Quick & Easy Chicken Massaman
Papacito usually cooks his meals from scratch, using our stash of herbs and spices, but it's often too time consuming for a week day night, so we save it as a weekend treat.
One of my favorite range of curry sauces are made by Mae Ploy in Thailand, and are available to buy in the US and also in the UK. When I discovered they were also available here in El Salvador I was delighted, as they really do make cooking a tasty Thai curry quick and simple.
Let me share with you how easy it really is to use a Mae Ploy sauce to cook a Chicken Massaman curry.
Please do not be put off by how the curry looks in the photograph. I could have cheated and used a stock photo, but I wanted you to see my actual curry. If photographs had the option of smell you would know how delicious this truly was.
Let me introduce you to Mai Ploy Thai Mussaman Sauce
I have tried Mae Ploy's Penang, Massaman, Green Thai and Yellow Thai sauces and they are all authentic and delicious. Mussaman and the Thai Yellow are definitely my favourites. Papacito also loves the Green Thai and Penang sauces but I find them a little hot for my taste.
We lived in Malaysia for two years and one of the things that we miss the most is the fantastic Asian food. Mae Ploy's sauces have definitely improved our mealtimes, by enabling us to cook authentic Asian food in very little time.
What is Chicken Massaman?
Massaman, or Mussaman curry is a Thai dish that is their interpretation of a Malaysian dish. It is possible that the name was derived from the Malay word Masam, which means sour.
Do not be put off making this if you do not like hot curries - this is quite a mild curry.
If you were to make the sauce from scratch you would need: unsalted dry roasted peanuts,shallots, chillies, galangal or ginger, lemongrass, ground coriander, cumin, whole cumin seeds, nutmeg, cinnamon, ground cloves, ground cardamon, fish sauce, shrimp paste, palm or brown sugar and coconut milk.
I think you'll agree it's much easier to purchase a good quality ready made paste such as the one from Mae Ploy?
Quick and Easy Chicken Mussuman
— using Mai Ploy Thai Mussuman Sauce
Ingredients
Instructions | Papacito's Top Tips
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- Put the curry paste in to a frying pan, along with the oil and 1/3 tin of coconut milk and stir fry for several minutes, until the paste and milk are combined and have no lumps.
- Add the chicken and a further 1/3 of the tin of coconut milk and bring to the boil.
- Add the potatoes, onion and 1/2 cup (125mls) of water.
- Turn down the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
- Add the sugar and tamarind paste and stir well.
- Stir in the remaining 1/3 of the tin of coconut milk.
- Serve with boiled rice.
Why we love to cook Asian food
We do however have an oriental supermarket that sells a very limited choice of mainly Korean and Japanese lines, and when I shopped there a couple of weeks ago I was amazed to see that they had a new range of sauces.
I had no idea if they would be nice, but when you live in a spicy food desert, and food stuffs are sometimes only available for a limited time, you learn to grab it while you can.The sauces were an instant hit with my husband, Papacito, who confirmed that they were the best cook in sauces he had tried, and they have helped to stave our homesickness for Malaysia.
Just to confirm to you how easy these sauces are to use, I rarely cook Asian food, but as Papacito had a metting at work last night I decided to give it a whirl and see if they are as easy to use as the packet suggests. I was impressed. Half an hour later we had a delicious curry.