Sawaddee Ka, welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen so as many of you know I am now
very very pregnant and ready to pop this baby out anytime now so at home we've
been doing a lot of freezer meals in preparation for that now
freezing your meals is useful whether or not you're pregnant it's always handy to
have some meals ready to reheat in the freezer right so today I thought I would
share with you my method of freezing a Thai curry in a way that reheats really
well and saves a lot of space in your freezer because probably like many of
you the freezer is constantly full and if there's anything you can do to like
reduce the bulk even better right so today's not so much a recipe as it is a
tricks and tips methods that you can apply to any of my curry recipe let's
get started so to be clear this video is not just how to freeze a Thai curry
because anyone can throw curry in the bag and throw it in the freezer right
but this video is more how to make a curry for the specific purpose of
freezing it so that it will reheat well and not take up as much space okay so
I've got some coconut milk here that I'm gonna reduce until it's very very thick
alright so the coconut milk is super thick now I'm going to add my curry
paste and this curry paste could be anything red, green, yellow, panang, massaman
whatever you want I'm just gonna do my classic red and then saute this in the
coconut milk now you're gonna see a lot of curry recipes out there that just
tell you to sautee the curry paste in some vegetable oil and then add coconut
milk which you can do but remember when you do that you lose out on this
concentrated coconut flavor that we now have from reducing this coconut milk and
sauteing the paste in the coconut oil and concentrating flavor is what it's
all about when you're trying to freeze a curry without taking up too much space
so now you can see the coconut oil is separating out from the paste it's
basically frying this paste really really aromatic
now I'm gonna add the rest of my coconut milk and this is one thing that
I do differently from when I make just a regular curry normally after I saute the
paste I add the meat I add the coconut milk and they let everything cook but
what I'm doing now is I wanna reduce this amount of coconut milk first to
about half its original volume so that when I freeze it it takes up even less
space and then when I go to reheat it I just add a little more water so we'll
let that go 7 to 10 minutes should do it okay so as you can see it is super thick
now looks way too thick for a Thai curry so I'm gonna season this first though
before we add our meat with some fish sauce and some palm sugar and of course
at this point depending on the recipe whatever seasoning that you need to add
you can add right now now in terms of herbs the only herbs that you should add
at this point our sturdy sturdy herbs like kaffir lime leaves which I am going
to add right now so delicate things like Thai basil so I'm just gonna give this a
rough tear and drop them in Thai basil cilantro anything like that will turn to
complete mush in the freezer you do not want to add that until the end okay but
if your lime leaves they freeze very very well now my chicken goes in so I
always use chicken dark meat when I freeze curry because as you probably had
experienced chicken breast overcooked very easily and it's not nice when it's
overcooked it's dry it's not good when you freeze a curry you've got to reheat
it and all that stuff the chances of you overcook breast white meat is very very
high okay so now I'm gonna turn this down a little and let it simmer let the
chicken cook for 20 minutes that's how long this size chicken thigh takes to
become fork tender and by the way for our patreon members with access to the
bonus show after the show today we're gonna talk about what other things do i
fries regularly that makes my cooking much easier if you want to know how to
become a patreon member I'll put the link in the description box below so
It's been 20 minutes the chicken is perfectly cooked it's fork-tender and as
you can see it's a lot more liquidy now than it was when it first went in and
that's all juice from the chicken this is why we needed to reduce that sauce
first to really thick before we add the chicken because once you add the chicken
you can't just keep cooking it forever because the chickens gonna overcook at
some point right so now let's talk vegetables for me personally when I
freeze curry I don't like to add vegetables because 1) it adds bulk 2)
vegetables only take a couple of minutes to cook anyway and you're gonna need to
reheat it for a couple minutes so it's just easier for me to just throw it in
at the end but more importantly vegetables generally do not freeze well
so if your particular about the vegetables being al dente, firm,
not too mushy freezing is not gonna work for you because when it thaws it will
inevitably be mushy so that's just my preference but if you want to make this
so that it's just ready to go in the microwave and it's done you can add
vegetables let me give you a few advice on choosing vegetables that'll thaw
better than others I've got a few examples here for you
so rule of thumb is the more water content the vegetable has the worse they
will thaw so things like zucchini cucumber tomatoes like cherry tomatoes
those will not freeze well okay you want vegetables that don't have a lot of
liquid and then they will thaw better so I've had success with bell peppers will
come out pretty good cauliflower will come out still intact but it won't be
firm so it'll be completely soft so just keep that in mind broccoli same thing
it'll come out whole but it'll be soft the only thing that freeze is incredibly
well like it comes out almost exactly the way it went in is bamboo shoots
which happens to also be a very popular curry vegetable so if you want freezing
bamboo shoots is one of the best things you can do
peas would also work quite well but basically non watery vegetable is your
rule of thumb all right let's now freeze this curry I like to
use freezer bags for this is a serving for for this recipe
that I will give you as a serving for four and I like to split it into two
because there's only two people in my family so the freezer bags if you are on
the streets of Thailand you see street vendors who always pack food and curry
in plastic bags what you do you flip it out like this it's a little harder with
the zipper top but that'll do two things that'll keep the mouth open so it's
easier for you to spoon things in and also it keeps this part clean so you
don't mess that up and now it's all greasy isn't whatever so I like to do
that for my bags so I distribute the meat first so I can it's easy for me to
tell whether they're evenly split up and don't be alarmed by all this oily stuff
on the top that's just coconut oil that separates and it Thai curries are
supposed to look like that it actually is a desired characteristic for curries
to have a layer of coconut oil on top good thing also about these freezer bags
is you can put the curry in piping hot it'll be totally fine and then I always
like to drop these right away in a bowl of cold water yet another benefit of
using bags because now they'll cool really quickly which is important for
food safety you want you want food to cool quickly and heat up quickly you
don't want it lingering at lukewarm temperature for too long and then once
it's cool enough we'll stick it in the freezer so I've got my curry cooled I've
labelled it I've noted to myself that this needs diluting so I don't forget
and think why is this thing so spicy and salty and when you freeze it make sure
you lay it flat on a plate so that it will be as thin as possible it'll thaw
as quickly as possible so now this goes into the freezer and then when that's
frozen I'll show you how to reheat it so here is our curry nice and frozen and
I'll just show you how quickly this comes together obviously if this is
ready to eat for you you can just nuke it add a little bit of water obviously
because this was concentrated and then you're done but I want to show you how I
do it with some extra finishing touch
case so to get this out of the back easily I just dip it in hot water here
so a nice dip in the hot bath and this is just hot tap water you don't need to
boil water or anything so while that's chilling or the opposite of chilling I
am going to heat up some water and this could be chicken stock as well if you
have it would be even better so now the water is boiling whoa look how fast that
thought and I just need at this point for it to be able to slide out of the
bag I don't need this to completely thaw because obviously we're still going to
heat it up in the pot just enough so that I can plop it into this pot get
everything out because this is concentrated curries we want every last
drop okay so now I'm just gonna let this cook until everything is thaws I still
have this solid block here so now I'm gonna add my vegetables which in my case
I'm gonna do some bell peppers just for some nice pops of color Oh slow that
down a bit and some bamboo shoots cuz I had it to show you you might as well
just add them and the belt the bamboo shoots already cooked so you're just
getting them hot the bell peppers will take as long as you want them to take
really if you like them soft a few minutes if you like them still for just
one minute will do it oh look at that and by the way if you've seen my curry
videos you know that most of the time red curry green curry yellow curry it's
a lot brothy ER than you might think it should because that's how Thai curries
tend to be so it's not like a super thick gloopy Indian curry so Thai
curries are more like like a soup so this is perfect consistency right here
it's coming back to a simmer I'm gonna finish it off with any fresh herbs that
you like Thai basil stir that in I'm gonna just turn it off and use the
residual heat to wilt and infuse all the flavors and that is it in just a few
minutes you've got a beautiful curry ready to go assuming you've got some
rice ready and by the way you can also fries rice if you want to make it
just like one quick packet so you can freeze a portion of rice along with your
curry so you can pull them both out together and just microwave the rice
woohoo okay look mmm so beautiful clean out the edges for a nice presentation
now I'm just gonna taste this just so you know even though this isn't about
this particular recipe just so you know I can tell you what it's like after
frozen perfect I wouldn't know if nobody said anything that this was a frozen
curry particularly because we added our vegetables at the end and as you can see
it went super fast now having said that if you wanted to freeze the bamboo
shoots they will come out fine if you want it to freeze the bell
peppers they will also come out fine but they will not be a little bit crunchy as
they still are right now so it's a choice that you make the chicken once
it's been thawed I find that it is a little bit more soft than it was before
it went in but again if you didn't say anything I would have just thought that
it was slow cooked chicken that's super fork-tender at this point so which is
why using buy meat is a good choice because it's something that we would
normally stew and brace anyway right so I hope that was useful information for
you if you've got other tips for freezing anything you can share with all
of us in the comments below I would love to hear from you I will have sort of
more detailed instructions written on the website as always on hot Thai
Kitchen comm and if you freeze your curry send me a photo on Facebook
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notification when it goes to the video thank you as always for watching and I
will see you next time for your next delicious Thai meal