Prik Gaeng Garee (Thai Yellow Curry Paste)

Before we get to my recipe for prik gaeng garee, or “yellow curry paste,” I want to clear up some confusion about what “yellow curry” is and isn’t.

The Lowdown on Yellow Curry

In Southern Thai cuisine, gaeng leung, which literally translates to “yellow curry,” is a sour and spicy water-based curry that’s commonly paired with fish. It bears little resemblance to the mild but heavily spiced coconut-based curry that’s commonly listed as “yellow curry” on Thai restaurant menus in the United States. That dish is gaeng garee, which combines Thai curry techniques with the warm spice profile of South Asian curries. (“Garee” is a Thai loanword for Indian-style curry, so while a more accurate translation of gaeng garee might be “curry curry,” it would probably be more confusing than the “yellow” misnomer.)

The Essentials

Gaeng garee starts out like many other Thai curries, namely with a pounded prik gaeng, or curry paste. Prik gaeng garee uses many of the same ingredients as other pastes—chiles, lemongrass, garlic, and shallots—but the heat is toned down, which allows its two distinctive ingredients, fresh turmeric and a garam masala-like curry powder, to shine. The curry powder is rich with warm spices, thanks to toasted cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg, cumin, and coriander. Fresh turmeric lends an herbal bitterness to the paste, along with its bright orange-yellow color, which is bumped up by the ground turmeric in the curry powder. The spice-forward flavor profile of prik gaeng garee bears a closer resemblance to a paste like massaman than the fresh bite of prik gaeng khiao waan.

I’ve also kept this version of prik gaeng garee vegetarian by omitting shrimp paste, a staple ingredient used to provide a savory backbone to most curry pastes (the accompanying gaeng garee makheua yao recipe is vegetarian, too). This recipe produces roughly four ounces (1/2 cup) of curry paste, which is the equivalent of one can of store-bought paste. For this quantity, it’s best to make it using a mortar and pestle, as it can’t be made easily in a standard-sized food processor or blender; the volume of ingredients is too small to be processed properly, and much of it will just get stuck to the sides of the blender jar or processor bowl without getting pulverized.

For this recipe, I’ve provided instructions for making a curry powder from scratch, which involves toasting whole dry spices and then grinding them into a fine powder in a spice grinder. It’s a simple process, but for people who want to save time, or for those who don’t have a well-stocked spice cabinet, using a store-bought curry powder is perfectly acceptable. Either way, the recipe calls for an extra pinch of toasted coriander, cumin, and white peppercorns to ensure that the flavors of those spices come through.

Working With a Mortar and Pestle

With a little practice, pounding a curry paste doesn’t take all that much effort, especially if you follow some basic principles.

• Make sure to thinly slice the fresh aromatics before adding them to the mortar; smaller pieces are much easier to process into a paste.
• Add only one ingredient at a time to the mortar (because of the small quantities and comparable texture, shallots and garlic can be added at the same time), and don't move on to the next one until you have fully pulverized the latest addition; overcrowding the mortar will just slow you down and make a mess.
• Use the weight of the pestle to your advantage; start by simply tapping the ingredients with the heavy pestle to crush them, and then move on to more energetic pounding.
• Embrace the process; once you get the paste going, it becomes easier to incorporate each subsequent ingredient.
• Give yourself some arm relief by grinding whole spices separately in a spice grinder before incorporating them into the paste in the mortar and pestle.
• Ground spices help absorb liquid released by aromatics during pounding, making it easier to generate the abrasive friction between the pestle and mortar that’s required to pound the more fibrous ingredients into a fine paste.