Sundays are for slowcooking | Making Tom Ka Gai soup from scratch

It was totally winter time and I was starting to feel a bit under the weather. It always feels like this is happening after the holiday season and when the weather starts to go to crap. So it was time to make something decent to also let the time pass, but also something that feels decent and that just might help the general health a bit.

It was time to make some Tom Ka Gai soup based on this recipefrom the 'Hot Thai Kitchen'. Tom Ka Gai is a coconut based soup with chicken in there and you can get it easily in Thailand. There are many different way of making this soup, and I guess if you originate from here you might just kill me for this, but writer 'Pai' knows whats up if you also follow her Youtube channel for a bit.

But it all starts with the chicken stock

For me the start if this soup was ofcourse because I was not feeling so well, and nothing is better than having some chicken soup with that. I really wanted to make my own soup base stock in stead of buying one, so I used this recipe also from 'Hot Thai Chicken' to start with.

I got some old soup chickens about 1 kilo of them and used 3 liters of water with it. Now I also takes some side paths with recipes as you know as I don't always have the ingredients in the house. I tossed in the chicken in the water and brought it to boiling water.

As you can see here in the picture the water starts to foam and that foam you take off during the process, because it cam become very bitter. I boiled the chicken for about 45 minutes in water.

After that I tossed in the next ingredients:

5 crushed cloves of garlic
1 Onion ( the recipe says Daikin but onion is your plan B)
1 teaspoon of pepper balls (the recipe says white peppercorn, this is plan B)
8 Stems of cilantro
4 tops of lemongrass (the reipe says 2, I think you never have enough of this)

After adding these ingredients it takes another hour of simmering before the base of you chicken stock is ready to use! If there it too much water reduction too fast, just add some new water. Only at the end let the soup reduce. I added water like 3 times during the whole process.

I took out the left chicken from the stock to use another time in a pulled chicken recipe or in a dressing of mayonaise chicken and curry. Recycle it all!

Making the soup base into Tom Ka Gai

Once you have the base of your soup, the rest is not even that complicated to make. What I mentioned before in freewheeling a bit with the ingredients, is not something you can do with all ingredients. Things like lemongrass, galangal (you might know this as Laos) and Kaffir leaves and non negotiable if you ask me and you really have to stick to the amounts of this as the flavours are really strong.

Once you have your homemade chicken stock add:

1 Teaspoon salt (since the home made stock doesn't have any salt in there)
Between 500 grams and 1000 grams of chicken thighs

After 15 minutes of simmering add the following

500 ml of coconut milk
2 stems of lemongrass (fair enough, I took 4)
6 Kaffir leaves
12 slices of chopped Galangal (or Laos)
Chillies (or add later if you don't want the heat so bad)
3 tablespoons of fishsauce (the recipe says 2, but taste to flavour)
1 teaspoon of sugar (eventually I added a second for the flavour)

Leave all of this in for 5 minutes to simmer according to the recipe, I took 10 minutes because....why not.

After these 5 to 10 minutes of infusing the soup:

Squeeze in some lime for some addition lime juice

Now is the time when you starting tasting to your own choice. That usually means adding more umami (fishsauce), more sweet (sugar) or more sour (more lime) according to your own taste.

As garnish you can already prepare the usual suspects:

Some extra chillies
Cilantro
Spring onions

And presto!!!

That is about it!

When looking back at all of this...Making this soup wasn't really that difficult looking back to it. But it took time...a lot of time. First making the stock was 2 hours for sure, and with adding the rest was at least 1 additional hour.

But you know me...I took more time on the stock, to get more flavour in there, and I used a lot of the stock to store in the freezer as well. This was surely a multi person recipe, and that is cool.

Because once having the ingredients, that means you are ready to rumble!.

As said: this is a bit of my own swing on an existing recipe. Did you ever make Tom Ka Gai soup? What did you do different that this?

I am always willing to learn and explore! Because this was delicious but there is always room to improve