Panaeng curry with beef

An feature I've noted when cooking Thai curries at home is that no matter if the name in the title says that the curry should be red, yellow or green, they always turn out brown.

The curry I chose to cook, panaeng curry, is supposed to brown though. Maybe with some red oil flecks on top, but basically brown. The curry paste, that is the base of the curry, contains a lot of peanuts, shallots, garlic, lemongrass, galangal, chillies and coriander root. For a quicker version ready made panaeng paste can be used. In Thailand this curry is mostly done with beef, but I suppose you could really put in any kind of meat and veggies, anyway, I used beef.


The recipe in the book is kind of involved, saying you should boil the beef in coconut milk for 2 hours. The beef I had would probably be turned into porridge by that time, so I skipped that step and just used my standard Thai curry algorithm.

1) Fry some coconut cream until the oil separates from whatever else is in there.
2) Fry the curry paste in the coconut cream
3) Add the meat, other spices and/or veggies
4) Add chilli, fish sauce, sugar and lime juice until everything tastes right.

And, voilá, it turned out really good :)