Nam Prik

If you like Thai-style food, you can make a non-sweet hot nam prik yourself with all the chillis you grow at home or buy at the market. (The commercial versions in jars can be 25% sugar or more although many of the dozens of varieties you can buy fresh at markets in Thailand aren't sweet.)

Here are 9 recipes: NAMPRIK9.htm

I use variations on these, sometimes the full shrimp treatment, sometimes just a dollop of shrimp paste (the soft Thai one), but mostly it goes like this:

Peel about 2-3 heads of garlic (or buy the pre-peeled stuff from one of the Asian food shops). Proportions are about 50-50 by weight of garlic to chillis, or any proportion that suits your tastes and heat of the chillis.

Soak a couple of different types of long dried chillis in hot water for a while.

De-stem and roughly chop all sorts of (red) chillis from my garden, including jalepenos, thai hot and several other varieties. There are other recipes for green chillis too.

I don't bother de-seeding, but if you want a smoother paste or don't like the seed you will have to spend the extra time.

Put it all in a big food processor, it fills ours to max capacity. Blend until fairly fine, you can add some oil and/or fish sauce at this stage if it seems to help it blend better.

Pour a fair amount of oil (peanut, soya, safflower, vegetable, not olive) into a big/wide frying pan or skillet, at least half a cup, probably more, I often add more as it goes along too.

Slowly and gently fry the mix, stirring frequently, turn down heat to very low if it starts to brown too quickly on the bottom between stirs.

I generally adjust seasoning with fish sauce and a teaspoon of palm sugar (we don't like it sweet) after it's cooked for a while.

Don't plan on doing much for an hour or so as you will have to watch it doesn't burn and stir frequently.

It's finished when it's a deep red/brown all through.

Store in sterilised jars and top up with oil to make sure the surface is covered. You may have to do this a couple of times as it soaks up extra oil if you didn't use enough while cooking it.

If you sterilised the jars properly and covered with oil it will last for years in the cupboard and months in the fridge after it's opened, but the open jar seldom lasts that long at our place, unless we have several different ones open at once.