Green curry is ranked 17th among the world’s best-tasting stew dishes

Green curry is ranked 17th among the world’s best-tasting stew dishes

     In addition to Phanang curry being ranked 1st in the world for best-tasting stew by Taste Atlas, other Thai dishes also won spots in this category, including Massaman curry, ranked 8th; green curry, 17th; Thai curry, 33rd; spicy curry, 35th; and rice noodles in fish curry sauce, ranked in 90th place.

     Green curry has been in the Thai kitchen since ancient times and is still popular, with its herbal taste, not too spicy, making green curry popular at home and abroad. Green curry can be served with rice noodles or roti on the side. It is no wonder why nearly every Thai restaurant has green curry on the menu. The taste of flavored green curry must be salty, spicy, and sweet at the end.

     It is not easy to cook green curry with a mellow taste because, even though it contains smooth-tasting coconut milk, there are many other ingredients, such as garlic, onion, leek, coriander root, and chili pepper, which must be cooked right to get a good curry. And if you look at the ingredients that need to be added, you can see that almost all of them have to be fresh, so the taste that can be achieved each time may be different.

     As to the origin of green curry, there is no definite evidence for when Thai people started making green curry. It is believed that curries with coconut milk were most likely influenced by Muslims and Persians, who came to trade in the Ayutthaya period.

     Therefore, green curry in the old days probably started with Liang curry and wild curry without coconut milk. Later, it was modified by adding coconut milk and dried chili peppers to create “red curry” or “spicy curry." And some of those ingredients were modified into green curry.

     Indeed, the name “green curry” means curry with a sweet green color, soft green, not dark green. And it is not a green curry with a sweet taste but salty and sweet.

     The green part of the green curry comes from the green curry pepper, which is a mixture of green chili with spices such as garlic, shallots, lemongrass, bergamot, capsicum, coriander, cumin seeds, cilantro, salt, and the indispensable cumin to help make the green curry more appealing to the eye, so it looks as good as it tastes.