The BEST and WORST Thai Curry Paste - Taste Test! transcript

[Music] Sawaddee Ka, welcome to hot Thai Kitchen Thai curry is popular all over the world so much so that my most popular video is my green curry video and the question that I get asked a lot is what is the best brand of Thai curry paste because let's face it most of us are not gonna make it from scratch Thai people included and my answer usually goes something like this well I usually go with my Ploy but this and this is also great notice I never directly answer the question what is the best brand because I actually don't know I've been using my employee for years it's kind of become a default for me but is it actually the best well the only way to objectively find that out is to do a blind taste test which I am going to do today here's the plan I've chosen five brands of Thai curry paste and first I'm going to make just a basic curry sauce with them and then taste them and rank them in order of my preference and then I'm going to take my top and my bottom choice and make a full curry with them complete with meat vegetables and eat it with rice to see if once all of those ingredients are added is the difference still significant let's meet our contestants and talk about how I chose them first I narrowed it down to just red curry paste for our test because it's the most basic paste it's the most widely available and the most versatile I used it in the most number of my recipes and importantly every brand has a red curry paste now there are many many Brands out there obviously I can't possibly taste this all of them so I had to narrow it down to a manageable number and here is how I chose them first I chose only brands that are commonly available outside of Thailand so nothing obscure or local or specific to Canada that you can't find second I chose brands that have been around for quite some time and have good reputation so they're all coming in with a certain amount of cred finally I checked the ingredient list to make sure that it's got all the things you'd expect in a red curry paste without any additives because a good crepe paste should just be a mix of real food ingredients and with those guidelines I arrived at these five Mae Ploy this is my current go-to brand as I mentioned I just want to note that it does contain shrimp paste so if you're vegetarian this is going to be out by default Aroy-D, this is another brand that I use quite often because it's widely available they also make my go-to coconut milk Maesri this is the only one that comes in a can and also the only one with added sugar which I've never actually noticed until now so this might be a new thing Namjai I've been seeing more of this lately and it's the other one in our lineup that contains shrimp paste finally Thai Kitchen which is not actually something that I see often in Asian stores but by far the most common one at the international aisle of non-asian stores so if you can't find anything else on this list you can probably find this one before we taste a little background on curry paste Thai curry paste is basically just a mixture of ground up herbs and spices there are tons of varieties red yellow green so on and so forth now for each paste there is a basic expectation of what it should taste like but like any food everyone has their own recipe hence all of these different brands on the market now if you want to learn more about Thai curry paste I highly suggest checking out my curry paste 101 video where I go through what it is what's in it how to use and store so on and so forth and I will link to that below alright let's make our curry sauce I'm measuring out all my ingredients by weights for accuracy just a quick reaction after I've just weighed everything out they all look visibly different which is good because in the back of my mind I was afraid that somehow these are actually manufactured by the same company and they're just different branding which happens but it appears that that is not the case there are different colors different textures they smell different so this is good they should taste different to make the curry sauce I'm first going to saute the paste in some neutral oil for exactly two minutes now usually I like to saute my curry paste in reduced coconut milk as you may have seen before in other videos but I want to eliminate the potential differences between coconut milk being reduced to different degrees so this will help keep our samples more consistent for some of these pastes they're starting out drier and they're sticking to the bottom within that two minutes and so I have to deglaze the pot to prevent the curry paste from burning then I'm going to add some coconut milk some water and a little bit of sugar to help balance the salt I'm not seasoning it with any fish sauce right now because most of these paste have quite a bit of salt in it and at this point without any added meat or vegetables any added fish sauce is probably going to make it too salty and that's just gonna simmer for exactly five minutes to allow for the flavors from the paste to integrate into the liquid and that's our curry sauce and I'm going to repeat this process for all five Brands and to control for differences in evaporation during simmering I weighed the final curry sauce and added water to make them all weigh as much as the heaviest one for the tasting I also reheated them so they are roughly the same warm temperature all right moment of truth first I'm gonna have Adam come in and rearrange all of these I'm gonna be in here and not looking I'll let you move them back okay okay spicy, taking notes so I don't forget, it's definitely spicy salty good flavor strength sweeter less salty very weak flavor like I feel like I need to at least double the paste in that one there's a lemongrass fiber that wasn't ground quite fine quite salty yeah both of these are about equally salty good flavor good strength I feel like I like the flavor of this better I do not like the lemongrass fibers but the flavor of this one is a Little Bit Stronger then that spiciness saltiness about the same really weak and watery not too salty though which is a positive good flavor but weak I'm gonna compare the two weak ones oh this is by far the weakest this tastes so watery this is my bottom pick so far this one is quite salty but compared to my current top pick this one's a little more acidic so one three and five are currently very very close this one's prominently salty I feel like I taste shrimp paste in this one it's a little bit more funky okay I'm gonna try the weak ones again oh man this one is so watery [Music] so hard to try it's so watery okay okay here is my thought on this one three and five you can't go wrong with any of these good flavor good level of spice and quite a bit of saltiness which is not always a positive because there are some situations where it's too salty like if you want to reduce a lot of paste to amp up the flavor but then that makes it too salty so that's not always a positive but flavor wise these are good these two are weak this one has good flavor but it's quite weak so you need to use more of it this one is so watery so mild that it's it's so hard for me to to even know how good the flavor is so for sure according to this test this is my bottom pick and this is kind of a problem because think about it if I'm making a recipe and I'm using this one and I tell you to put three tablespoons of curry paste you go and you make yours with this one you're gonna think that I gave you a week that's recipe because it's so diluted right but it's not my food or the fault of the recipe that you're following but it's actually the paste because this is huge how different these are now picking my top pick we know that this is the bottom pick my top pick let me just do this one more time splitting hairs to be honest like totally splitting hairs at this point I'm going to go with this one because I feel like I can it's got a little bit more oomph and that could be the shrimp paste and I'm biased because I like shrimp paste yeah I feel like this one has more oomph so that's my top pick bottom pick okay let's reveal what is my top pick you know it it's my go-to it is Mae Ploy it is Mae Ploy ladies and gentlemen which for those of you who are vegetarian that is not good news because Mae Ploy contains shrimp paste our worst is Thai Kitchen which is not unexpected because Thai Kitchen I think is made for not Thai people, they don't sell it in Thailand for example so they're probably wanting to make this milder and weaker for those who are not used to spice our third one which was decent Namjai wow namjai came out pretty good namjai came out pretty good this one also quite weak I have a theory about what this is Maesri yes I the reason I had a feeling this was Maesri was because the paste was also quite wet so these two were probably the ones that I didn't have to deglaze at all because the paste already had so much moisture in it which by default means that they also have less seasoning and spices and herbs in it and this one is Aroy-D there you go in conclusion Mae Ploy, Namjai, Aroy-D, all really good options if you want no shrimp paste you want to go with Aroy-D because Namjai and Mae Ploy both have shrimp paste not surprisingly also my top picks because shrimp paste really does add Umami and oomph and and so that was not a surprise if you are somebody who really needs things to be mild and you want more room to adjust you want to be able to like add more paste without making it too strong or too salty then these two will be your go-to now for our next test I'm going to take my top pick and my bottom pick and I'm gonna try to make the best curry I could possibly make with them that means that for the Thai Kitchen one I will add more paste I will probably add more fish sauce than I will with this one I want to bring them to their full potential and see yes on a standardized test it's not performing as well but can we work around it like can we just add more stuff and it'll be just as good as this one in the end let's find out for the curry I'm going to bring out curry sauce to a boil and then add a little bit of palm sugar and some bamboo shoots once that comes back to a boil I'm gonna add some chicken breast which has been marinating in just a little bit of fish sauce I'm gonna cook it for just a couple more minutes until the chicken is done and then I'm going to taste for seasoning and I want to bring this to its optimal level and for my apply I had to add just a little bit of fish sauce and then off the heat and stir in some Thai basil and that is it now this is a basic chicken curry that is very similar to my green curry recipe which I will link to below in case you want to try this at home for the Thai Kitchen I'm going to start by first sauteing more curry paste and I'm basically doubling it up once that's got its two minutes of sauteing I'm gonna repeat the same process as with the other curry but for this one I had to add quite a bit more fish sauce to bring it up to the optimal seasoning level so they look very different here is our Thai Kitchen and here's our maploy Thai Kitchen is so much redder because I had to add more paste so what this tells me is that they put a lot of chilies so that the color is there but maybe there's less of everything else so that's why the flavor is so weak um and if you didn't know you look at this automatically you're going to be like yeah that looks better right but let's find out and to make this representative of real life I'm gonna have it with rice who has curry without rice let's taste our good one first just as a benchmark because we're trying to determine whether we can bring this up to the level of our paste of choice that's good good level of spice I would call this mild it might be medium for some people but I think this is a good like crowd pleaser level it's very red there's like no heat like kid friendly so this is very interesting is it bad? no. is it a meal I would enjoy? for me it's a little it's still a little weak for somebody for a kid this would be perfect because it's not spicy at all it's still it's kind of weird because it actually feels richer and thicker like the the texture of the curry is thicker which tells me that there's more solids in it now we doubled the paste that would make sense there should be more stuff in it but it still tastes weaker than this one so I don't know what the stuff is that is in here but it's not really delivering the flavor that's in this and it could it be shrimp paste I wouldn't say so because the Aroy-D paste that that didn't have shrimp paste seems to be able to deliver the a good flavor as well but that might be one of it so overall my conclusion is if you can get Mae Ploy or one of the other two two top two this one is is workable but still like it's even if I tried my best it's still not as good not as flavorful as this one but if you're very sensitive to spice or you're cooking for kids maybe this is the one to choose so the takeaway for me is that there's a big range between Brands and when you are cooking using store-bought curry paste you cannot throw your judgment out the window you have to taste and adjust and be prepared to add more if needed if you happen to be using one of these so I would say go with our top three if you can but it's not a deal breaker if these are your only options just know that you need to do some do some extra work if you're following my recipes I'm usually using either Aroy-D or Mae Ploy as a test Namjai is close enough that if you're using that you probably don't need to adjust if following my recipes other people's rest recipes who knows who knows what they are using so this is why you have to use your judgment and that is it I hope that was interesting and informative it was definitely interesting for me if you have any opinions at all about curry paste that you've used in the past another brand that we didn't cover do share with us in the comments below and a special thanks to all of our patreon supporters who help support the show and if you want to know what that's all about how to get bonus content and have direct access to me I will link to all that in the description below thank you as always for watching and I will see you next time, sawaddee ka [Music]