Beyond coconut milk and curry paste

There’s more to Thai curry than the ingredients on the supermarket shelves. You just have to know where to find them.

I’ve always been a fan of Thai food, whether from a good local takeaway or cooked using the curry pastes we’ve all seen in the shops. But when I started flicking through a Thai cookbook, I realised that I’d never heard of at least a third of the ingredients there. And a lot of them didn’t appear in my local supermarket or greengrocer either.

Then my parents presented me with a voucher for the Sydney seafood school for my birthday. After much deliberation and drooling I selected the Thai seafood course, hoping to learn how to make fish cakes, hot and sour prawn soup and fish curries.

But the first stop of the day was the Lucky Thai Grocery Store at 50 Campbelltown Street, near Central Station. This shop stocks all the ingredients you need for curries, soups, salads, street food like fish cakes and sticky rice. It’s close enough to the station to make buying them a quick and enjoyable trip – which is the opposite to how I feel whenever I enter a supermarket.

I arrived and took a copy of the notes and recipes from one of the teachers and joined the milling throng outside the shop. The teachers gathered us around two shopping baskets full of jars, tins, vegetables and spices to give us a crash course in Thai ingredients. We wouldn’t be cooking with all of them that day, but it was a good introduction to what else is out there.

Some of the ingredients I recognised- lemongrass, coriander (I now know how to use the roots as well as the leaves!) and ginger (not to be confused with the peppery galangal, as I had done for years). But I’d never seen a Thai pea eggplant, which is about the size of a pea and apparently goes very well with curry. And I’d certainly never thought of using pineapple or green bananas in a curry either.

One of the ingredients that really fascinated me was a huge purple cone, which turned out to be a banana blossom. The teacher explained that you peel away the outer purple petals until you reach the creamy centre, before adding it to chicken cooked in coconut milk, lime juice and chilli jam for a cool, summery salad. This description sent me straight to my cookbook once I got home and back down to the store two weeks later to buy one of these blossoms.

Exploring inside before heading to the cooking school yielded more interesting ingredients. Some of the other new additions to my shopping list include;

Gapi: dried shrimp, one of the ingredients you can use to make your own curry paste.

Red shallots: these are crushed and added to the curry paste mixture

Tamarind paste: another of the ingredients we used to make our own curry paste.

Palm sugar: this gives the curries a sweet flavour and cuts some of the heat.

Dried red chillies: these give the red curries their heat and colour, as well as being easier to crush in the blender than fresh.

Green mangoes: these can be substituted for papaya if you don’t like the taste.

Kaffir lime leaves: these should be bruised before being added to a curry.

Sticky rice: this can be used to make a variety of sweet dishes, some of which are next on my list of dishes to try.

I hope this encourages you to go forth and explore Thai grocery stores and their bountiful array of goodies! You’ll be cooking like a local in no time.

By Laura Boness.

Image credit: Laura Boness