Homemade or store-bought curry pastes? What's the different?

Now we all know that Thai curries are everyone’s favourite dish, but there’s a myriad of ways to make ‘em.

Some popular ones you may have heard of are green curry (“gaeng keow waan”), “massaman curry”, “panaeng curry” and yellow curry (“gaeng gari.”) Now, Thai curries in general can be divided into 2 categories; coconut base or water base. The choice shouldn’t be taken lightly, as the base will highly reflected in the taste and texture of the final outcome. Some coconut base curries will include green curry, red curry, yellow curry, massama curry and panaeng curry. Water base curries include sour soup curry, jungle curry and southern style yellow curry.

Obviously homemade curry paste is always preferable and generally tastes much better than store bought ones. The perks of making it yourself will also be that you can tailor make your curries to fit your diet and spice tolerance that you usually won’t be able to get with the store bought versions. Store bought curry pastes are also mostly made from dried ingredients and are more concentrated (which will aid it in lasting for prolonged periods of time.)

This means that cooking with store bought curry paste you’ll need less paste to create your dish, since it’ll be stronger than their homemade counterpart. Also the perks of store bought curry pastes will be that if you’re as pressed for time, then the store bought will do you just fine (just remember to start less and add more as you see fit!)

The cool thing about all these curry pastes is that they all have 4 basic ingredients. From chillies, to garlic, shallots and shrimp paste (also galangal and lemongrass are popular as well.) BUT please don’t substitute galangal with ginger as it’ll change the flavour and aroma of the curry paste to an unreconizable degree. If you make your own curry paste then you can portion them out in zip-lock bags to keep in the freezer for months!