Do Thai aubergines need deseeding?

Krachai is actually what defines the gaeng pah taste. You needn't add galangal, it's not used in Thailand.

Don't make the mistake of reducing it too much, it is eaten as a soup, not as what we would define as a curry.

I love it, it's my favourite Thai 'curry', my wife needs to make it at least ince a week.

If you've a Thai grocery in your hometown then you could also add cha om. I think it's water acacia in English. Thais will understand, you need to look for youngish shoots, maybe 3- 4 inches long, get rid of the stems if they're too thick or have already developed thorns.

Here's cha om:
http://www.simply-thai.com/thai-veg-big-images/cha-om-vsm.jpg

Here's krachai:
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/pictures/boes_01.jpg

And don't add coconut cream, it's not that sort of curry ;)

Edited by: HenningWessel

There aren't that many 'dry' Thai curries...

On the spur of the moment I can just think of chu- chi curry, dry red curry, panaeng curry (which isn't dry really but there's not much liquid).
Then there's the gaeng xxx pong kari, where xxx is the meat you use (chicken, pork or, very rarely, beef). Pong kari actually translates as curry powder, and the curry powder used is normally of the Indian/ Malaysian kind.
You marinate the meat in the powder for a couple of hours, then fry it, adding a little water each time and reducing it continuously so that when it's done it's dry again.

Very nice. Fry with shallots, garlic, julienned ginger.

You got them in Camberwell did you...hmp!... Waitrose by any chance?.

What is a jungle curry?

Certainly, I never shop anywhere else but Waitrose in Camberwell. It's in between the Bentley showroom and the Cartier store.

#14.Perhaps a generic name for a tropical spicy hot,sour and aromatic soupy like stew made with wild herbs,spices,tubers,leafy vegetables and other ingridents that can be scrounged from the jungle or surrounding countryside.Wild boar,pocrupines,civet cats,fruit bats,scaly anteaters,samba deer sometimes included.
In the OP's case(Camberwell) it might dovetail well into the "urban jungle curry" catergory:-))

Is there really a Cartier shop on Thomas More st.?, I remember seeing a Waitrose once when I got lost coming out of the Prospect of Whitby I took a left instead of a right and ended up near Shadwell.

What is a jungle curry?

It's a gaeng (I hesitate to call it a curry because it seems more a soup to me) that gets its defining taste from the krachai root (related to ginger and galangale I think) and to a lesser extent from the kaffir lime leaf.

You first fry bogstandard red curry paste (there's gaeng paa paste available, probably the only addition to the red curry paste ingredients is krachai), add a lot of water, say a liter, add salt and fish sauce to taste plus a little sugar and MSG and the meat (pork, chicken, very seldom beef because it gets too tough). Finally the vegetable, my favourite is the water acacia I mentioned above. Can also be water convulvulus or any other vegetable without too strong a taste.

It does not contain garlic, onions or galangale (apart from what might be in the curry paste).

It's from Central Thailand and is not a dish that contains actual products of the jungle.

If you're in Thailand order it, it's quite a distinctive dish.

And the only dish I know that contains krachai.

Does it have a name in Thai?

I just looked up krachai and see that it is fingerroot, temu kunci in Indonesian. They use it a lot in Java.

Edited by: VinnyD

More usually spelled grachai I think.

Thomson defines a jungle curry as having no sugar to balance the chillies and no coconut.