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But now, let's talk about Thai curries.

Most home Thai curries taste flat. Mine did for years. I'd follow a recipe, simmer it forever, add more paste, add more salt — and it was fine, but it never tasted like what I'd eaten in Thailand (or at my favorite Thai restaurant).

Close, but missing something I couldn't name. Ever felt that? It took a cooking class in Thailand for me to figure it out.

It's all about the coconut bloom. That is, don't shake the coconut milk can.

Open it carefully, scoop the thick cream off the top into one bowl, and pour the thin milk into another. You're going to use them at different stages.

Fry your curry paste in a dry wok for a couple of minutes, then add only the thick cream and keep stirring. In 3 to 5 minutes, the coconut oil will start to separate and pool at the edges of the pan — orange-tinged, glossy, unmistakable.

That's the bloom - aka when the paste actually cooks. If you skip this step and just dump everything in at once, the paste stays RAW no matter how long the curry simmers, and you get that flat taste.

Every Thai restaurant does this.

The rest of the recipe is just a 40-minute weeknight curry — pressed tofu pan-fried until golden, eggplant, baby corn, long beans, makrut lime leaves, Thai basil stirred in off the heat so it doesn't turn black. Done.

Two quick things to know if you want to go further:

• For store-bought paste, this one is vegan, gluten free and quite solid. I also just have a homemade green curry paste - takes 10 minutes and freezes in ice cube trays for three months. The aromatics in a jar usually lose their volatile oils which is why fresh ones smell completely different. Worth the extra 10 minutes if you can swing it.
• And here's how I cook jasmine rice — the ratio on most bags is wrong for jasmine. 1¼ cups water to 1 cup rice, for stovetop. Game-changer for any Thai dinner.

Toodles,
Shruthi

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