The basic Goan Curry Paste is a red essential paste in any kitchen in Goa, India.
The paste is easy to make, saves you time for making a fresh curry from scratch and you can freeze a batch for another day.
Smooth, spiced and enriched by freshly scraped coconut.
That's how this Goan curry paste ought to be.
While it seems as if this basic cooking paste is difficult to prepare, it actually turns out to be a breeze to get this curry paste right.
The Goan curry paste is an essential in any kitchen in the sunny coastline state of Goa, India.
Locals prepare it from scratch with commonly found fresh ingredients such as coconut, tamarind, ginger garlic and spices.
The red coconut curry paste is used to prepare the all famous fish curry, prawn curry and any vegetable curries such as sorak or bimli (cucumber tree) curry.
It's a basic, top essential goan curry paste and all those who send me e-mails to post more Goan food, have to save this printable recipe and video now. 🙂
If you love lightly spiced, flavorful Goan food, then this is your next kitchen project.
I am going to post more curries here in the future with this paste as a base.
The red curry paste can be frozen so basically what locals do they freeze a batch or two and use it for another day.
It saves so much time while making a curry from scratch.
It will take you only 20 minutes to make a prawn curry from scratch with this goan curry paste.
How to make Goan curry paste?
The key is to use fresh ingredients only, besides the spices.
Also when making the Goan curry paste you need to blend it to a very smooth consistency and that's the actual tricky part.
So, you need a good quality blender to make this paste happen!
You will be blending for a couple of minutes and the coconut etc can be quite a load to turn all the ingredients into a fair, smooth paste without pieces.
At a certain point, the blender will go slower and have trouble reducing the whole content in the jar to a paste.
That's when you need a great tool and some water to create your red Goan curry paste.
Your blender jar will get super hot and the paste, after blending it smooth, will be hot and it will be even fuming.
In fact, you might be able to see the heat in the basic Goan curry paste video below.
More essential condiments for the Goan cuisine:
Dear reader, do you enjoy Goan food?
Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas with us in the comment section further below!
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Basic Goan Coconut Curry Paste Recipe
Ingredients
- 4-5 Kashmiri Chili or similar dried
- 2 ½ cups shredded Coconut
- 1 Tablespoon Tamarind Paste
- 1 Tablespoon Ginger + Garlic *see Notes
- ½ Onion
- ¼ Teaspoon Turmeric Ground
- ¼ Teaspoon Cumin ground
- ¼ Teaspoon Black Pepper
- 1 Teaspoon Coriander ground
- 1 Cup Water
Instructions
- Remove the stems form the clean red chili. Place into the blender jar and add the scraped fresh coconut.
- Continue to add in the Tamarind Paste, Onion, Ginger Garlic and spices (Turmeric, Cumin, black pepper and coriander seed powder) Then add 1 cup of water too.
- Close the lid and blend the paste. If the blending is getting heavier, turn off the kitchen gadget, open the lid and add some more water.
- Use in curry or freeze in batches for later use.
Notes
- Use a quality strong blender to prepare the paste.
- You can store the paste in the freezer and use whenever you want to make a curry. It simplifies and helps in reducing time when preparing a Goan fish curry from scratch.
- Makes about 1.1 pounds or ½ kilogram, which you can use for 2 curries. 1 curry = 6 servings. So the paste can serve up to 12 persons.
- Use Ginger and garlic fresh (ratio 1:2) or use in paste form
