've got a pot of water here. Uh warm water just sort of bubbling under the boil there. And I've got some water here to apply to my hands. And the way we do this is we take a little bit of our mix at a time and you're just going to squeeze your fist together and use a spoon to form a little ball shape. And they go straight into the hot water which should help them to keep their shape. Um, if you're going to store these, if you're going to freeze these,
still do this part. Cook them first. Uh, and then cool them down, freeze them, and you can just use them from there. Um, and you'll see here they kind of sink to the bottom. Just going to bring them to the boil. And so we're going to cook them for about 3 minutes until they all float to the top. Okay, so 3 minutes later, they're nice and boiled at the top. Let's give them a good drain. And we'll set aside. And we'll make a start on the star of the show, which is our green curry paste. With any Thai curry, the most important part of the dish is the paste itself. That is where we're going to put all of our energy, all of our care, all of our attention. Um, if we get the paste
right, everything else becomes really, really easy. I'm going to start chopping these and I'm going to put them in an order on my plate here. That's going to be the order in which they're going to go into my pestle and mortar later. So, we're going to start with our green chilies. Green chilies are the most important thing in a Thai green curry because they're going to give us our heat, our flavor, but crucially our color as well. So, I've got some big green chilies here. These are fairly sort of mild. I'm going to use about five of these. I want plenty of green color in there. And I'm also going to add in a couple of uh Thai bird's eyes as well to really kind of up the heat in there. This should be a fairly sort of
fiery curry, but if that's not for you, you can just leave these out. So, these chilies uh I'm just going to give them a rough chop down. And we start with the chilies because they are actually quite hard to break down and we want them to have had plenty of time uh for the cell walls of these chilies to break down and for the color to release into the paste. So that is why we start with those. Just gives you that more pleasing final product. Now guys, I know this looks like a lot of chili, but please do not fear. It should be hot, but it shouldn't be like blow your head off spicy. All right. Next, we got our lemongrass, which we're just going to take the ends off, give it a little bash, and we just want to remove the
first kind of hard woody outer layers of the lemongrass. and we'll just cut it in half. With the things like lemongrass, they are quite tough. So, I'm going to give these a nice fine chop. It's just going to make my life easier when we get to the pestle and water. Okay. Next, our galang gal, which we're just going to slice, cut into matchicks, and then dice. So, ty green curry is a dish that really is at the heart of school of walk. It's one of our most popular menus on our corporate events and one of our most popular public classes, too. And even though we must have made it hundreds of times, we're still not sick of it. So, just going to finely chop these. Okay, next here we've got our uh
lime. So, this is our cafe lime. Um, usually we would use um the leaves, the fresh leaves. These are a little bit easier to find in Asian supermarkets. Um, you can either get them fresh or you can find them in the frozen section as well. If you can find these, these are even more flavorful. And what we do is just take a tiny little bit of the uh zest from the lime. And like even that much is going to give you such a boost of that like citrusy flavor in your curry. Couple more ingredients here. So we've got our uh lesser ginger. So, like the gallon gal, it's in the ginger family, but it has a much more
kind of uh mild uh sort of herbal medicinal quality to it. This one we're just going to give a rough chop to. Thai green curry weirdly is one of those dishes that has popped up again and again um throughout my life. I remember trying it for the first time uh as a teenager and being like wowed by the flavor. As someone who'd grown up in uh Devon and had experienced mostly salt and pepper, to think that food could taste that good was uh was like a big moment for me. We've got a little bit of garlic just peeled. Last but not least, uh a few Thai shallots here. Now, there's a lot of aromatics at play here. And I think really what makes Thai green curry so good is that it is
at the same time very complex but also harmonious. It's about finding the kind of balance in the flavors. No one thing should overwhelm the dish. Got a couple of other things to prepare for our curry here. So, we've got some Thai oberines here. So, with these, we're just going to remove the stem and we're just going to cut into bite-sized pieces. We've also got here some pea oberines. So, we're just going to pick these off the stem. And these have the most incredible kind of fresh grassy flavor. And they're also there for the sensation of pop of something popping in your mouth. And last, but by no means least, we've got some of those fresh uh lime leaves. So, for these, what we're going to do is just fold them in half
and just pull the stem out of the middle. Okay? And you can smell by doing that how much more of that lovely citrusy lime aroma is released by doing so. And then we're ready to make our paste. We've got our pest and mortar ready to go. What we're going to start with here is a little bit of salt. It's about half a teaspoon. You don't need loads, but what the salt does is it acts as an abrasive, which helps to kind of break everything down. Chilies are going to go in to begin with. And there's a little bit of technique to this. Uh often I think we can fall into the trap of thinking that we're just kind of mashing everything together. Um we're starting with our chilies. We're going to work our way
around. A couple of minutes of pounding on each ingredient. And then we add the next one and so on and so forth. Um as we go down, we're going down and forward, down and forward, down and forward, and repeating. You can use your other hand here as a bit of a guard. And you just want to gently rotate the mortar as you go as well. And that's going to give you a fairly even paste without having to think too much about where you've been pounding. This is a really great dish if you hate your neighbors. Not that I hate my neighbors. If any of them, if any of watching this, I like my neighbors. So guys, after the first couple of minutes, this is what we're looking for. So everything is starting to break down. We can then get our
lemongrass and galagal in and continue. And each time you add a new ingredient, you're just trying to get the paste back to where it was before you added that last ingredient. Okay? Okay. And we're going to keep working our way around our plate until everything's nice incorporated. And what you want to end up with is what I would describe as smooth guacamole. Okay? That is what you're looking for, that kind of texture. Uh but thanks to the magic of editing, uh you will now see my paste finished. Okay guys, so we're getting pretty close now. Now we've got a really nice color and consistency to our paste.
The final thing we're going to add is the all important shrimp paste. This is what's going to give the curry its real depth of umami flavor. Okay, about a teaspoon going in. And I think this is the most crucial ingredient. I think if it's missing this, then there's there's just something missing. And no matter how much fish sauce you add, just can't replicate that uh real kind of depth of funky flavor. That goes right in the eye. Today is trying to break me and Lance. Sorry. Okay, guys. So, time to cook this curry out. And the way this starts is with coconut fat. Uh, so if you have a little jar of coconut oil at home, you can use that. But actually, there's enough fat here in the coconut milk to do the job
for you. So, what I'm doing is taking the top part of the milk, so the cream part, and I'm adding it to my pan. And we are going to use the rest of that water. So keep that. Don't throw it away. But we're just starting with the cream part to begin with. We need to get this up to a boil. At the moment, this is basically fat and it's water. So what we need to do is we need to evaporate the water and we'll be left with the fat and we're going to use that to cook out our curry paste. There's actually two reasons why we use the coconut milk here. Number one is that fat's going to imbue more of that lovely sweet coconuty aroma to the curry. Number two is if I put in some vegetable oil here, if I
heated it up and I chucked in my curry paste and the temperature was a little bit wrong and I burnt my paste, that's it. Game over. Start again. Get the chopping board back out. Get the pest and mortar back out. We definitely don't want that. So guys, this is what you're looking for. We're seeing this fat start to split now. You see how these little bubbles of oil start to appear at the top of our curry? It also will kind of change sound. It will go from like a kind of simmering to more of a frying sound. Okay, at this stage, we're going to add in our paste. I probably need about half the amount that I've made, and I'm going to freeze the rest. Now, we're going to let this fry off for about four or five minutes here.
What we're looking for is we want that oil to kind of split and be bubbling away. In terms of the aroma, it's going to go from a very sort of raw uh aroma where, you know, maybe those onions and garlic are still making your eyes tingle a little bit to a bit more of a kind of sweet aroma. Yeah. And the other thing we're looking for here is to really kind of deepen the color of our paste. It's gone from a light green to a much darker green. Okay. Now, just for the last 30 seconds here, I'm going to add in my lime leaves and just fry them off as well. And my paste. I'm really happy with the color of it. Smelling really kind of sweet. We're going to go in with the rest of our coconut milk. You can do this kind of gradually.
It'll just give you a really nice smooth sauce. green curry. It shouldn't be sort of super thick. We want it to be fairly sort of soupy. What I've got here is a little bit of chicken stock, which I'm just going to use to thin out the sauce a little bit. And now let's bring that back up to the boil. And then we're going to let it simmer. And really now it's a case of just poaching the other ingredients through. In this sauce, we've already done the hard work of creating the flavor. So, it's just a case of cooking everything to its required level of dness. We're going to add our oberines in first, and we're going to let these simmer away for about five or six minutes. Depends on how much kind of bite you want there to be um in the
final dish. If you want them a little bit softer, you can leave them cooking for another couple of minutes. Now, what we're going to do before we go any further is just add our seasonings. So, we're going to go in with about a teaspoon of palm sugar. Now, there should be some sweetness to this curry. It shouldn't be overly sweet, but there should be a kind of sweetness in the background. Want to give that a good stir through. And fish sauce. I'm going to go with about a tablespoon to begin with. And I got a little bit left if I need to adjust. And what we're looking to do is to just bring out all of the flavors that were in that paste. Final steps. What we're going to do is just add back in our fish balls just to heat
through for another couple of minutes. And last but not least, our prawns, which are going to go in. And again, just need a couple of minutes simmering away to cook them through. So, our curry is ready. We're going to serve this And to garnish, we're going to use some fresh Thai basil. That really nice sweet almost kind of slightly anided flavor to it. Don't be shy with this. You want plenty of this over the top. Just for a little pop of color, some of our red chili, which just looks really good in contrast with the green. And that is it, guys. Our Thai green curry with fish ball and prawn. So, going to try it with
a little bit of rice, of course. And let's get one of those fish balls in there. You can see the sauce. It's really great. We've got that really nice kind of balance of flavors. Got that nice kind of harmony going on. The texture of the fish ball is really nice. Really kind of bouncy. And for me, it's got the perfect level of spice with those two bird's eye chilies in. It's got a really good kick to it, but it's not uncontrollably spicy. There we have it. our Thai green curry with fish balls and prawns. If you've enjoyed watching today, don't forget guys to like and subscribe to the channel and to leave your comments down below. And thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time on What Wednesday.
