Tom Kha Gai - Chicken Coconut Soup with Galangal

"Tom Kha Gai is cherished as a full-flavoured soup like Tom
Yum but made milder with coconut milk. Tom Kha is predominantly sour but also sweet, salty and deliciously coconutty. A good Tom Kha recipe calls for a smoothtextured soup. The coconut milk must not separate. Popular choices of protein are lean meats such as chicken breast and white fish."

Ingredients
(Yield 12 pieces)

• 250 ml. coconut milk
• 15 g. young galangal, sliced
• 15 g. lemongrass, sliced
• 2 kaffir lime leaves, torn
• 50 g. oyster mushrooms
• 180 g. chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces
• 200 ml. coconut cream
• 3 g. sea salt
• 1 g. granulated sugar
• 5 g. hot chillies peppers, crushed
• 30 ml. lime juice
• Coriander leaves, to garnish

Method
1. Bring the coconut milk to a light boil over a medium
heat. Add galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves,
mushrooms and chicken. Cook for 1-2 minutes. Once
bubbling, pour in the coconut cream. Season with salt
and sugar. Then stir in the hot chilli peppers. Remove
from the heat. Mix in lime juice (adding lime juice while
cooking makes the soup bitter). Adjust the seasoning.
The taste should be sour, salty, sweet, creamy and
delicate. Adjust the seasoning to suit your preference.

2. Serve the soup hot in a bowl and garnish with
coriander leaves.

Tips
• To extract “coconut cream”, knead 1kg of grated
coconut by hand, squeeze the liquid out and strain
through cheesecloth. To get coconut milk, knead the
same grated coconut with 1½ cups of warm water and
squeeze out. You can squeeze up to 3 times to extract
as much liquid as possible or until the milk comes out
quite clear and less creamy.
• Avoid eating some of the ingredients such as galangal,
lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves.
• You can replace mushrooms with cabbage or other
kinds of vegetables.