Whole Roasted Onion Thai Red Curry
A Foolproof Template For Making The Perfect Vegan Red Curry + Best Onions For Roasting + Bonus Recipe For Mexican Roasted Onions
I love exploring ways of adding different star ingredients to traditional curries and salads. As I mentioned in my past newsletters, every week I pick an ingredient/s we don’t cook enough with to add interest to our meals while ensuring we are eating many many different varieties of fruit and veg.
In recent weeks, we’ve enjoyed sweet potato and purple cabbage, kale, oyster mushrooms and kipfler potatoes in solid, tried and tested recipes that have become instant favourites. This week the focus is on onions - specifically brown or yellow onions. I wanted to create a beautiful dish that made the onion the star of the show rather than a backstage act. The result was this gorgeous Whole Roasted Onion Thai Red Curry. If you haven’t eaten, soft sweet roasted onion with charred edges smothered in Thai curry, you are seriously missing out!
Also, have you ever wondered why whacking a store-bought paste with a jar of coconut milk doesn’t give you a restaurant-style curry? Or why does it feel like it is missing something? That is because it is missing something. A whole bunch of ingredients needs to be added to elevate that authentic Thai curry taste.
Over the years of cooking Thai food, I have created an ironclad template for making the best red curry using a store-bought paste. There are 8 ingredients that when added to any red curry paste along with coconut milk make the most deliciously authentic Thai Red Curry (mine is vegan too!)
I also have a bonus recipe for Whole Roasted Mexican Onion With Salsa - a lovely light and fresh salad dish that is quite unique and utterly delicious.
Best Onions For Whole Roasting
Brown (or yellow) onions are inherently best for roasting and slow cooking. They have a milder onion taste and a sweetness that is slowly coaxed and enhanced into caramelized perfection as they cook. They pair beautifully with hearty, creamy, fatty flavours.
But it doesn’t mean that you can’t whole roast red onions. Because they are delicious too. Their sharpness and pungency is reduced when they roast and their flavour marries really well with Mexican and Indian flavours especially tossed through or added to fresh vibrant salads.
French shallots roast really well too but can fall apart because of their fiddly shape and smaller size.
And one must never roast a white onion. Reserve those for salads.
When picking and roasting brown onions, remember these tips
Pick smaller onions. They are often found packaged separately as brown pickling onions. Or just pick the smallest of brown onions you can find.
Trim the ends and peel off not only the skin but the first and/or second layer. These layers below the skin get dry and tough on roasting and stop you