We were sent a Thai curry kit from Chantra Thaito test and review. It was on offer through another blog from the company, and being lovers of oriental food, we thought why not. We emailed off, and the Red Curry Kit arrived.
The kit comes with all you need, minus the meat and veg, to make an authentic Thai curry. The all important paste, coconut milk powder - which was a new one on us, dried herbs and chillis and a small sachet of fish sauce. We made a chicken curry, even though the Chantra Thai website recommends Red Curry for beef, pork or prawns, so all we needed to buy was the chicken and the green beans.
The whole idea of the coconut milk powder seemed a bit odd to me, but it did work well, and cooked through nicely. The pack said you could vary the amount of paste used in accordance with how spicy you wanted the curry. We generally like spicy food (although I have had a yellow curry in Thailand which was so hot I couldn't eat it), and we wanted to try exactly what the curry kit had to offer, so we used it all. With the addition of the chillis, herbs and fish sauce, it smelt divine! We served the curry with some plain rice.
We thought the curry was lovely. Very tasty. It had a different depth of flavour which you don't always get with the standard Thai curry pastes you can buy in the supermarket. Perhaps it was the addition of the herbs and a different mix of spices which gave it the more authentic taste. The idea behind the kits we think is very good. Especially for the occasional cook. Having the right amount of all the ingredients certainly is an excellent idea if you aren't into cooking oriental food often so you don't have to seek out and buy a bottle of fish sauce which you might only need for a Thai curry, for example. Also the coconut milk powder is a good idea for similar reasons. We've recently been making a few recipes which call for a small amount of coconut milk, and opening a tin just for that, seems such a waste if you're not in a position to use it the next day.
The kits are priced at £3.29 on the Chantra Thai shop website, but the delivery charges seem rather high to make it worth buying one or two packets. A bit of poking around their website, and it seems their products can be ordered from a number of sources, including Amazon, but in varying package sizes. They do have a stockists locator via their main homepage, and their products seem to be available in quite a few local places. So I think we will be keeping an eye out for them as we shop, rather than ordering online.
