Massaman curry the king of curries and the curry of kings,
specifically the king of Siam what is now known as Thailand.
And today I'm making a recipe for Massaman curry curry as eaten in the Royal Palace itself.
So thank you to hello fresh for sponsoring this video as we make the Siamese kings Massaman curry
this time on Tasting History.
I love Thai food. It is one of my favorite cuisines
so it's kind of weird that I haven't done any Thai food here on the channel yet.
One of the reasons is because it's very hard to find old Thai recipes
especially that have been translated into English.
So imagine my good luck went a few months back
a viewer named Rosalind Yunibandhu reached out to me with a book called 'Petals of the Champaka'
that she and her family had been working on, and basically what it is is updated recipes
from an ancestor of hers, Thanphuying Kleeb Mahidhorn. And she grew up in the Grand Palace during the reign of King Rama 5 in the late 19 century.
Later she learned to cook including many of the dishes served at the palace.
Now this cookbook which I will put a link in the description to where you can get it
are modern versions of her recipes, so they have modern ingredient quantities and and words and everything
so you can actually make it at home but since this is Tasting History
I was very fortunate that Rosalind still had her ancestors original recipes like this one for Massaman curry.
"Pound chilies, shallots, garlic, coriander seeds , and cumin together with shrimp paste, galangal, lemongrass,
[cardamom, cloves] and a little roasted coconut to a fine paste.
Squeeze the coconut milk, separating the cream from the milk. Simmer the coconut cream until the oil separates out.
Cut chicken into large pieces pan fry in oil until golden brown. Add the curry paste and stir until fragrant.
Add the coconut milk together with the roasted peanuts [and cinnamon bark.]
Simmer until tender, add fish sauce, sugar, tamarind juice, small shallots, bay leaf.
Add two to three slices of ginger upon removing from the stove."
Now this is just one variation on Massaman curry there are many variations on this curry
that change out different spices and different meats but one thing they all have in common is
they do take a little time to make, and they are very complex. They have a lot of ingredients.
It's generally thought to be one of the most complex of the Thai curries,
and am I up to it? <_<
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So this recipe has two major components and the first
is the one that really gives all of the flavor to the dish, and that is to make the curry paste.
So for that what you need is: 1 tablespoon of coriander seeds, 2 teaspoons of cumin seeds, 1 tablespoon grated coconut,
4 cloves, and 1 teaspoon of seeds from cardamom pods.
Now these are typically going to be white cardamom or Siam cardamom but you can use green or black cardamom and that'll be just fine.
So you put all those into a dry pan over medium heat and toast them keeping them moving
until they're nice and fragrant about three or four minutes or until the coconut has turned a light brown.
Then grind them into a powder and set them aside.
Then take 3 tablespoons of shallot, 6 to 7 cloves of garlic, 1 tablespoon of lemongrass and 1 tablespoon of galangal.
So I've mentioned galangal here on the channel before because it was very popular in Medieval European cuisine.
It has since lost popularity but only only in Europe because it's still very much used in Southeast Asia.
You can get dried galangal online and rehydrate it and use it for this but
if you can find fresh galangal it is absolutely worth it.
In fact I I bought mine but we're actually growing some galangal so next time I'll just rip it out
and it's the rhizome in the base so fresh galangal next time I make this.
Lastly you need 7 chilies. They can be dried they can be fresh you want to chop them up and take out all the seeds though
because this is not supposed to be very spicy so these are not the little Thai chilies.
These are different types of chilies that are much less spicy.
All of these need to be roasted dry in a frying pan or over an open flame just until you get a little char.
Then add them to a mortar and grind it into a paste.
Along with 1 teaspoon of shrimp paste. This takes a very long time and it really has to be done by hand.
If you do it in a blender it doesn't release the oils right so you've got to do it by hand and just
yeah takes a while. So you take the shrimp paste, you grind it with the chilies, and everything then
add in the toasted spices and keep grinding until everything is as smooth as you can get.
If you buy it it's perfectly smooth, if you're grinding it yourself it's going to be as smooth as you can get
but that's the hard part and now it's done!
Next you take 2 pounds or 1 kilogram of chicken or beef. She actually does mention both and you cut these into large pieces.
I don't exactly know how large large pieces are but I went with like large bite-sized pieces because that's what I've had in curries before.
Also dark meat is going to work best for this like a leg or thigh because
it does cook for quite some time so don't use chicken breast.
Then heat a few tablespoons of coconut oil in a pan and add the meat frying it until it starts to brown.
While it does heat a 1/2 cup of coconut cream over medium heat.
Now she says to simmer this until the oil separates out and that is a process called cracking.
The oil and the and the solids kind of separate out and the water evaporates and it ends up looking like oil bubbles on top of the coconut.
The problem is you have to find a coconut cream that has no emulsifiers in it. If you don't have that you can just add some
coconut oil to the coconut cream but from all of the curry aficionados that I've spoken to
it does not taste quite the same but it is a common practice.
But once it has cracked and bubbles cover the surface add the curry paste and stir until fragrant.
After a couple minutes the curry paste should be nice and aromatic and you can add two cups of coconut milk.
Then bring that to a simmer and add the chicken along with a quarter cup of unsalted roasted peanuts and a cinnamon stick.
So simmer the meat until tender about 30 to 45 minutes and then add 2 tablespoons of fish sauce,
3 tablespoons or 50 grams of palm sugar, 3 tablespoons of tamarind juice,
a 1/2 cup of chopped shallots and 3 bay leaves. Then simmer this for another hour on low heat.
And it should darken up as it simmers. A lot of recipes for Massaman curry tend to be on the lighter side
but that's because they add a lot more coconut milk or coconut cream and one is not right one is not wrong.
It's just that they're all different and there are many, many variations on this dish,
but they are all delicious and they are all complex just like the history of Massaman curry.
The word Massaman like the curry itself is not originally Thai.
It actually comes from the word Mosalmân which is an old Persian word for Muslim.
So Massaman means Muslim curry and originally that's who brought it or a version of it to the Ayutthaya kingdom which in the 17th century
ruled much of what is now Myanmar and Thailand.
The capital, a city called Ayutthaya, was extremely cosmopolitan.
A crossroads between the East and the West. It had Traders from Japan and China and Russia,
England, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese everyone was there as well as traders from Persia.
They were all common guests at the palace and they would bring ingredients from whence they came along with new cooking methods.
Many of the traders, especially the Persians, ended up settling within the city
near the palace and actually gained prominent positions within the government.
Most famous was the Persian Sheikh Ahmad Qomi who became a high-ranking official and it said that it was
he who originally brought Massaman curry to the palace and gave it to the king but
it's kind of hard to prove. What isn't hard to prove is that Persian cuisine in general did
become quite popular at the palace especially under the reign of King Narai the Great
who ruled from 1656 to 1688.
"When King Narai was still a boy he used to visit the Persians regularly, and he took great pleasure in their social manners and their foods and drink.
In that way he became quite familiar with the Persian style of life."
That was an account written by a Persian diplomat of the time and we actually have to thank the accounts of travelers like him
for knowing as much as we do about this period in Thai history because a little while after this
the city of Ayutthaya was destroyed along with all of their documents about their own history.
That said they are foreign people writing about a different culture and so we have to kind of take everything that they say with
a bit of skepticism, even about the most routine things like the food that they ate.
"The food of the Siamese... in no way resembles normal, proper foods and the natives are not familiar with intelligent methods of preparing meals.
In fact no one in Siam really knows how to cook or eat or even how to sit correctly at table.
King Narai, having had much contact with the Persians when he was growing up,
has acquired a permanent taste for our food and every so often, according to his mood,
he will make an exception and inclined to eat in our style.
For this reason he has had a cook brought over from India, whose sole occupation is to prepare real food for him when it is required.
But since the king is not practiced in our table manners and the proper forms of society, he closed at the doors of banqueting upon himself
and did not make an appearance during the party."
So the King didn't know the etiquette but he knew he liked the Persian food and it's very likely that he had
a Persian style curry that had things like sultanas and peanuts and other ingredients that were not in Siamese cooking at the time,
a Muslim style curry a, Massaman curry.
Then in 1767 following several years of war a Burmese army defeated the Siamese Army.
The king was killed, the documents burned, and the city of Ayutthaya was destroyed.
The ruins of which are still there today.
The city's population nearly a million people were displaced and had to leave and the most wealthy and noble of the families
including those of Persian descent ended up settling in Krung Thep also known as Bangkok
the modern capital of Thailand.
There a new royal dynasty was founded with the crowning of King Rama 1. Today they're on King Rama 10,
and it is interesting because usually here in the West we say- we would say King Rama the first and the fifth but over there
typically it's done King Rama 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. I thought that was kind of interesting.
And it's likely under King Rama 1 that Massaman became became popular again or continued its popularity in the royal kitchens.
It was actually so popular that the king's son the future Rama 2 would actually write a poem about Massaman curry, at least in part.
It was written on the occasion of a royal barge procession but in reality it was probably written
for his beloved Princess Bunrot who was an avid cook herself
but instead of writing it directly to her he kind of couches it in that he's writing of his love of the different foods that she would cook.
"Massaman curry made by my beloved, is fragrant of cumin and strong spices.
Any man who just tastes this curry is bound to search for her in his dreams."
What's interesting is he also mentions a dish called foi thong or golden threads which is the Thai variation
on this Portuguese egg dish that has versions all over including
the kiran somen from Japan hand which I did a video on just a couple months ago.
He says "The golden threads of the sweet egg dessert make me recall when you embroidered with golden silk."
We don't write enough poetry about food these days.
But Rama 2 absolutely did and it's clear that he had a passion for not only Princess Bunrot but Massaman curry
and many people who came to visit the Royal Palace shared this passion.
It was one of the dishes mentioned in a collection of recipes in London's magazine of 'Domestic Economy' in 1840.
After describing several basic curry powders it says "A Mussulman Curry is made in the same way,
with green coriander seeds and more garlic."
And that does seem to be the case because when the first full recipes from Thailand for Massamn curry start to appear in the late 19th century
garlic and coriander feature quite prominently but they're all very, very different recipes.
There's a lot of variation some are cooked with duck, some beef, others chicken, or lamb or goat,
One even is cooked with a pork lard showing it has really strayed away from its Muslim roots.
Other ingredients include sultanas and almonds and nutmeg Which is popular in Massman curry today,
and one from 1890 actually calls for the juice of sour oranges which I thought was quite interesting,
but all of them are highly spiced complex coconut based curries
just like the old recipe that we are making today.
So as the curry finishes up give it a taste and add some more fish sauce or sugar, or whatever you want to to make it taste as you want,
and then take it off the heat and add 3 slices of ginger and then it is ready to serve,
except that really you should keep it overnight
and serve it the next day because the flavors will really, really develop overnight if you put it in the fridge so yeah.
Either way it's usually served with rice but it doesn't have to be
and here we are Massaman curry from the royal Palace of Siam.
It smells so good but it smells really, really strong.
The whole house just smells of Massaman curry.
Let's give it a go.
Just wave of flavor.
I mean wow!
It's a lot of ingredients and it's a lot of work but
what a payoff.
Just overwhelming. It's like I'm encapsulated in flavor.
[In bad Guy Fiery] Flavortown!
It's so spiced but it's not hot at all.
The coconut comes through but it's not coconutey you know it's not like a piña colada or something.
It's just so rich and I do want to try it with some rice and kind of soak up some of the some of the sauce and everything
but the meat is nice and tender and the peanuts do give it a little bit of crunch.
Even the ones that have been in there for a little while uh are still pretty firm.
That's fantastic.
Man I wish it wasn't so much work.
So thank you again to Rosalind and her father and her aunt who helped me so much with this with this video,
the research, the food, everything, pronunciations.
I'm going to put a link to their wonderful cookbook online
in the description and yeah so try making this.
It's a lot of work but maybe find it. You know if you want to find a different one and buy the curry paste do that,
but make a curry. It's really, really worth it.
There are few foods that have just so much flavor. It's fantastic,
and I'll see you next time on Tasting History.