Red Curry Chicken is one of many recipes of red curry, the foreigners’ favorite scrumptious Thai dish. The red curry has the significant characteristic from the color of its red soup that comes from the main ingredient of dried red chili. Red curry presents a hot flavor as its major taste and follow by a salty and creamy taste from the coconut milk. The old-fashioned recipe of this menu is cooked with a very strong hot flavor similar to Wild Curry (Curry without coconut milk).
Red curry will mostly be cooked with beef, pork, chicken, duck or wild life such as boar or partridge because the ingredients to make curry paste have strong fragrance from the spices and a strong taste which can eliminate the smell from meat well. The red curry that is made with chicken is called “Red Curry Chicken”. And we can add any vegetables in this dish i.e. eggplant, pea eggplant, long eggplant, bamboo shoot, young coconut shoot, and straw mushroom.
The Nutrition in Red Curry Chicken
Red curry paste
There are a lot of dietary benefits from Red Curry Chicken, start with its curry paste which is the main part of the dish. Studies have found that the Red Curry paste has benefits to help in reduction of inflammation that occur in any processes within a human body or even from outside factors like toxin. This helps to prevent any deceases related to inflammation such as diabetes, cancer or other. This can be an advantage for Thai dishes which are cooked with red curry paste since it will serve you not only its taste but also prevent decline of your body.
Chicken and coconut milk
Red Curry Chicken is made up of coconut milk, chicken, eggplant and a little amount of basil leaves. So it provides you protein from chicken, fat from coconut milk and this is a good fat which can be absorbed into your body immediately and this fat can help to dissolve any vitamins in your body. Furthermore, this menu contains several vegetables that have many benefits, these are eggplant, pea eggplant and basil. The pea eggplant contains a lot of fiber which helps to slow down the absorption of sugar into the body, absorption of fat in food and to get rid of with excretion.
Pea eggplant
Pea eggplant also has some minerals which can provide many different types of nutrition. Nevertheless, be careful to consume too much pea eggplant even though some say that it is a good source of calcium which is true in fact. On the one hand, there are some biochemical that may be dangerous for someone who eats too often and too much. This is just information for you to be careful, not that we try to stop you to have it. What we mean is that you are not supposed to take pea eggplant in supplementary types.
Well we do not want to make this article into a lecture, so let go to cook our yummy curry now. For this recipe we will provide you with how to make curry paste from the start. However, there are not many people, even Thais who make the curry paste by themselves. Mostly we can find ready to cook red curry paste in the fresh market (fresh style) or in the super market (preserved style). So, let start our cooking. ^^
Red Curry Chicken Recipe
Ingredients: (for 4 servings)
- Chicken meat 300 grams
- Shredded coconut meat 250 grams
- Eggplant 100 grams
- Kaffir lime leaf 2 leaves
- Basil 2 branches
- Fish sauce 1.5-2 tablespoon
- Palm sugar 1 tablespoon
- Cooking oil 1 tablespoon
Ingredients for Red Curry paste
- Dried chili 5
- Shallots 5
- Garlic 10 cloves
- Galangal 1 teaspoon
- Shredded lemongrass 1 tablespoon
- Shredded kaffir lime peel ½ teaspoon
- Shredded coriander root 1 teaspoon
- White pepper 5 seeds
- Roasted coriander seeds 1 tablespoon
- Roasted cumin 1 teaspoon
- Ground pepper 1 teaspoon
- Cooking salt 1 teaspoon
- Shrimp paste 1 teaspoon
Direction:
- Add pepper, coriander root, galangal, lemongrass and kaffir lime peel in a mortar and pound them together into pieces then add dried chili, salt, garlic, shallot and shrimp paste pound together until mixed well. Add ground roasted cumin, coriander seeds and pound together to mix well then set aside.
- For chicken cut it in pieces and marinate with 2 teaspoon of soy sauce.
- Squeeze the shredded coconut meat by add 2 cups of warm water to get 1 cup of Undiluted coconut milk and 1 ½ Thin coconut milk.
- Heat the pan and add oil, then add Red curry paste use low heat and fry until its fragrance comes out. Add some undiluted coconut milk during fry chili paste until float up during boiling.
- Then add chicken, stir well until chicken is light cook, rip kaffir lime leaves and put in the pan.
- Transfer the curry to pot and add the rest of coconut milk, then flavor with fish sauce, sugar and let it boils then add eggplant and let it cook.
- Add basil leaves and done.
- Serve in a bowl and garnish with fresh red and green chili and basil leaves.