Thai Green Curry with Chicken
Coconut curry built the proper way — paste fried in cracked coconut cream until the oil separates, then everything else. That one step is the whole difference.
Nutrition Info (per serving)
- 610
- Calories
- 36g
- Protein
- 38g
- Fat
- 32g
- Carbs
Ingredients
- 600 g boneless chicken thighs
- 4 tbsp green curry paste
- 800 ml coconut milk (2 tins), not shaken
- 150 g Thai eggplant or 1 regular aubergine
- 100 g bamboo shoots
- 1 red chilli
- Large handful Thai sweet basil
- 4 kaffir lime leaves
- 2 tbsp fish sauce
- 1 tbsp palm sugar
- 1 tbsp neutral oil
- 4 servings jasmine rice
Instructions
- 1Open the tins of coconut milk without shaking them. Spoon the thick cream from the top of both tins into a bowl — you want about 200 ml — and keep the thin milk underneath separately.
- 2Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Quarter the Thai eggplants, or cut a regular aubergine into 2 cm cubes. Slice the red chilli on the diagonal and tear the kaffir lime leaves in half, removing the tough centre stem.
- 3Heat the oil in a wide pan or wok over medium-high heat. Add the thick coconut cream and let it bubble for 3 to 5 minutes until it visibly splits and a clear oil pools at the edges. This is called cracking the cream, and skipping it is why home green curry often tastes flat.
- 4Add the curry paste to the split cream and fry for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring, until it darkens and smells strongly fragrant rather than raw.
- 5Add the chicken and stir to coat every piece in the paste. Cook for 3 minutes until the outside turns opaque.
- 6Pour in the remaining thin coconut milk, add the eggplant, bamboo shoots and kaffir lime leaves, and bring to a gentle simmer.
- 7Simmer uncovered for 12 to 15 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through and the eggplant is tender. Do not boil hard — high heat makes coconut milk separate into a grainy curdle.
- 8Season with the fish sauce and palm sugar. Taste and adjust: it should be salty first, then sweet, with the heat arriving last.
- 9Turn off the heat, stir in the basil leaves and sliced chilli, and serve with jasmine rice.
Green curry is the one Thai dish most people have eaten a hundred times and never made, usually because the shop-bought version tastes nothing like the restaurant one. The gap is almost always a single technique.
Cracking the coconut cream
Tinned coconut milk separates while it sits. The thick white layer at the top is mostly fat; the thin liquid underneath is mostly water. Thai cooks use these separately and on purpose.
Frying the paste in the thick cream until the fat splits out does two things. The oil that releases becomes the medium that carries the spices, the way any curry needs fat to bloom in. And the heat drives off the raw, grassy edge of the paste, replacing it with something rounder and deeper.
Tip the whole tin in at once and you skip this entirely. The paste simply dissolves into liquid, the curry tastes thin and slightly raw, and no amount of simmering fixes it.
Do not shake the tin. If it has been in a warm kitchen and looks uniform, put it in the fridge for an hour and it will separate again.
Green, from fresh chillies
Green curry is green because the paste is built on fresh green bird's eye chillies rather than dried red ones. It is usually the hottest of the Thai curries, which surprises people who assume red means hotter.
Brands vary enormously in heat. Start with three tablespoons if you are unsure and add more after the paste has fried — you can always build heat, and coconut milk is expensive to waste.
Basil at the end, always
Thai sweet basil has a liquorice note that lives in volatile oils. Simmer it and those oils boil away, leaving dark tired leaves and none of the aroma. Off the heat, thirty seconds is all it takes for the residual warmth to wilt them and release the smell that makes the dish recognisable.
Holy basil is not a substitute here — that is for pad krapow. Italian basil is not either.
Keep it below a boil
Coconut milk is an emulsion, and hard boiling breaks it. You will see it go from smooth to grainy with visible oil slicks, and it cannot be brought back. A lazy simmer where a bubble breaks the surface every second or two is right.
Nutrition
A serving lands near 610 calories with 36 grams of protein, and most of the fat comes from coconut. Using light coconut milk cuts that substantially, though the sauce will be thinner and you lose the cream layer the technique depends on — if you go that route, use one full-fat tin for the cracking step and light milk for the rest.
Aubergine, chilli and lime leaves add vitamin C and a useful amount of fibre. Serve with brown jasmine rice for more.
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