Massaman curry

Method

1. Soak the dried chiles in warm water for 20 minutes, then drain and squeeze them out. Keep 30 ml of the soaking water if you want a looser paste.
2. Toast the coriander seeds, cumin seeds, cardamom pods, cloves, broken cinnamon stick, star anise, and white peppercorns in a dry pan over medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes, until you can smell them clearly. Do not let them darken. Tip them onto a plate to cool, then grind to a powder and stir in the grated nutmeg.
3. In the same dry pan, char the shallots, garlic, and galangal over medium-high heat until they have black patches, about 6 minutes. This is where the smoky backbone of the curry comes from, so let them actually blacken in places.
4. Pound or blend the chiles with the salt first, then work in the charred aromatics, the lemongrass, the shrimp paste, and finally the ground spices. Add the water a little at a time until you have a thick, smooth paste. A small food processor is fine. A mortar gives a better texture if you have the arm for it.
5. Open the coconut milk tins without shaking them and spoon the thick cream off the top into a heavy pot. Add the oil and heat over medium until the cream is bubbling and starts to separate.
6. Add the paste and fry for 5 to 8 minutes, stirring, until it darkens and the oil comes back out around the edges. Fried paste tastes completely different from raw paste. This step is the whole recipe.
7. Add the chicken and turn it in the paste for 2 minutes. Pour in the rest of the coconut milk, drop in the cinnamon stick, star anise, and bay leaves, and bring to a bare simmer. Cook uncovered for 30 minutes.
8. Add the potatoes and onion wedges. Top up with a splash of water if they are not just covered. Simmer 20 to 25 minutes, until the potatoes are soft enough to give under a spoon.
9. Stir in the palm sugar, tamarind, and fish sauce. Now taste and adjust. Massaman should land sweet first, then sour, then salty, with the spice underneath. Add tamarind if it is flat, fish sauce if it is dull, sugar if it is sharp.
10. Add the peanuts, take the pot off the heat, and let it sit for 10 minutes. Fish out the cinnamon stick, star anise, and bay leaves. Serve with jasmine rice.

Notes

• On why this recipe exists. Christoph has been hunting a curry he ate once and could not name: aromatic, tasting of cinnamon and nutmeg, somewhere between Japanese and Korean in his memory, with flavours he read as Southeast Asian. Massaman is the dish that answers all of it. It is the only curry in wide circulation whose spice paste literally contains both cinnamon and nutmeg, and it also carries cardamom, clove, and star anise, the same warm register that Japanese curry roux uses in trace amounts. On the plate it looks exactly like Japanese curry: thick tan sauce, chunks of potato and onion, mild, a little sweet, over rice. That resemblance is why the memory files itself under “Japanese, or maybe Korean.” The giveaway is the cinnamon and nutmeg pair together. Japanese roux has them at one or two percent, where you would call them a background warmth, not a flavour you remember years later. Massaman has them at the front. If you cook this and the answer is still not quite it, the next most likely thing is that you ate a Japanese curry made from scratch rather than from a block, so cook the other recipe in this pair and compare. If it was closer but too sour, cut the tamarind to 25 ml. If it was closer but too coconutty, use 600 ml of coconut milk and 200 ml of chicken stock.
• Shopping in Germany. Galangal (Galgant) is almost always frozen or in brine at the Asia-Markt, and frozen is better than dried. Lemongrass keeps for months in the freezer. Thai shrimp paste is sold as kapi in small tubs; if you cannot get it, use 15 g of a good anchovy paste and add a little extra fish sauce. Tamarind concentrate comes as a dark pourable paste in a jar, sometimes labelled Tamarinden-Konzentrat. Palm sugar comes in hard discs that you chop or grate; brown sugar is an acceptable stand-in. For the chiles, dried Guajillo from the Mexican shelf is a very good match for Thai dried long chiles: mild, fruity, and it gives the right colour.
• If you buy paste instead. Maesri and Mae Ploy massaman pastes are both sold in German Asia-Märkte and are honest products, but they are lighter on the warm spices than a fresh paste. If you use a tin, add half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon, a quarter teaspoon of grated nutmeg, and one crushed cardamom pod when you fry it. That closes most of the gap.
• Make ahead. The paste keeps two weeks in the fridge under a film of oil and six months in the freezer. Freeze it in tablespoon portions. The finished curry is better on day two, once the spices have settled into the coconut milk.
• Failure modes. Boiling the curry hard will split the coconut milk into grease and grain. Keep it at a lazy simmer. Adding the potatoes too early turns them to mush and thickens the sauce past the point of pleasure. And skipping the paste-frying step gives you a curry that tastes raw and one-dimensional no matter how long you cook it afterwards.
• Leftovers. Reheat gently with a splash of water. Leftover sauce with no meat left in it is excellent over a roasted sweet potato or poured on rice with a fried egg.
• Beef version. Use 800 g beef chuck in 4 cm cubes, simmer it for 2 hours before the potatoes go in, and add 200 ml of water along the way. Lamb shoulder works the same way.

Sources used

• Hot Thai Kitchen: Authentic Thai Massaman Curry with Chicken
• Simply Suwanee: The Best Authentic Thai Massaman Curry Paste
• Thai-Foodie: Massaman Curry Paste
• RecipeTin Eats: Massaman Curry
• Wikipedia: Massaman curry