When people think of Thai food, they often picture fragrant curries, spicy soups, and vibrant stir-fries bursting with fresh herbs. While ingredients like lemongrass, Thai basil, and chilies often steal the spotlight, one humble rhizome is truly responsible for the unmistakable flavor of authentic Thai cuisine—galangal.
Often mistaken for ginger, galangal has a personality all its own. Its bold, citrusy aroma and peppery bite are what give many classic Thai dishes their signature taste that simply can't be replicated.
The flavor of galangal is unique and unmistakable.
Flavor: Sharp, peppery, slightly spicy, with citrus and pine notes.
Aroma: Fresh, floral, and earthy with hints of lemon.
Texture: Dense and woody, making it ideal for simmering in soups and curries rather than eating in large slices.
Because of its firm texture, galangal is usually sliced or pounded into curry pastes instead of being grated like ginger. Therefore, to elaborate the important of this herb in Thai dishes could be describe as the component ingredient that brings brightening and reducing the richness of curries, adding the depth to spicy soup, complement the lemongrass and the kaffir lime leaves.
Besides its culinary value, galangal has long been used in traditional Southeast Asian herbal medicine. It contains natural compounds that may: promote overall wellness, support healthy digestion, provide antioxidant properties, help reduce inflammation, and offer antimicrobial benefits.
Lastly, even though galangal may not be as famous as ginger, but it is one of the true stars of Thai cuisine. Its distinctive citrusy aroma, peppery warmth, and earthy complexity create the authentic flavors found in beloved dishes like Tom Yum, Tom Kha, and Green Curry.
If you're looking to bring genuine Thai flavors into your kitchen, galangal is one ingredient you shouldn't skip. Once you've cooked with it, you'll understand why this remarkable rhizome has earned its place at the heart of Thai cooking for generations.
Of all the curries in the Thai repertoire, massaman is the one that makes you pause. It is richer than red curry, deeper than green, more complex than yellow. It is slow-cooked rather than quickly assembled, spiced with cinnamon and cardamom and star anise rather than just chilli and lemongrass. It smells, unmistakably, of somewhere else — of spice routes and trading vessels and the long, slow movement of ingredients and ideas across the ancient world. And that is exactly what it is.
Massaman curry is one of the most historically layered dishes in Thai cuisine — a bowl that carries, in every spoonful, the traces of cultures and civilisations that shaped the way Thailand cooks.
A Name That Tells a Story
The word massaman is widely believed to derive from "Mussulman" — an archaic term for Muslim — and that etymology is the first clue to the dish's origins. Massaman curry was introduced to Thailand by Muslim traders and travellers, most likely Persian and Malay merchants who arrived in the Gulf of Thailand and the southern regions of the country centuries ago, bringing with them the spice traditions of the Middle East and South Asia.
This makes massaman curry something genuinely rare in the culinary world: a dish whose very name preserves the memory of the people who created it. Every time someone orders massaman in a restaurant, they are, without knowing it, invoking a history of cultural exchange that stretches back five hundred years or more.
The Spices That Don't Belong — and Yet Do
The clearest way to understand what makes massaman different is to look at its spice profile. A typical Thai curry paste is built around fresh aromatics — lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime, fresh chilli. Massaman uses these too, but it layers on top of them a collection of warm dried spices that are almost entirely absent from the rest of Thai cooking: cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, star anise, cumin, and nutmeg.
These are the spices of the Persian kitchen, of Mughal India, of the ancient trade routes that carried goods from the Middle East through the Indian Ocean and into Southeast Asia. They are warming rather than fiery, complex rather than sharp, and they give massaman a depth and a roundness that no other Thai curry can quite match.
In Thailand, this blend of spices was absorbed into the existing framework of Thai cooking — the coconut milk, the fish sauce, the palm sugar, the fresh aromatics — and the result was something that belonged to neither tradition entirely but synthesised both into something wholly its own. That synthesis is massaman curry, and it is one of the great achievements of Thai culinary history.
The Role of the Royal Court
Massaman curry is also closely associated with the royal cuisine of central Thailand — the refined, technically demanding cooking tradition that developed in the kitchens of the Bangkok court and the earlier Ayutthaya kingdom. Royal Thai cuisine placed the highest premium on balance, complexity, and visual elegance, and massaman — with its layered spicing, its slow cooking method, and its rich, deeply flavoured sauce — fitted that tradition perfectly.
Historical records suggest that massaman curry was being cooked in the Thai royal court as early as the seventeenth century, during the reign of King Narai of Ayutthaya — a monarch known for his openness to foreign cultures and his court's lively engagement with Persian, French, and Dutch diplomats and traders. It was a cosmopolitan era, and massaman curry is, in many ways, its most lasting culinary legacy.
What Goes Into a Massaman
The paste at the heart of massaman curry contains the same fresh foundation as other Thai curry pastes — dried red chillies, lemongrass, galangal, garlic, shallots, and shrimp paste — but the warm dried spices are what distinguish it. Cinnamon brings a woody sweetness. Cardamom adds a floral, eucalyptus note. Cumin gives depth and earthiness. Cloves and star anise contribute a subtle, almost medicinal warmth. Together they create a paste that is more complex on the nose than any other in the Thai canon.
ONOFF's Massaman Curry Paste brings all of these elements together in their organic form — the fresh aromatics and the warming spices in a single carefully balanced blend, ready to begin the slow cooking process that massaman demands.
Slow Cooking as a Philosophy
If pad thai is fast and pad krapow is faster, massaman is the opposite of both. It is a curry that rewards patience. The meat — traditionally beef, though lamb and chicken work beautifully — is cooked low and slow in coconut cream until it is falling-tender, absorbing the spiced sauce as it cooks. Waxy potatoes and whole roasted peanuts are added to the pot, both of which absorb the sauce and add their own distinct textures. The result, after an hour or more of gentle simmering, is a curry that is thick, rich, and almost stew-like — a world away from the quick wok cooking that defines much of Thai street food.
This slow cooking method is itself a reflection of the curry's origins. It speaks to the Persian and South Asian culinary traditions that shaped it — traditions that built their flavour through time, through the gradual melding of spices into fat and liquid, rather than through the high heat and immediacy of the Thai wok.
Sweet, Salty, and Something Else
The flavour of a well-made massaman is unlike anything else in Thai cooking. It is sweet — from palm sugar and coconut cream and the natural sweetness of the slow-cooked onions and potatoes. It is salty — from fish sauce, integrated so thoroughly that you feel its depth without identifying its source. It is gently spiced rather than aggressively hot, with a warmth that builds slowly and lingers pleasantly rather than demanding your immediate attention.
And then there is something else — a quality that is difficult to name but impossible to miss. A roundness, a completeness, a sense that every possible flavour has been considered and accounted for. It is the quality that comes from five hundred years of refinement, from a dish that has been cooked and adjusted and perfected across countless kitchens and cultures until every element is exactly where it should be.
In 2011, massaman curry was voted the most delicious food in the world by CNN's global food poll — the first time a curry had ever topped the list. For those who know the dish well, the result was not surprising. What was perhaps more remarkable was how little attention the victory brought to the history behind it — the Persian traders, the Ayutthaya court, the spice routes, the centuries of quiet cultural exchange that produced something so good that the whole world eventually agreed on it.
A Bowl Worth Taking Your Time Over
Massaman is not a dish for a Tuesday evening when you have twenty minutes and a hungry family. It is a dish for a slow Sunday, for a cold evening, for a dinner party where the cooking is part of the occasion. It rewards the time you give it with a depth of flavour that faster dishes simply cannot reach.
ONOFF's Massaman Curry Paste gives you the foundation — the complex, organically sourced spice blend that takes the longest and most skilled part of the preparation out of your hands. From there, all the dish asks is patience, good coconut cream, and the willingness to let time do what time does best.
The rest, as five hundred years of culinary history have already established, will take care of itself.
There are ingredients that flavour a dish, and there are ingredients that define a cuisine. Lemongrass is the latter. Its clean, citrusy fragrance is so immediately and unmistakably Thai that a single stalk, bruised and dropped into a hot pan, is enough to transport you — to a street food stall in Chiang Mai, a family kitchen in Isan, a floating market on the canals outside Bangkok. No other ingredient captures the essence of Thai cooking quite so completely, or quite so instantly.
A Plant With Deep Roots
Lemongrass — known in Thai as ตะไคร้ (takrai) — is a tall, fibrous grass that grows abundantly across Southeast Asia, thriving in the tropical heat and rainfall of Thailand's plains and hillsides. It has been cultivated and used in Thai cooking, traditional medicine, and Buddhist ritual for centuries, long before it became a fashionable ingredient in restaurant kitchens around the world.
The plant itself is unassuming to look at — a dense clump of long, pale green stalks with a bulbous white base and rough, papery outer leaves. It is the inner core of those stalks, pale and tightly layered, that holds the essential oils responsible for its extraordinary fragrance. Those oils — primarily citral, the same compound that gives lemon its characteristic scent — are released when the stalk is bruised, sliced, or pounded, flooding the air around it with a fragrance that is simultaneously citrusy, floral, and faintly herbal, with none of the sharpness of actual lemon.
How Lemongrass Works in Thai Cooking
Lemongrass appears in Thai cooking in several distinct forms, each suited to a different purpose. Understanding those forms is key to using it well.
In curry pastes — including ONOFF's red, green, Panang, and massaman pastes — lemongrass is pounded into the paste along with the other aromatics, its fibres broken down completely so that its flavour infuses the entire dish without any texture remaining. This is where lemongrass does its deepest work, contributing a fragrant citrus backbone that underpins everything else in the paste.
In soups and broths — like the famous tom yum and tom kha — lemongrass stalks are bruised with the back of a knife and added whole or in large pieces to the simmering liquid, infusing the broth with flavour before being removed before serving. The bruising is essential: an unbruised stalk releases very little of its fragrance. A well-bruised one perfumes the entire pot.
In salads and stir fries, lemongrass is sliced as finely as possible — the inner white core only, the outer leaves discarded — and used raw or briefly cooked. At this fineness it becomes almost translucent, contributing both flavour and a very subtle texture to the finished dish.
Lemongrass Beyond the Kitchen
In Thailand, lemongrass has never been confined to cooking alone. It has been used for centuries in traditional medicine as a digestive aid, an antimicrobial, and a treatment for fever and inflammation — properties that modern research has increasingly supported. Lemongrass tea, made from the fresh or dried leaves steeped in hot water, is a common household remedy across Thailand and much of Southeast Asia, valued for its calming, digestive, and antioxidant qualities.
The essential oil extracted from lemongrass is widely used in aromatherapy and natural skincare, and the plant's natural insect-repelling properties have made it a fixture in Thai gardens and outdoor spaces for generations. In a country where the boundary between food, medicine, and ritual has always been porous, lemongrass moves comfortably between all three.
Lemongrass and the Thai Flavour Balance
Within Thai cuisine's celebrated five-flavour framework — sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and bitter — lemongrass does not fit neatly into a single category. It is primarily aromatic, contributing fragrance and brightness rather than a dominant flavour note. But that aromatic quality performs a structural function: it lifts the other flavours around it, creating the sense of freshness and aliveness that distinguishes Thai cooking from cuisines built on earthier, slower spice profiles.
This is why lemongrass appears in almost every category of Thai dish — in soups, in curries, in salads, in marinades, in dipping sauces, and in desserts. It is not a specialist ingredient with a narrow application. It is a constant presence, threading through the entire cuisine like a single fragrant note that ties everything together.
Choosing and Storing Lemongrass
Fresh lemongrass is increasingly available in supermarkets across Europe, and its quality matters. Look for stalks that feel firm and heavy, with a pale, tightly packed inner core and no signs of drying or browning at the cut end. The outer leaves should be intact — they protect the inner stalk and keep it fresh longer.
At home, lemongrass keeps well in the refrigerator for up to two weeks, wrapped loosely in a damp cloth or paper towel. It also freezes beautifully — whole stalks can be frozen and used directly from frozen in soups and curries, losing very little of their fragrance in the process.
When preparing lemongrass, remove the tough outer layers until you reach the pale, smooth inner stalk. For pastes and fine slicing, use only the bottom third of the stalk where the essential oils are most concentrated. The upper, greener portion is too fibrous to eat but makes an excellent addition to stocks and broths.
An Ingredient That Earns Its Place
Some ingredients are interchangeable. Lemongrass is not. There is no substitute that replicates its particular combination of citrus fragrance, herbal freshness, and aromatic depth — and no Thai kitchen, whether in Bangkok or Brussels, should be without it.
It is the ingredient that, more than any other, makes Thai food smell like Thai food. And in a cuisine where fragrance is as important as flavour, that is everything.
This is Thai comfort food at its most aromatic and most elegant — a clear, fragrant broth built on fresh lemongrass, ginger, and kaffir lime leaves, with tender pieces of chicken and a seasoning of ONOFF's No Fish Vegan Seasoning Sauce that gives the soup its gentle, rounded depth. Lighter than tom kha and simpler than tom yum, this soup lets lemongrass speak clearly and without competition. It is the kind of dish that feels restorative the moment the fragrance reaches you — warming, clean, and deeply satisfying.
Plant-based eating has never been more popular. But for many people who don't eat meat or animal products, eating out or cooking from a new cuisine can feel like an exercise in substitution and compromise — scanning menus for the one or two options that have been grudgingly adapted, or cooking recipes that feel like pale imitations of the original.
Thai cuisine is different. Not because it has been adapted for plant-based eating — but because it was never really built around meat in the first place.
A Cuisine Built on Plants
At its structural core, Thai food is a plant-based cuisine. Rice — steamed jasmine in the centre and south, glutinous sticky rice in the north and northeast — is the foundation of every meal. Around it sits a collection of dishes built primarily from vegetables, fresh herbs, aromatic pastes, and fermented sauces, with protein added as one element among many rather than as the centrepiece that everything else serves.
Walk through any Thai market and the evidence is immediate. The stalls are piled high with fresh produce — lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves, holy basil, long beans, aubergine, banana blossom, morning glory, baby corn, and dozens of varieties of chilli. Meat and fish are present, but they occupy a smaller proportion of the overall landscape than in many other food cultures. Thai cooking has always known how to make vegetables the main event.
This is partly practical — in a tropical climate with year-round growing seasons, fresh produce has always been abundant and affordable. But it is also philosophical. Thai Buddhist tradition, which runs deeply through the culture, has long encouraged mindfulness about what we eat and where it comes from, creating a natural openness to plant-based cooking that many other cuisines lack.
The Flavour Problem — Already Solved
The biggest challenge in plant-based cooking is flavour. Specifically, the deep, savoury, umami-rich quality that meat and fish naturally provide — and that can be so difficult to replicate without them.
Thai cuisine has been solving this problem for centuries, long before plant-based eating became a global conversation. The solution is fermentation. Fish sauce — the backbone of Thai seasoning — is a fermented product, and it is the fermentation process that creates its extraordinary depth. When you replace fish sauce with a well-made plant-based alternative like ONOFF's No Fish Vegan Seasoning Sauce, you are not simply removing an ingredient and hoping for the best. You are replacing one fermented, deeply flavourful liquid with another — and the depth that results is genuine, not approximate.
The same logic applies to oyster sauce, another common Thai seasoning. ONOFF's No Oyster Vegan Seasoning Sauce provides the same dark, glossy richness in stir fries and marinades without any animal ingredients. These are not compromises — they are direct replacements that honour the flavour principles of the original.
The Curry Question
For many people, the first concern when approaching Thai food as a vegetarian or vegan is the curry. Thai curries are built on coconut cream and aromatic paste — both entirely plant-based — with protein and vegetables added to the sauce. Replacing chicken with tofu, aubergine, sweet potato, or chickpeas requires no adjustment to the sauce whatsoever. The paste remains the same. The coconut cream remains the same. The balance of flavours remains the same.
ONOFF's curry pastes — red, green, yellow, Panang, and massaman — are all built from certified organic herbs and spices with no animal ingredients in the paste itself. This means that every curry in the ONOFF range is, at its foundation, already vegan. The choice of protein is simply that — a choice, not a constraint.
A green curry with tofu and courgette made with ONOFF's Green Curry Paste and Coconut Cream is not a lesser version of the dish. It is the dish, made differently — and made in a way that is entirely consistent with how Thai cooking has always approached flexibility and adaptation.
The Salad Tradition
Thai salads — the yum family, as well as Isan classics like larb and som tum — are among the most naturally plant-friendly dishes in any cuisine. Their dressings are built on lime juice, palm sugar, and fish sauce or its vegan equivalent, with fresh herbs, shallots, and chilli doing most of the flavour work. The protein in these salads — minced meat, prawns, or seafood in traditional versions — can be replaced with crumbled tofu, mushrooms, or simply omitted in favour of more vegetables and herbs, without the essential character of the dish changing.
The vegan larb with tofu and mushrooms is a perfect example of this. Crumbled tofu and finely chopped oyster or shiitake mushrooms absorb the sharp, fragrant dressing in exactly the same way that minced pork does in the traditional version. The toasted rice powder, the fresh mint, the lime — these are the elements that make larb what it is, and none of them have anything to do with meat.
Street Food and the Plant-Based Tradition
Thailand has a long and genuine tradition of vegetarian street food that predates the current global interest in plant-based eating by centuries. Thai Buddhist vegetarianism — known as jay — is observed by a significant portion of the population, particularly during the Vegetarian Festival celebrated each October in communities with Chinese-Thai heritage across the country. During this period, an extraordinary range of entirely plant-based Thai dishes appear on street food stalls and in restaurants — dishes that are complex, deeply flavoured, and completely satisfying, demonstrating that Thai cuisine loses nothing essential when meat is removed.
The jay tradition also shows that Thai plant-based cooking is not a recent adaptation or a Western import. It is a living, rooted part of the cuisine itself — one that has developed its own techniques, its own dishes, and its own flavour philosophy over generations.
Cooking Thai Food as a Vegetarian or Vegan
In practical terms, cooking Thai food plant-based at home is simpler than it might appear. The substitutions are few and the logic is consistent: replace fish sauce with ONOFF's No Fish Vegan Seasoning Sauce, replace oyster sauce with ONOFF's No Oyster Vegan Seasoning Sauce, choose a protein that suits the dish — tofu, tempeh, mushrooms, chickpeas, or simply more vegetables — and cook everything else exactly as the recipe instructs.
The aromatics, the pastes, the coconut cream, the fresh herbs, the dressings — all of it remains unchanged. Because all of it was already plant-based to begin with.
That is the quiet truth about Thai cuisine and plant-based eating: the adaptation required is minimal, because the foundation was always there. Thai food does not need to be reinvented for vegetarians and vegans. It simply needs to be cooked — and the results speak for themselves.
Larb is one of the great dishes of Isan cuisine — bold, punchy, and built around a dressing that is sharp, salty, and deeply fragrant. This vegan version replaces the traditional minced meat with crumbled firm tofu and finely chopped mushrooms, which together absorb the dressing beautifully and provide the texture and substance the dish needs. The ingredient that makes it sing is the same one that makes every larb sing: the dressing — and at the heart of that dressing is ONOFF's No Fish Vegan Seasoning Sauce, delivering all the depth and layered saltiness of fish sauce without any animal ingredients. Served with sticky rice and raw vegetables on the side, this is Isan cooking at its most honest and most satisfying.
This yellow curry soup combines the warmth of turmeric and fragrant Thai spices with the creaminess of coconut milk. Tender noodles soak up the rich broth, while fresh vegetables add texture and balance. It’s a wholesome, plant-based dish that delivers both comfort and flavor, perfect for anyone craving a hearty yet nourishing Thai-inspired meal.
Walk into a Thai kitchen — whether it belongs to a street food vendor in Bangkok or a home cook in Chiang Mai — and the first thing you notice is not the wok, or the mortar and pestle, or the neat rows of sauces and pastes. It is the herbs. Bundles of lemongrass leaning against the counter. A pile of kaffir lime leaves releasing their oil into the air at the slightest touch. Coriander arrived with its roots still attached, because in Thai cooking the roots matter as much as the leaves.
This abundance of fresh aromatics is not incidental. It is the defining characteristic of Thai cuisine — the thing that separates it most clearly from other Asian food traditions, and the reason Thai food tastes the way it does: alive, layered, and impossibly fragrant.
Fresh, Not Dried
Most of the world's great spice-driven cuisines — Indian, Moroccan, Persian — build their depth from dried spices: cumin, coriander seed, turmeric, cardamom. These are extraordinary ingredients, capable of extraordinary flavour. But Thai cooking takes a fundamentally different approach. Where other cuisines reach for the spice jar, Thai cooking reaches for something still living.
Lemongrass is used fresh, not dried. Galangal is sliced from the root, not shaken from a tin. Kaffir lime leaves are torn at the last moment so their oils are at full intensity when they hit the dish. Coriander root is pounded in the mortar alongside garlic and chilli to form the base of innumerable sauces and pastes. The result is a flavour that is brighter, more immediate, and more vivid than anything dried spices alone can produce — food that smells as good as it tastes, and tastes exactly as good as it smells.
Understanding these herbs — what they are, what they contribute, and how to use them — is the single most useful step any home cook can take toward cooking Thai food that tastes genuinely authentic.
Lemongrass
Lemongrass is perhaps the most recognisable Thai herb in the world, and for good reason. Its flavour — citrusy, floral, and faintly grassy, with a clean freshness that no other ingredient can replicate — appears in everything from curry pastes and soups to marinades and dipping sauces.
The part that carries the flavour is the lower, pale section of the stalk — the outer leaves are too tough and fibrous to eat, but they can be bruised and added to broths and soups to infuse their aroma. For pastes and finely prepared dishes, the inner stalk is sliced very thinly or pounded in a mortar, releasing the essential oils that give Thai cooking its signature fragrance.
In tom yum, lemongrass provides the backbone of the broth's aroma. In green and red curry pastes, it adds a citrus note that balances the earthiness of galangal and the heat of chilli. In gai yang marinade, it perfumes the chicken with a fragrance that intensifies beautifully over the heat of the grill.
Lemongrass is one of those ingredients that, once you understand it, you will want to use constantly — and one of the reasons ONOFF's curry pastes taste as authentic as they do is that organic lemongrass is right there at the heart of every one of them.
Galangal
Galangal is frequently described as a cousin of ginger, which is accurate but somewhat misleading — the two plants are related, but galangal has a character entirely its own. Where ginger is warm, sharp, and familiar, galangal is more complex: earthy, slightly piney, with a medicinal quality that sounds unappealing in description and is absolutely essential in practice.
It is the ingredient that gives tom kha gai — coconut and galangal chicken soup — its distinctive depth, and the reason that trying to substitute ginger for galangal in a Thai recipe produces something that tastes noticeably, unmistakably wrong. Galangal is not ginger. The two are not interchangeable, and any recipe that tells you otherwise is sacrificing authenticity for convenience.
Fresh galangal is sliced or pounded for use in pastes and soups. It is also one of those ingredients with genuine functional value beyond flavour — used for centuries across Southeast Asia for its digestive and anti-inflammatory properties. In Thai curry pastes, including ONOFF's full range, galangal plays a structural role: it is one of the ingredients that gives the paste its body and its depth, working quietly beneath the more prominent notes of lemongrass and chilli.
Kaffir Lime Leaves
Kaffir lime leaves are visually distinctive — their unusual double-lobed shape, two leaves joined end to end, makes them immediately recognisable once you know what you are looking for. Their fragrance is extraordinary: intensely citrusy and floral, with a complexity that far exceeds what the fruit itself delivers. The moment you tear a kaffir lime leaf, the oils in the leaf are released, and the aroma that fills the air is one of the most beautiful things in Thai cooking.
In curry pastes, the zest of the kaffir lime fruit is used rather than the leaf — sharper and more concentrated, it provides the citrus backbone of green and red pastes. The leaves themselves are used in soups, curries, and stir fries, either left whole to infuse and then removed before eating, or sliced into very fine strips and used as a garnish where their fragrance and slight chew are part of the eating experience.
ONOFF's dried Thai Lime Leaf is a practical and authentic way to bring this ingredient into your kitchen — the drying process concentrates the oils, so the flavour is present and correct even when fresh leaves are not available. They are worth keeping in your pantry as a constant.
Holy Basil
Of the three basil varieties used in Thai cooking — holy basil, Thai sweet basil, and lemon basil — holy basil is the most important and the least substitutable. It has a peppery, slightly clove-like flavour with an intensity that Italian basil simply does not have, and it is the non-negotiable ingredient in pad krapow — the holy basil stir fry that is arguably Thailand's most eaten everyday dish.
The name krapow is the Thai word for holy basil, which tells you everything you need to know about how central this herb is to the dish. Without holy basil, pad krapow is just a minced meat stir fry. With it, it becomes something with genuine character — aromatic, slightly peppery, deeply savoury, and entirely itself.
Holy basil wilts quickly once added to a hot pan, which is why it is always added at the very last moment, off the heat, so the residual warmth releases its fragrance without destroying it. It is one of the few herbs in Thai cooking that is genuinely irreplaceable — though Thai sweet basil is a closer substitute than anything from a Western kitchen.
Coriander Root
This is the Thai herb that surprises people most — not because coriander is unfamiliar, but because most of the world discards the root and uses only the leaves. In Thai cooking, the priority is almost inverted. The root and the lower stems are pounded into curry pastes and marinades, where they contribute an earthy, slightly nutty depth that the leaves cannot provide. The leaves themselves are used as a fresh garnish, scattered over finished dishes for their bright, citrusy fragrance.
Coriander root is the quiet foundation of many Thai pastes and sauces — present in the background, doing structural work that you would notice immediately if it were absent. It is one of the reasons that a Thai curry paste made from scratch in a mortar and pestle tastes different from one made in a food processor: the pounding of the root, along with the galangal and lemongrass, releases compounds that blending alone does not fully extract.
If you buy coriander with the roots still attached — which is worth seeking out — keep the roots in the freezer between uses. They last well and are always ready when you need them.
Putting It Together
What makes Thai herbs so remarkable is not any one of them individually, but what happens when they work together. Lemongrass and kaffir lime zest provide the citrus top notes. Galangal adds the earthy, medicinal depth. Coriander root brings the nutty base. Chilli brings the heat. And the result — when these ingredients are properly prepared and properly balanced — is a flavour profile that is simultaneously complex and coherent, layered and harmonious, unlike anything else in world cuisine.
This is the foundation on which ONOFF's curry pastes are built. Organic lemongrass, organic galangal, organic kaffir lime, organic coriander — each ingredient sourced with care, prepared authentically, and brought together in a paste that carries the genuine character of Thai cooking into your kitchen wherever you are in the world.
The herbs are the soul of Thai cuisine. Everything else is built on top of them.
Tod mun pla are one of Thailand's great street food classics — golden, slightly springy fish cakes fragrant with red curry paste and finely shredded kaffir lime leaves, served with a sweet and tangy dipping sauce. They are the kind of snack that disappears from the plate before you have finished cooking the last batch. The kaffir lime leaf is not a garnish here — it is woven into every cake, releasing its citrusy, floral oil with every bite and giving tod mun pla a character that no other fish cake in the world quite matches. Simple to make, deeply satisfying, and unmistakably Thai.
There's a reason red curry has earned a permanent place in kitchens around the world. It's bold, warming, deeply fragrant — and as it turns out, remarkably good for you. Behind that rich, ruby-coloured sauce lies a collection of ingredients that have been used in traditional medicine for centuries, long before the word "superfood" ever existed.
It Starts with the Paste
At the heart of any red curry is the paste — and what goes into it matters enormously. The ONOFF Thai Red Curry Paste is built from a short, honest list: organic red chilli, organic lemongrass, organic shallot, organic garlic, organic galangal, organic coriander seeds, organic cumin seeds, and organic kaffir lime leaves. No fillers, no artificial preservatives, no irradiation. Just the real ingredients that have made this dish a staple of Thai cooking for generations.
Each one of those ingredients carries genuine nutritional weight. Red chillies contain capsaicin, a compound well-studied for its anti-inflammatory properties and its ability to support healthy metabolism. Lemongrass is rich in antioxidants and has long been valued in Southeast Asian wellness traditions for its digestive and antimicrobial qualities. Galangal — a close cousin of ginger — has been used across Asia for centuries to support digestion and reduce inflammation. And because every ingredient in the ONOFF paste is certified organic, you get all of that functional goodness without compromise.
The Kaffir Lime Leaves Make the Difference
One detail worth highlighting: kaffir lime leaves. They're listed in the ONOFF paste — and if you want even more of that bright, citrusy depth in your dish, ONOFF also sells dried Thai Lime Leaf separately. Rich in antioxidants and used traditionally across Southeast Asia for digestive and immune support, they're one of those ingredients that quietly do a lot of work.
Coconut Cream: Misunderstood and Underrated
Coconut milk or cream often raises eyebrows among health-conscious cooks. But the fats it contains — primarily medium-chain triglycerides — are processed by the body differently from other saturated fats and are increasingly recognised as a valuable source of quick, clean energy. ONOFF's Coconut Cream pairs naturally with the red curry paste, and in the context of a balanced meal it adds richness while also helping the body absorb the fat-soluble vitamins found in all those fresh vegetables.
Vegetables That Actually Make It to the Plate
One of the practical strengths of red curry is how naturally it carries vegetables. Courgette, aubergine, bell peppers, baby spinach, sweet potato — all of them absorb the sauce beautifully and hold their texture. Because the cooking method is quick and hot, those vegetables arrive at the table with their nutrients largely intact. It's one of the rare dishes where eating more of it is genuinely a good idea.
Protein, Your Way
Red curry is also one of the most flexible dishes when it comes to protein. Chicken, prawns, tofu, chickpeas — whatever your preference or dietary need, the sauce embraces it equally. And if you prefer a plant-based version, swap the fish sauce for ONOFF's No Fish Vegan Seasoning Sauce and you lose nothing in flavour while keeping the dish fully vegan.
Made for Real Kitchens
The ONOFF Thai Red Curry Paste comes in a practical 50g sachet — enough for a full meal, easy to store, and ready whenever you are. No chopping, no blending, no hunting down obscure ingredients. The hard work of sourcing and preparing authentic Thai aromatics is already done for you, organically and with care.
A Dish Worth Coming Back To
Great food doesn't ask you to choose between pleasure and nourishment. Red curry has never made that trade-off. With ONOFF's organic paste as your starting point, and a handful of good ingredients alongside it, you have everything you need for a meal that satisfies deeply and supports you quietly — with every spoonful.
Thai red curry pairs the delicate, flaky texture of Panga fillet with a creamy coconut-based curry infused with chili, lemongrass, and aromatic spices. The fish absorbs the vibrant flavors beautifully, creating a dish that is both hearty and fragrant. Served warm, it offers the perfect balance of spice, richness, and comfort — a true taste of Thailand’s culinary tradition.
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