Thai restaurants seem to be everywhere in Australia, ranging from the finest dining experiences to cheap $6 curries for lunch and takeaway dinner. The popularity of this style of food stems from the fact it is full of flavour and caters to a variety of palates and requirements. Gluten free, vegetarian, seafood, spicey or mild are all very easy to achieve without any compromise to the quality of the flavours.

In a similar vain, it is easy to cook an authentic Thai curry yourself, at home, with minimal fuss. Forget about the pre-packaged ready-made stir through sauces, all a great tasting green curry requires is nothing more than a heap of really fresh veges, a bit of meat, a tin of coconut milk, curry paste and a few spices.

Ingredients:

• A few tablespoons of green curry paste
• 200 ml tin of coconut milk
• 2-3 Kaffir lime leaves
• Handful of mushrooms, sliced
• 1 small red capsicum, diced
• 1 small green capsicum, diced
• handful of green beans
• 400g of the diced meat of your choice (preferably pork, chicken or prawns)
• 10 grams of palm sugar
• 200 ml or vegetable or stock of the meat of your choice
• Chilli to taste

Process

Start by frying the curry paste in vegetable oil until you can smell it, add the coconut milk, Kaffir lime and palm sugar. Once the palm sugar has desolved, add the meat and cook over a low heat until meat is mostly cooked, add the stock and all vegetables and simmer for a further 10 minutes. Serve on long grain rice.

The trick to making this is making sure not to overcook the vegetables, the low heat means you don’t need to worry so much about overcooking the meat as it should remain juicy regardless.

Wine Pairing

While I very rarely recommend people to drink the most citrusy of sauvignon blancs, the tangy lime flavours will be tempered quite nicely by the spice of the curry and blend quite nicely with the slight citrus flavour brought through by the Kaffir lime. Gewurztraminer almost always stands up well to the often overpowering flavours of curry and spice and this will be no exception.