Flavoring Your Dish with Thai Curry

Video Transcript

"Hi, Bill Lyons here for Expert Village, talking about our quick Thai curry. Now we're up to the next step where we're going to start flavoring the ingredients that we have in the pot that we're working with. I always like a little bit of ginger, microplane, fresh ginger. Great flavor. Adds a little zing to your meal. Ginger just adds some brightness to your curries. Be very careful of course when you're using a microplane. It's a great way to trim your nails and trim your fingers. You don't want to be doing that. Okay, we've added a little bit of fresh ginger. Now one of the next things that we can add to this is our canned vegetables. Again you can use all fresh vegetables or you can mix and match your vegetables. I'm going to be adding tonight a can of stir fry vegetables. These are nice because they have baby corn, your straw mushrooms also water chestnuts and bamboo. Gives your meal a little more variety, a little more interest. Pop that in. You basically just want to take and warm this through, because those vegetables are already steamed and cooked before they're sold. So you take those, move them through very quickly. They'll warm up extremely fast in your pot. This is also of course moving your ginger through. The next thing you want to do is add your coconut milk. Coconut milk comes in many different varieties. There's a whole coconut milk and there's a light coconut milk. Matter of dietary preference. It's like whole milk versus skim milk. Whole coconut milk has a nice silky, smoothly flavor on your tongue. Kind of adds a little more richness and depth to your meal. However, if you're calorie conscious, you can go with a light coconut milk. You won't miss anything, but you'll definitely notice a little bit of a difference compared to the whole milk. Pop that in. And as you can see, that almost has a creamy consistency to it. It's important, before you open the can, that you shake it up a little bit, because sometimes the coconut milk will settle out. Stir that in and get that moved around so that all your vegetables are now coated with your coconut milk. You can vary the amount of coconut milk in your meal. I'm going more to an entree meal tonight, so I've used quite a bit of vegetable and only a small amount of coconut milk. In this case one can. If you wanted to go with more of a soup, which a lot of people do, then you could either reduce the amount of vegetables, or increase the amount of coconut milk to give yourself more of a soup type mixture. Tonight we're going to be using the green curry. This is a milder flavored curry. All you need to do is take your curry paste, take small amounts pop it in your wok and blend it in. Now this is very much a season to taste meal. You want to take little bits of curry, add it in slowly, move it through your food, make sure it's mixed in thoroughly and then taste it before you add any more curry. Because once it's in, you can't take it out. And in a minute, we'll be back."