The BEST and WORST Thai Curry Paste - Taste Test!

Welcome to Hot Thai Kitchen .

Thai curry is popular all over the world so much so that my most popular video is my green curry video .

And the question that I get asked a lot is what is the best brand of Thai curry paste ?

Because let's face it .

Most of us are not gonna make it from scratch .

Thai people included .

And my answer usually goes something like this .

Well , I usually go with ploy but this and this is also great notice .

I never directly answer the question .

What is the best brand ?

Because I actually don't know I've been using my for years .

It's kind of become a default for me .

But is it actually the best ?

Well , the only way to objectively find that out is to do a blind taste test , which I am going to do today .

Here's the plan , I've chosen five brand of Thai curry paste .

And first , I'm going to make just the basic curry sauce with them and then taste them and rank them in order of my preference .

And then I'm gonna take my top and my bottom choice and make a full curry with them complete with meat vegetables and eat it with rice .

To see if once all of those ingredients are added is the difference still significant .

Let's meet our contestants and talk about how I chose them first .

I narrowed it down to just red curry paste for our test because it's the most basic paste .

It's the most widely available and the most versatile I used it in the most number of my recipes .

And importantly , every brand has a red curry paste .

Now there are many , many brands out there .

Obviously , I can't possibly taste this of them .

So I had to narrow it down to a manageable number .

And here is how I chose them .

First , I chose only brands that are commonly available outside of Thailand .

So nothing obscure or local or specific to Canada that you can't find .

Second , I chose brands that have been around for quite some time and have good reputations .

So they're all coming in with a certain amount of cred .

Finally , I checked the ingredient list to make sure that it's got all the things you'd expect in a red curry paste without any additives because a good curry paste should just be a mix of real food ingredients .

And with those guidelines , I arrived at these five ploy .

This is my current go to brand , as I mentioned , I just want to note that it does contain shrimp paste .

So if you're a vegetarian , this is gonna be out by default .

This is another brand that I use quite often because it's widely available .

They also make my go to coconut milk ma This is the only one that comes in a can and also the only one with added sugar , which I've never actually noticed until now .

So this might be a new thing .

I've been seeing more of this lately and it's the other one in our lineup that contains shrimp paste .

Finally , Thai kitchen , which is not actually something that I see often in Asian stores , but by far the most common one at the international aisle of non Asian stores .

So if you can't find anything else on this list , you can probably find this one before we taste a little background on curry paste .

Thai curry paste is basically just a mixture of ground up herbs and spices .

There are tons of varieties , red , yellow , green and so on and so forth .

Now , for each paste , there is a basic expectation of what it should taste like , but like any food , everyone has their own recipe .

Hence all of these different brands on the market .

Now , if you want to learn more about Thai curry paste , I highly suggest checking out my curry paste one on one video where I go through what it is , what's in it , how to use and store so on and so forth and I will link to that below .

All right , let's make our curry sauce .

I'm measuring out all my ingredients by weight for accuracy .

Just a quick reaction after I've just weighed everything out .

Um , they all look visibly different , which is good because in the back of my mind , I was afraid that somehow these are actually manufactured by the same company and they're just different branding , which happens , but it appears that that is not the case .

There are different colors , different textures , they smell different .

So this is good .

They should taste different to make the curry sauce .

I'm first going to saute the paste into some neutral oil for exactly two minutes .

Now , usually I like to saute my curry paste and reduced coconut milk as you may have seen before in other videos .

But I want to eliminate the potential differences between coconut milk being reduced to different degrees .

So this will help keep our samples more consistent for some of these paste .

They're starting out drier and they're sticking to the bottom within that two minutes .

And so I have to deglaze the pod to prevent the curry paste from burning .

Then I'm going to add some coconut milk , some water and a little bit of sugar to help balance the salt .

I'm not seasoning it with any fish sauce right now because most of these past have quite a bit of salt in it .

And at this point without any added meat or vegetables , any added fish sauce is probably gonna make it too salty and that's just gonna simmer for exactly five minutes .

To allow for the flavors from the paste to integrate into the liquid and that's our curry sauce .

And I'm going to repeat this process for all five brands and to control for differences in evaporation .

During simmering , I weighed the final curry sauce and added water to make them all weigh as much as the heaviest one for the tasting .

I also reheated them so they are roughly the same warm temperature .

All right .

Moment of truth .

First , I'm gonna have Adam come in and rearrange all of these .

Hello , pork and chicken curry .

Chicken pork , belly serving pieces , red and green bell pepper , frozen green piece .

There's a lemon grass fiber that wasn't ground quite fine , quite salty .

Yeah .

Both of these are about equally salty .

Good flavor .

Good strength .

I feel like I like the flavor of this better .

I do not like the lemongrass fibers .

Um but the flavor of this one is a little bit stronger than that spiciness .

Saltiness about the same really weak and watery .

Not too salty though , which is a positive , good flavor but weak .

I'm gonna compare the two weak ones .

Oh This is by far the weakest , this tastes so watery .

This is my bottom pick so far .

This one is quite salty but compared to my current topic .

This one's a little more acidic .

So 13 and five are currently very , very close .

This one's prominently salty .

I feel like I taste shrimp paste in this one .

It's a little bit more funky .

Ok .

I'm gonna try the week once again .

Oh , man , this one is so watery .

It's so hard to try .

It's so watery .

The .

Ok .

Ok .

Here is my thought on this .

13 and five .

You can't go wrong with any of these good flavor , good level of spice and quite a bit of saltiness , which is not always a positive because there are some situations where it's too salty like if you want to be reduce a lot of paste to amp up the flavor .

But then that makes it too salty .

So that's not always a positive .

But flavor wise these are good .

These two are weak .

This one has good flavor but it's quite weak .

So you'd need to use more of it .

This one is so watery , so mild that it's , it's so hard for me to , to even know how good the flavor is .

So for sure , according to this test , this is my bottom pick and this is kind of a problem because think about it , if I'm making a recipe and I'm using this one and I tell you to put three tablespoons of curry paste , you go and you make yours with this one .

You're gonna think that I gave you a weak recipe because it's so diluted , right ?

But it's not my fault or the fault of the recipe that you're following .

But it's actually the pace because this is huge .

How different these are now .

Picking my top pick , we know that this is the bottom , pick my top pick .

Let me just do this one more time splitting hairs to be honest , like totally splitting hairs at this point , I'm going to go with this one because I feel like I can .

It's got a little bit more and that could be the shrimp paste and I'm biased because I like shrimp paste .

Yeah , I feel like this one has more .

So that's my top pick .

Bottom pick .

OK , let's reveal what is my topic .

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30 to 35 seconds .

30 seconds .

You ready in at all part ?

But ingredients , pork and chicken curry .

I think .

I , I , yeah , between medium 45 to 60 minutes depend on pork .

15 minutes back .

15 to 18 minutes .

Yeah .

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Flavor .

Hm .

Set up bell peppers .

Mhm .

Pork flavor for fun .