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Swaddee Thai is one of my favorite Thai restaurants in the valley. They make the absolute best yellow curry around. It's a spot I frequently visit for lunch, just as I did yesterday.
I was really in the mood for sticky rice with mango ever since the last time I had it at Yupha's. Given that I find Swaddee's food generally better than Yupha's, I was looking forward to seeing how their version of the tasty dessert stacked up.
As usual, I ordered the yellow curry, 5 star "Thai hot". This is usually amusing to my friends and coworkers as I tend to sweat profusely when I eat it, and sometimes even before the dish makes it to the table. For me, it isn't hot enough unless it makes me sweat. I like my yellow curry so spicy that it almost resembles red curry, and Sawadee usually gets the heat right. As expected, when my meal arrived, it was just what I had expected. The potatos cooked to the point where they are still firm, almost crunchy without being raw. The carrot the same way. The sauce itself was that perfect balance of hot and seeet that I just can't seem to get enough of. I could drink this stuff with a straw!
When I first started ordering the dish, I used to spoon it out of the bowl and onto the mound of rice on my plate. Not anymore. These days, I spoon some of the rice from my plate into the bowl of wonderful golden red goodness and eat it with a spoon, just like soup.
Although I had asked for an order of the mango and sticky rice to be brought out with my meal, it didn't actually arrive until we were all done eating. Normally this would have been fine, but we were in a bit of a hurry to make it back to work. When the dessert arrived, I was a little disappointed right off the bat. At Yupha's, the presentation was artistic with the sticky rice molded in a mound, and each half of a mango nicely fanned out across the plate and garnished with a flower. The plate I got at Sawadee contained what can only be described as a "glop" of the sticky rice on the plate with the two cut halves of the mango on either side, sliced through, but not fanned.
Unfortunately for me, the overall taste of the dish wasn't much better. The rice was overly starchy and bland, with the sweetness of the coconut milk unevenly distributed. The mango wasn't bursting with flavor as it was at Yupha's either. So, while Swaddee may make a better yellow curry than Yupha's, they could certainly take a lesson or two from her on how to make a great sticky rice with mango.
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I suspect that like everything else over here, most of what we end up with in our Thai restaurants is "Americanized" to some degree. I'd be interested to know if you have any recipes for more authentic Thai dishes. I've tried several variations myself, some with and some without the potatos and carrots (it also had onion which I failed to mention. Some of the yellow curries I've had also seem to include bell peppers.
After doing some more research over the weekend, almost every single recipe (from both the US, and Thailand, including cookbooks and restaurant menus) that I found for yellow curry contained both potatos and carrots.
as i said, potatos should only be in mussamun curry. never seen carrots in any traditional thai curry, neither of these are actually native to thailand so you're not likely to find them in many "real" recipes. i can recall "fusion" food here that did strange things to everbody's traditional food (some worked most was just kind of trendy nonsense) such as substituting carrots for papaya in som dum (papaya salad) or using italian pasta in fried noodle dishes.
i can't imagine using carrots in a thai curry unless it was being substituted for something hard to find in the US (or somekind of "fusion" food) but i can't think of what that might be. i've heard of folks trying to use peas instead of "makuea" (i'd like to say small round eggplant-like but these things are spicey).
and by "yellow" curry you mean "gaeng leuang"? or something like "gaeng ka ri"?
The kind of yellow curry I've had is Gaeng Ka-ri. Everywhere around here seems to serve it with potatos, but only some with carrots. This includes the places run by Thai families.
I have access to two large Asian groceries out here, so I'm fairly confident I can find many of the more traditional recipe ingredients. I'm definitely interested in your "death curry" recipe should you be able to locate it as I love to see just how much I can take ;-)
Thailand was orininally on our vacation list for this year, where we planned to stay a week in Bangkok and another week in Phuket, but with the devestation to that area by the Tsunami, we thought it best to push the trip out a bit.
On a seperate note, I tried my hand at mango with sticky rice last week, and found that my version came out just as good as the one I had at Yupha's Thai Kitchen, and much better than the one served at Sawadee. I have a few more places I want to try while mango is still in season here to see how my recipe stacks up!
I'll be in Singapore later this week, so I'll have to give it another go to see if any of their curries have potato!
I feel the same way about the yellow curry. I like it so much, I can't seem to order anything else when I visit!
Lately, I've been having it with the deep fried tofu. You should give that a try with the red curry.