Pounded Fresh Thai Chilli Paste
getting ready to make steak fried rice with a few thai chilies from the garden! LFGGGG
A granite mortar with a heap of scarlet chillies in it, stems and leaves still attached. Ten minutes later it is a paste that lives in the fridge for a fortnight and improves everything it touches.
Pound it, do not blend it. A blender cuts; a pestle crushes. Crushing ruptures the cell walls and releases the oils into the paste, which is why a pounded paste is fragrant and a blended one is wet and flat. It is the single reason the mortar is still on the counter in an age of food processors.
Salt goes in at the start and it is not just seasoning. It is abrasive — it does half the grinding for you.
- Makes
- About 1 cup
- Hands-on
- 15 minutes
- Tool
- Mortar, not blender
- Keeps
- 2 weeks, cold
What you need
The paste
- 40 fresh Thai chillies, stems removed (from my garden)
- 10 cloves garlic
- 1 tbsp coarse salt — it is the abrasive
- 2 shallots, roughly chopped
- 1 tbsp sugar
- 2 tbsp fish sauce
- Juice of 2 limes
- 2 tbsp neutral oil, to cover
How it goes
1 — Stems off, leaves off, seeds in
Pull the green caps away. Leave the seeds — in a Thai chilli they are not where the heat is, but they are where a good deal of the flavour sits.
2 — Salt and garlic first, alone
Coarse salt and peeled garlic into the mortar and pounded to a smooth wet paste before anything else. The salt crystals grind the garlic for you, which is why this order and not the other.
3 — Then the shallots, then the chillies
Shallots pounded in until they break down, then the chillies a handful at a time. Each addition goes in only once the last has given up its shape.
4 — Pound, do not stir
Straight down with the pestle, turning the mortar with the other hand. The moment you start stirring you are mixing rather than crushing, and a mixed paste is a blended paste with extra steps.
pro tip — Hold a cloth or the lid of a pan over the mortar for the first minute. Chilli flying up at eye height is a specific and memorable mistake.
5 — Sugar, fish sauce and lime at the end
Stirred in once it is a paste. Sugar balances the heat, fish sauce gives it depth, lime keeps it bright and stops it browning.
6 — Taste it on something, not off the spoon
Neat, it will tell you nothing except that it is hot. A smear on a piece of bread or a grain of rice is how you judge the salt and the sugar.
7 — Jar it under a film of oil
Into a small jar, pressed flat, with a couple of spoons of oil poured over the surface to seal it from the air. Two weeks cold, and the colour holds.
A few Thai chillies from the garden. LFGGGG. LFG.