Quick pork penang

Here's a quick way of making a drier almost 'stir fried' type of curry. It works with various pastes & protein combos, here I made 'penang' curry with pork, peanuts, plus lots of long fresh chillies and Thai basil.

Penang is a variety of Thai curry paste, to be simplistic it's a form of red curry which generally includes peanuts. It tends to go work best with beef or even game (we have a venison penang on the menu at Nahm at the mo), but pork is nice here too.

I'm not going to give a long recipe here, instead below is a rough idea of how I cooked it.

Note: I used a bought curry paste here as was in a hurry. Home-made is obviously best (the nice Thai lady who writes 'Chez Pim' has a good paste recipe here), but if buying try and get a decent one from an Asian store e.g the Mae Ploy brand is common and not too shabby*.

This was for 4 people, with some other dishes alongside...

I started by taking about a cup of thick coconut cream and heating it in a wok until it 'cracks' (starts to split and go oily), then with the wok fairly hot I fried three generous tablespoons of my paste in this for at least 4-5 mins, stirring the whole time, and added some torn frozen lime leaves I had handy.

Next I seasoned this with palm sugar and fish sauce to taste (rich, salty and slightly sweet) then added 300g or so of sliced pork loin, and cooked for a minute of two more before pouring in a small cup of chicken stock (or use thin coconut milk) plus 4-5 diagonally sliced long red and /or green chillies and some roughly crushed roasted peanuts.

Finally I just checked the seasoning again, turned off the heat and stirred through a big handful of thai basil leaves.

Start to finish it takes only about ten mins. Pretty quick and not too taxing.

*note on bought curry pastes - I'd say go for red over green (a green curry paste relies more on fresh ingredients, hence the ones from a tub/jar/bag/tube are always so disappointing).

A.

p.s cheers to Ben for the pic