Food Ethos

On Gaeng Som

I’ve always loved Gaeng Som, a traditional Thai sour orange curry that’s hugely popular in Thailand but relatively unknown elsewhere. Its popularity stems from the simplicity of its paste, which is made with just four ingredients—chilies, turmeric, shallots, and shrimp paste.Unlike most Thai curries, which rely on a vast amount of ingredients, Gaeng Som is quick and cheap to make. In its very crude form, you boil the paste in water, and you’ve got supper. It’s also a stock-based curry, not coconut, which gives it flavours I find really interesting: spicy, salty, seasoned with tamarind and a sour kick from Garcinia.

Gaeng Som is always served with fish. We use sustainable, line-caught pollock, but it needs a bit of care to bring out its best. It’s aged for a few days before it gets to us, then we cure it with a mix of salt and sugar to further intensify the flavour. From there, we trim it down to the prime cut, confiting it in oil until it develops a rainbow sheen—a sign it will cook beautifully. But this process left us with a lot of trimmings, and I didn’t want to waste them. So, we began experimenting, blending them with curry paste, coconut cream, egg, honey, and fish sauce to create Hor Mok Pla, a curried fish mousse traditionally wrapped in banana leaves nand steamed or grilled. The coconut cream mellowed the mousse, offering a softer counterpoint to the curry, and together they started to tell the whole story of the fish.

Around the same time, we had a cabbage dish on the menu, and I noticed the team were discarding the outer leaves. I blanched one and used it to wrap the mousse instead of banana leaf, securing it with the tough, woody top of a lemongrass stalk—also something that would’ve gone to waste. That sparked another idea: we brined the cabbage hearts to soften them slightly, then grilled and rolled them as a garnish for the Gaeng Som. More outer leaves were blanched, sliced, dried and fried to create a crispy topping—something adjacent to the seaweed you’d get from a Chinese takeaway. Suddenly, we’d created a dish that felt truly symbiotic, celebrating both pollock and cabbage in two distinct but complementary forms.

The contrast between the bold, spicy curry and the more mellow fish mousse reflects the way Thai meals are often designed to have flavours that balance each other. This process became a bit of a lightbulb moment. It connected so many ideas we care about—using ingredients in their entirety, reducing waste, and showcasing the balance of Thai cuisine. That’s what AngloThai is about to me.

– John Chantarasak