Sunday, August 21, 2005
A Passionate Plea For Murder posted by Max
You will need to "mise en place" all your ingredients. If your recipe calls for some ingredients to be roasted, do so. You can use your toaster oven or just dry roast in a pan. You should, however, roast the shrimp paste regardless of what the recipe says. Wrap it loosely in foil and roast in the toaster oven for about 5 minutes at 450F.Dried chilies are a main staple for all curry paste. Soak them in warm water for at least 15 minutes or until soft. Seed and chop them finely. While waiting for the chilies to soften, turn your attention to the other ingredients. Chop them as finely as you can. You can use your old workhorse Cuisinart for this, but don't chop all the ingredients together, do each separately.
When the ingredients are prepared and ready, start your pounding. The first ingredients into your Krok are chilies and salt. Pound them until very fine, then add the harder stuff such as kaffir lime zest, cilantro roots, galangal, lemongrass, turmeric, or others. Pound them until fine, it will help if you do one at a time. Then add your garlic, again pound finely. The next ingredient is the shallots. After you're done pounding the shallot to a fine paste, the mixture in your Krok will be quite moist. This is the time to add powdered spices were they called for in the recipe. The last to go in should be the shrimp paste, since it is, as the name implies, already in paste form.