Thai Coconut Milk Soup Recipe | Cotter Crunch (2024)

FAQs

Can you use coconut cream instead of coconut milk in curry? ›

Coconut milk and cream are mostly interchangeable in recipes such as curries and soups. If you prefer a richer flavour and texture, try coconut cream or vice versa. However, be careful when substituting coconut milk and cream in baked goods.

A staple of South Asian and Greek cuisine, chickpea flour is an excellent thickener because it has a naturally creamy feel that adds a smooth yet rich texture to soups. You can also use regular chickpeas instead of the flour. Mash your cooked or canned chickpeas into a paste before adding them to your broth or soup.

Add lentils or rice

Blended lentils and rice can also add body to a soup. Red lentils work in tomato soups such as this recipe, and rice can be used in green soups or where a vegetable like cauliflower has been used. Cook them until they're tender, then blend them into the soup.

If you don't want to change the coconut-rich flavor, use coconut flour for thickening the same as you would wheat or other flour. Remove some stock from the pot, let it cool, mix into it until you have a slurry, then return the slurry to the pot while constantly stirring and bring to a boil until thickened.

Can You Replace Coconut Cream with Coconut Milk? The good news about coconut cream and coconut milk is that although they may be different consistencies, they're very similar. You can use coconut cream in place of milk if you dilute it with additional water. Different coconut cream brands vary on fat content.

Cream. If dairy isn't a concern, heavy cream and half and half would also be a good replacement for coconut milk at a 1:1 ratio. Since coconut milk's fat content is between heavy cream and half and half, the consistency of your dish may be slightly thicker or thinner, depending on the replacement used.

Easy-to-access alternatives are wheat flour, arrowroot flour, and rice flour. These are good alternatives to cornstarch because they are more nutritious and contain fewer carbohydrates and calories. Xanthan and guar gum are much stronger thickeners than cornstarch, but they can be harder to obtain and use.

Add Flour Or Cornstarch

You can thicken soup by adding flour, cornstarch, or another starchy substitute. For the best results, never add flour or cornstarch directly to your soup. If you do, it will clump up on top. Instead, ladle a small amount of broth into a separate bowl and let it cool.

Mash beans, lentils, rice, or bread.

Rice, lentils, and beans release a lot of starch and naturally thicken soups simply from simmering, but you can also mash half the cooked rice/lentils/beans before adding to the soup for a simple way to thicken your dish.

When to add cornstarch to soup? ›

To thicken a sauce or soup with cornstarch, you first need to make a slurry, which is a mixture of equal parts cornstarch and liquid (usually water, stock or wine). It's important to make the slurry with cold liquid, and then add the slurry to the simmering sauce.

To thicken soup, try adding a dash of cream or a spoonful of yogurt. Or, you can add coconut milk for a vegan-friendly option. If you want to give the soup a creamy, savory flavor, try stirring in some beaten eggs to thicken it.

Coconut milk is a relatively stable oil-in-water emulsion with proteins that act as emulsifiers and thickening agents. It is opaque and milky white in color and ranges in consistency from watery to creamy.

Even if you wanted to improvise and make the liquid thicker, I would want to use rice flour or blend some cooked or uncooked rice with excess coconut milk taken from your pot, and then use it as your "invisible" thickener and cook the whole pot for a short while until you get the desired viscosity.

Coconut cream is usually added at the end of cooking, when other ingredients have already been simmered together. This ensures that the coconut cream doesn't curdle or separate from the rest of the curry.

Coconut milk would work fine in this recipe, if you just adjust the amount of water based on the consistency you want for the sauce. But if you can find it, coconut cream will make this REALLY delicious.

The majority of Thai curries are made with coconut milk as the main liquid, which produces creamier curries, but they're not necessarily “rich.” The amount of coconut milk can vary by quite a lot, depending on the texture one is looking for: massaman curry, for example, is quite rich because it uses coconut milk and is ...