How to Make Spicy Chicken Thai Soup

Learn how to make Spicy Chicken Thai Soup, as shown in this video by Chef John of Foodwishes.

Today, we’re doing what I'm calling Thai Soup. There are one million variations of this soup but it's your basic red curry, chicken, coconut milk, lemon grass soup that probably the most common soup in a Thai Restaurant. Anyway here we go. This is the only ingredient that you may have a hard time finding, lemon grass. Okay, that’s fresh lemon grass, ginger and garlic shouldn’t be a problem. So what we’re going to do here, we’re going to take three or four cloves of garlic and just give them a rough chop I just cut them in half basically you don’t have to peal. I've got about three to four inch piece of ginger. I’m just going to cut and slice this and in fact I had a little kind of bruise piece at the end that I trimmed off. So five or six slices of ginger. Now, this lemon grass is really kind of unique. It's kind of a lemony flavor but not really. So I'm going to cut it half way down, usually just use the bottom halves. If you can’t find it on the site, we’ll give you some substitutions. But hopefully you can, it also comes actually puree the little squeeze bottle, but it's the same brand that you see me use in a ginger a lot of times. So anyway, you want to peal off really kind of tough outer leaves. And by the way, we’re going to strain this, so I'm no a huge, huge deal how perfectly you trim this. Go ahead and cut it in like a quarter inch, half inch slices and add that to your garlic and ginger and a little stock pot. So what we’re going to do which I think is a really nice trick, we’re going to add a quarter of chicken stock or chicken broth to our ginger, lemon grass and garlic. We’re going to simmer on low for a half hour and then we’re going to strain that into the soup. See one of my prep cubes in Thai restaurants I just—I love this soup beyond believe but I don’t like biting in to that really tough ginger and lemon grass, a lot of times it leave it in there. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to simmer it like that for a half hour and then we’re going to strain it into the soup so that we don’t have to worry about those chucks. All right, in the mean time get your chicken ready that is two and a half pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thigh that I cut into one inch pieces, 12 ounces of mushrooms those are quartered. I got one red onion that I've sliced up, with the grain, all right. We have some cilantro. It's about a third a bunch, half a bunch maybe. Two nice juicy limes, some coconut milk, now that is two cans. That is regular coconut milk and that’s a light coconut milk. I’d like to mix, one of each. So people go all lighter all ready there and that’s red curry paste. And most grocery stores actually have there is your fish sauce. Most grocery stores actually have Thai food section now right where you find all the Asian barbecue sauces and soy sauces. Look around there you're going to find those ingredients. In a stock pot or any soup pot, go ahead and put a little bit of vegetable oil. Dump in your chicken thigh, we’re not trying to sear it, and we’re not trying to brown it. Okay, we basically just want to cook it in some of juices here for about five minutes just to get I started. So don’t worry about that it didn’t get brown, that it got all start boiling that’s fine. It's what we want. Throw in your mushrooms. Give it another five minutes, all right. So we haven’t spiced anything yet that’s just the mushrooms and the chicken five minutes with the chicken. Add the mushrooms five more minutes and it's already getting nice and juicy, all the delicious flavor comes out of the chicken thigh. And again, some people use chicken breast for this. I'm not a big fan of that. I think the thigh is way more flavorful and it’s getting nuts. That is two teaspoon of red curry paste, one of the hottest substances known to man, so be careful. If you’ve never made this before, you might want to start with just a half a teaspoon and then adjust at the end but I'm using two, I'm not scared. I'm going to put in three tablespoons of our fish sauce. We’ve talked about that before not to do the search on our site for fish sauce. You can see all the recipes that I use that in. It's a salting product, so we’re not going to need a lot of salt here in this dish. There is my lime juice, I will squeeze the two limes it's about two ounces. And I've use the signature flavor profile of the soup is hot, sour and delicious. All right, stir that in, all right make sure it's very well mixed and then that stoke that has been simmering for a half hour all that beautiful lemon grass and ginger and garlic flavors has been pulled out. We’re going to strain that into our soup and we’re going to disregard all the tough pieces of lemon grass, etcetera. Add your two cans. This is 14 ounce cans of coconut milk. Again I've used one light and one regular. And just bring that to a simmer and just simmer that for 15 to 20 minutes. Really that’s all over, pretty much done. Now that beautiful orange all slick at the top, they would never take that off in a Thai restaurant. It's a part of the dish but you Americans, you and friends, you know you know who you are, if you want to skin that off go ahead. And after a minute you take a little bit of that. And so just after 15 to 20 minutes I threw in my onion. It only need about five minutes more. You just want to the onions to soften slightly. You don’t really want it to fall apart. You wanted to have just a little bit of a texture to it. And then to serve the dish here, what you're going to do is you're going to turn off the heat, add your cilantro. I just did a rough chop on that and that is ready to serve. Now traditionally, this is served with an extra plate of garnish that is sliced hot pepper, extra cilantro and lime, just squeeze in and there you go. So I put a little—I put a squeeze a lime in. I threw some jalapeño in, little more fresh cilantro. Men, this is one of my favorite all time dishes. And now my goal here when slice this, I want enough red curry paste in this to make it pleasantly painful, all right, it almost hurts to eat it's so spicy, yet you cant wait for the next spoon full. It is like a delicate balance between I can’t take this and I can’t get enough of this all right. Difficult to describe take a little practice. Like I said when you first start out, you go maybe half a teaspoon or a teaspoon of that red curry paste. Give it a try then the next time a little bit more. But for me two teaspoons just gets me where I want to be and I knew you spicy food junkies you know exactly what I'm talking about. There are endorphins that are released in your brain that cause incredible pleasure when you eat something spicy. And if you’ve never felt that, I'm actually felt bad for you. So here is a great recipe to try, to experience that all the details will be on the site. I really hope that you give this a try. Oh, and one last tip, usually I served this as it's as is, this is the first course. Just want to make it into a full meal, make some regular white basmati or jasmine rose and put a big old spoon roast in that bowl and it's delicious, like that also. So either way with rice or plain, pure enjoy.