Thai Curry Dishes

The best Thai curries are: gaeng kiow wan, gaeng som, gaeng Massamanand gaeng phet.

Gaeng is an umbrella term for any wet, savory dish enriched and sometimes thickened with a spicy paste. It covers curries as well as several more watery offerings that belong to the soup category.

The three essential aspects of any Thai curry are the paste, called kreung gaeng the mode of cooking the paste, either frying or boiling; and the additional ingredients. Cooking- wise, boiled pastes are supposedly easier to make than fried ones. Usually, Southern Thai curry pastes are fried - often along with coconut cream - while Northern curries tend to be boiled, traditionally because fresh coconut cream isn’t readily available there. Of course there’s an exception to every rule about Thai food and gaeng som, a popular sour-sweet- salty curry from the south, is made with a boiled paste.

Just as each woman wears her own version of slinky décolletage to a Gala, so too does each gaeng express its own individuality within the Thai curry genre. For example, gaeng phet - “phet” means spicy - refers to several red-hued curries, all made by frying coconut cream with a kreung kaeng made with red chilies.

But fry the coconut cream together with a paste made from green chilies sharpened with shallots and lemongrass and you end up with gaeng kiaw wan, a classic Central Thailand dish. This delectable thick pale-green curry contains tiny pea-sized eggplant, kaffir lime leaves and some kind of meat, which is often, though not always, chicken.

Some say the sweet and oily gaeng Massamanarrived in Thailand with the Persian envoys to the court of Ayutthaya. Others believe it came via India. Either way, it’s the only Thai curry made with a kreung gaeng containing cumin, cinnamon and cardamom instead of the usual galangal, lemongrass, chili, kapi (shrimp paste) and assorted other herbs and rhizomes.