39 recipes. Page 2 of 2
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Rice cooked in coconut milk with pandan leaves makes a rich, fragrant base for the fiery sambal served beside it. Around it go crisp dried anchovies, roasted peanuts, boiled egg and cucumber, and each bite can be salty, crunchy, cooling or hot.
Over two to three hours the coconut milk goes from loose curry to thick sauce and finally to a dry stage, where the oil separates and the beef fries in its own spice crust. Finished pieces are dark brown, almost black at the edges, carrying chili heat, the warmth of galangal, and the sweetness of caramelized coconut. Beef chuck suits that long cook, a cut that needs the hours to turn tender.
Compared with Malaysian nasi lemak, this Jakarta coconut rice has a lighter coconut note, with lemongrass and pandan adding a soft herbal layer. The rice itself is salted, and fried shallot flakes on top give it crunch. It is meant as a base for side dishes such as fried tempeh, chicken or thin egg omelet strips.
This dish takes its name from a train line between Manila and the Bicol region in southeastern Luzon, where coconut and chilies go into cooking more freely than almost anywhere else in the Philippines. Pork belly simmers in coconut milk with shrimp paste and chilies until the coconut fat separates and the meat starts frying in it. By the end there is almost no loose sauce, just a creamy coating on every piece.
Chunky potato, carrot, and onion make this look like a familiar home-style curry, but the sauce is built on curry powder and coconut milk rather than a flour-and-butter roux. Starch from the potatoes and the reduced coconut milk thicken it without any flour, and reheated the next day it tastes deeper than on the first.
It began in 1940s Singapore, when M.J. Gomez, an immigrant from Kerala, put whole fish heads, which his Chinese customers loved, into a South Indian curry. Okra, eggplant and tomato cook along with the head in coconut milk and tamarind, and collagen from the head gives the gravy a slight stickiness. The first bites go to the cheeks and the soft parts around the eyes, which have soaked up the most curry.
The eggplant is cut into big cubes and browned on its cut faces before it goes anywhere near the coconut milk curry sauce. Raw eggplant would drink up oil and liquid and go limp; seared first, the cubes keep their corners after simmering and taste toasty where they hit the pan.
Coconut milk makes it look rich and creamy, but tamarind gives it a sharp sourness, and it eats lighter than it looks. Fishing households on Goa's west coast eat this curry with rice every day, and locally the pair is called xitt-kodi. It carries traces of the Portuguese colonial period along with Konkani cooking traditions, and Goans of every religion and class share it.
Dried taro leaves simmer slowly in coconut milk until they collapse into a creamy, spoonable mass with a faint sheen of oil on top. Fully dried leaves are essential, since fresh ones can leave an itchy, prickly feeling in the mouth. It comes from the Bicol region of the Philippines and is eaten a little at a time with plenty of warm rice.
Once the coconut milk and mango chutney go in, this shrimp curry simmers for only five to seven minutes, not long enough for the shrimp to toughen. Lime juice and cilantro go on top, with rice or naan alongside.
Of the Thai curries, massaman leans furthest from chili heat and closest to a sweet, savory braise, a style rooted in the Muslim communities of southern Thailand. Warm spices in the paste, more cinnamon and cardamom than fresh chili, make it read like a stew next to a green or red curry. Chicken thighs and big chunks of potato cook in coconut milk until the potato edges soften and thicken the sauce, and peanuts add crunch.
The sauce is cooked down until it coats a spoon thickly, so it clings to the thin slices of pork tenderloin rather than pooling around them. Peanut butter makes it nutty, and hand-torn kaffir lime leaves bring a sharp citrus smell up through the rich coconut.
The thick cream from the top of the coconut milk is heated first until a little oil shows, and the green curry paste is fried in that before the rest of the milk goes in. Eggplant can cook until soft, but the shrimp go in last and come off the heat the moment they turn pink and curl. Thai basil and lime juice are added off the heat.
The duck breast is cooked slowly skin side down to render out its fat before it meets the curry, so the browned skin still tastes of the pan even in a rich coconut red curry. Bamboo shoots, red pepper and Thai basil go in with it.
With fish sauce as the only added seasoning, frying the yellow curry paste in a dry pot until it darkens slightly and turns fragrant does most of the flavor work. Cut large, the potatoes simmer quietly with the chicken and onion in the coconut milk until a chopstick slides in, staying in whole chunks that soak up the sauce.