Want to spice up your dinner in the cold winter? Chef Mike has the answer.
While enduring last week’s brutally cold weather, I learned that hypothermia is a common medical condition that occurs when the body’s core temperature drops below 95 F.
This can result in violent shivering, blue colored lips and an increased danger that you could accidentally key someone’s car with your nipples.
To prevent cold weather tragedies and embarrassing insurance claims, let’s do a recipe walk-through of the most delicious, nipple-taming elixir to ever grace a soup bowl—Thai coconut soup, or tom kha gai,
The following recipe comes from watching Thai mothers, aunties and grandmothers make tom kha gai in small shophouses and food stalls around my home in Northern Thailand.
No slow cookers, curry pastes or elaborate preparations are needed, but if you follow the steps below carefully and don’t substitute any ingredients, you’ll end up with the most soul-warming, flavor-packed and traditionally flavored tom kha gai you can eat outside of the Land of Smiles.
Ingredients
- 4 cups sodium-free chicken stock
- 1.25 lb boneless chicken thighs (breasts will do, but thighs are better) cut into bite size pieces
- 12 ounces fresh straw mushrooms
- 2 stalks lemongrass
- 4-5 fresh Thai bird’s eye chilies
- 3-inch piece of fresh galangal, sliced thinly
- 6-7 fresh makrut (kaffir) lime leaves
- 3-4 fresh limes
- ¼ cup good quality fish sauce
- 16 oz full-fat coconut milk
- Cooked jasmine rice to accompany
Directions
The first thing to do is to concentrate the chicken stock. Pour the stock into a wide saucepan, bring to a boil, and reduce over medium-high heat until it’s half its original volume.
Typically, Thai stocks are made from just chicken or pork bones and water. Commercial stocks in the U.S., however, usually include carrots, onions, celery, and herbs that might interfere with the flavors in your tom kha gai so it’s best to make your own. Just boil some chicken or pork bones and reduce until you get a flavorful, concentrated stock.
Next, cut the straw mushrooms into bite-sized pieces and set aside. If you can’t get straw mushrooms, any mild, meaty mushroom will do, but if you use portobellos, scrape off the gills because they’ll turn the broth gray. Don’t use shiitake’s or dried mushrooms though; their flavors are just too strong.
Now cut the lemongrass stalks into one-inch pieces and smash them with the side of a large knife, Aunt Millie’s fruitcake, or any other hard, heavy object lying around the house. This breaks the juice sacs in the fibers and releases those beautifully aromatic oils. Whack the chilies and the lime leaves a couple of times too; set all three aside.
Put the coconut milk into a large pot with the chicken stock, lime leaves, lemongrass, and galangal slices.
The kha in tom kha gai actually means galangal, so it’s a very important ingredient and there’s really no substitute. Galangal has a very different flavor and texture from ginger and anyone who tries to tell you different should go back to having drinks with Sandra Lee in whatever level of culinary hell they came from.
Slowly bring the mixture to just below a simmer for about one minute to allow the herbs to infuse the liquid.
Maintain a “near-simmer” and add the mushrooms and chicken to the liquid. Coconut milk is very delicate, so make sure you stir it gently, always stir it in the same direction, and make sure it never comes to a rapid boil to prevent breaking or clumping.
Once the chicken is cooked, add the chilies and immediately remove the pot from the heat.Add the fish sauce and juice of two limes to the pot, stir, and taste. The soup should be a nice balance of sour, salty and sweet, but if you plan to eat it traditionally—with jasmine rice as a main course—you’re going to want to add a bit more fish sauce (salt) and lime juice (acid) to make the flavors strong enough to overcome the relative blandness of the rice.
Although tom kha gai is typically eaten by itself as a stand-alone soup course in the U.S., in Thailand it’s eaten with rice sort of like a curry. Tom kha gai is also not meant to be a spicy dish, so go easy on the chilies—not all Thai food is spicy!
Pro tip: the herbs (lemongrass, lime leaves, galangal, chilies) are not supposed to be eaten, but are instead pushed to the side as you eat the soup similar to bay leaves in gumbo or spaghetti sauce.
Life’s too short to eat mediocre food. Bon appétit!
Mike McJunkin is a native Chattanoogan currently living abroad who has trained chefs, owned and operated restaurants. Join him on Facebook at facebook.com/SushiAndBiscuits