The rhythmic pounding of my late grandma’s century-old mortar and pestle is as familiar to me as any lullaby. The sound of stone against stone, reducing shallots, garlic, galangal, lemongrass, and Thai chilies into a paste and releasing the pungent fragrance of shrimp paste is almost a Proustian memory, something I can taste.
And yet, in my adult life, I have often found myself reaching for canned curry paste in my day-to-day cooking. Maesri is my go-to brand; it’s what my mom uses, too, when she doesn’t feel like wielding my grandma’s mortar and pestle. Canned curry paste makes curry an easy weeknight dinner, especially if you’re pairing the curry with quick-cooking proteins like salmon or tofu. Homemade curry paste, by contrast, requires time to gather the many ingredients and some arm muscles to reduce tough and fibrous lemongrass and makrut lime into a paste that can melt into coconut milk.
But I feel like I’m eschewing my grandmother’s memory, by not attempting to replicate her recipe so I recently tried my hand at making curry paste from scratch, using both her mortar and pestle as well as a food processor to help me along the way. It’s the way James Beard Award-winner Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon prepares the curry paste at her Philadelphia restaurant, Kalaya. “There’s no need to use a krok,” Suntaranon says, referencing the Thai word for mortar and pestle, “because the kroks in America are not big enough and the wooden ones aren’t heavy enough.” Instead, she opts for a large food processor to make big batches at her restaurant.
“The way I look at is is that if I have to pound every batch of curry paste I make, I wouldn’t make it as often,” says Pim Techamuanvivit, the owner of Kamin and Michelin-starred Kin Khao and Nari and executive chef of Bangkok’s Nahm. “It’s fun to do once in a while, but it’s also a pain.”
At first, I really wanted to do it the hard way — the way my grandmother would’ve done it. The tip my mom gave me is to chop the ingredients as finely as possible in order to make it easier to incorporate them in the mortar and pestle. The tricky part is how ropey all the ingredients are; lemongrass is notoriously difficult to break down, dehydrated makrut lime peel is tough, and galangal definitely calls for extra effort. The actual pounding also requires some technique: “You don’t really pound it by sheer force of smashing,” Techamuanvivit says. “You aim on the side; that friction helps process the ingredients.”
When I attempt to make my own curry paste using my grandmother’s mortar and pestle, it is clear immediately that I do not have this technique down, as chunks of half-pounded lemongrass and dangerous streaks of Thai chilies go flying. Also, my shoulder muscles begin throbbing. There is some small reprieve when softer ingredients, like shallots and shrimp paste, are incorporated but still my curry paste was chunky and my grandmother’s mortar began to overflow. I concede and transfer my mixture to a food processor.
“For me, if you’re only going to make curry paste if you can blend it in your blender, it’s still going to yield better results than opening a can,” Techaumanvivit says. If the award-winning chefs are telling me to use a food processor, it’s okay to use a food processor.
Once it’s in the food processor, the curry paste blends easily. I pulse it because I don’t want it to be entirely smooth. This is one of the benefits of making curry paste from scratch: You can control its overall texture. And its ingredients, too. “For me, it’s about really knowing what’s in my curry pastes, being able to adjust and dial up or down certain components,” Techaumanvivit says. That includes the spice level, the pungency of the shrimp paste, the punchiness of garlic.
When the curry paste is fully blended, I release the lid of the food processor. The smell is intoxicating — briny and salty, herbaceous and bright. It permeates the entire kitchen. The time it took in total, from chopping the ingredients to pounding to tossing them into the food processor, was about a half hour. The hardest part might actually have been gathering the ingredients, and even those were relatively accessible. But does the curry paste really taste better than the canned stuff — enough to warrant making it from scratch?
To answer this question, I decide to make two versions of chicken panang, one using a canned curry paste and the other the red curry paste I prepared, to see which was better and if it’s actually worth it to make curry paste from scratch. When I pop open the can of Maesri, the aroma is not nearly as present as the fresh curry paste’s. The paste itself is very smooth and a bit oily; the color is a much brighter orange than my fresh version. Blooming the paste in hot coconut oil activates it a bit, but the smell still doesn’t feel as enticing to me as my homemade version. Perhaps it’s my own nostalgia for my grandma’s cooking, but the canned curry smells one-note.
The final dish is completely adequate. The flavor is sweeter than I prefer and lacks heat, but for a weeknight meal it’s extremely easy to put together. “There are times when you can use canned curry paste to add volume,” Suntaranon says. “It’s okay to use it as a base and then add the other elements to make it your own.” She suggests splashes of fish sauce, fresh makrut lime leaves cut into thin strips, and sliced Thai chilies to brighten up canned curry. I do this, which improves the flavor, but it’s not a dish I’m entirely enthusiastic about.
There’s a stark difference when I make panang using the homemade curry paste. The aroma is immediately sharp, the pops of shrimp paste and chilies obvious. Blooming the paste in coconut oil makes it stronger and I could detect the layers of shallots, lemongrass, and cilantro. What I found tricky about the homemade curry paste was figuring out how much of it to use; the canned curry had instructions, but with the homemade version I was using my intuition, the way my grandmother used to cook. There was nothing to fret over, though — the curry was definitely the best I’ve ever made myself. The hue of the curry was much paler than the version made with curry paste, a muted pink shade rather than bright red, but the flavor was so much more assertive.
I think curry paste is a great introduction to attempting curry at home, especially for people who have trouble finding the many ingredients required to make a fresh curry paste. “If you’re just cooking at home and trying to put dinner on the table, use curry paste,” Techaumanvivit says. “I’m not judging you. We’ve all used canned curry paste.”
However, making fresh curry paste from scratch is shockingly easy, especially when using a food processor. You can make a large batch and freeze the paste in ice cube trays so that every time you want to make curry, you have the paste ready on hand. That’s what I’ve done; in the food processor and mortar and pestle, I’ve made enough curry paste for at least eight meals. If you’re going to do it this way, just make sure not to add salt when building the curry paste — a tip I learned from Suntaranon. “It will draw out water and crystallize,” she explains. “Salt the curry paste when you use it.”
I can enthusiastically recommend making curry paste from scratch. It is hard to beat the freshness of the ingredients and the ability to customize your base to your preferences (which means extra chilies and shrimp paste for me). “Think of it as an adventure and play with it,” Techamaunvivit says. “I would like people to understand that an entire world of flavor would open if they tried making their own curry paste.”
Lily Fossett is a freelance illustrator based in Bath, UK. She has a passion for portraying narrative in her illustrations and uses digital media to explore color and texture.
