Laksa recipe - Part I

Due to popular demand, I have finally got around to (beginning) to share my ideas on making Curry Laksa. As I have already bemoaned, Laksa is hard to come by in Berlin. Even commercial Laksa paste on which to base your Laksa - often a good way to go - is only available in one unsatisfying, and non-vegetarian brand. As an aside, if you can find a good asian grocer with lots of Laksa pastes, I recommend OSHA brand as it is tasty and vegetarian.

So why do we need Laksa paste? The paste contains all the spices that make your Laksa so tasty, and in the cooking process it is good to be able to fry all your spices together, so having them all in one paste is convenient. Also, it can make the cooking process more efficient as you can prepare paste for more than one meal and keep it aside for later use.

Here in Berlin I have made the paste in two ways. The quickest way was to base it on Thai Red Curry Paste which has quite a good subset of the necessary ingredients. However, I felt my more successful attempt was when I did the whole thing from scratch, so that's what I'll tell you about today.

LAKSA PASTE:

Ingredients:

• 1 head of garlic
• 1 red onion
• 3 thumb sized peices of galangal
• 8 candle nuts
• 2 large fresh chillies, deseeded
• 5 stems of lemon grass (use white part only)
• 8 tablespoons peanut oil
• 1 teaspon tumeric powder
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon coriander paste
• 1 teaspoon Kings (Sri Lankan) curry powder
• 1 teaspoon peanut butter
• 1 red capsicum
• rind of 1 lime
  

Notes:
Non-vegetarians would probably want to add shrimp paste. The onion can be replaced with shallots, especially asian shallots if you can get them. The curry powder was not your typical yellow 'curry' powder. It could be ommited or exchanged for some cumin. The salt is a matter of taste. Originally I put 2 tablespoons, but this was quite a lot and meant I didn't need stock powder in the soup later, so I'd try less. It may help as a preservative I guess. You could of course add more chilli, though I like to keep it mild (for spice intolerant guests) and serve with a good chilli sambal.

Method:
Now the obvious way to make a paste is with a powerful food processor, but I don't have one. Hence I developed a novel way to do it using what I had - a hand held food processor that couldn't chop these things by itself.

Begin by finely chopping everything. I mean fine! Then fry everything in a pan, using the peanut oil, until the capsicum is soft. Use a lid while frying to stop it drying out too much. It doesn't need to be blackened, just enough to get the flavours mixed together. Then you store the paste in the fridge and it's ready to use.

When you want to make a Laksa you take the paste you need and throw it in a container with the coconut milk you're going to use. With the extra liquid you can now use a hand held chopper thingo to blend the softened paste into a fine coconutty spicy mix. To hear how to make the whole Laksa you'll have to wait til next time.