Curry flavour
When you stop to think about it, the word curry is quite clever – it’s a term that covers an almost endless array of dishes. The flavours it covers range wildly, and traditional versions are found all over Asia and bastardised versions have been adopted throughout the world. Curries can be made using pastes and powders, both of which can have very sparse or exceedingly complex ingredient lists. They can be mild, rich, hot, saucy, dry, thin or thick, highly spiced or subtle. You can spend an age roasting and grinding spices, preparing your ingredients and then more time slow-cooking. Or you can buy a paste, add coconut milk and, voila, you have an almost instant meal.
One of the benefits of all this variety is that most people feel comfortable making some sort of curry. The downside is it gives leeway to combine a mishmash of flavours that result in a generic “curry”. I am all for experimentation but it does need to be done with purposeful thought.
Which brings me to this curry, a nontraditional recipe I have made up that brings together flavours and techniques of Sri Lanka and Thailand. When you look at these two countries you see they have commonality – both are small with a predominately Buddhist population and their national cuisine profiles have echoes of hot, sour, sweet and salty.
Pepper was the predominant heat in both places until the arrival of chilli, an ingredient so immersed in the two fiery cuisines that it seems unthinkable it wasn’t always there. Tamarind and lime lend sour notes and are indispensable to both, as is sugar from the palm tree. (The Sri Lankan version, jaggery, has a molasses and smoky taste; the Thai version is much sweeter and is used more lavishly.) Salty flavour is so often there via fish or shrimp pastes – fish sauce in Thailand and Maldive fish flakes in Sri Lanka. Then just add coconut, potentially the most necessary ingredient of all.
If you look at the base ingredients of many Thai and Sri Lankan curries, they mirror each other. So to merge the two doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch at all.
The only tricky part of this recipe is the somewhat long list of ingredients for the curry paste, which includes aspects of both a Thai jungle or green curry and a Sri Lankan fish curry. You could make a big batch to freeze and then you’d be ready for an almost instant curry meal whenever you please. Once the paste is out of the way, we cook it using a
Thai technique of first frying coconut cream in oil until it splits, which gives this curry a beautiful richness and depth. Then we adopt the Sri Lankan technique of just adding (an Australian) fish to the base, rather than several different ingredients as you find in Thai curries. The result is a hybrid dish that happily sits under the title of curry.