Spiral Curry Puffs

Tried this when I was at a Thai's friend's home and fell in love with it. She also gave me a special ingredient to make it more crispy. Lime paste or slaked lime or kapur sirih is also known as calcium hydroxide solution is used in Thai cuisines. You don't have to use a lot but you prepare the solution before hand and take the clear liquid, don't shake it when you are using it. I was quite curious and did some research on this, and this site explains it well. I suppose if you can't get it, you can omit it.

She also gave me a translation from two sites which are in thai, but the illustrations are very helpful. This is a long post, since I also wanted to document the process with pictures.

Sites: http://varithorn.blogspot.com/2009/05/blog-post_9368.html and this one which I tried using Google's translation tool, but you can see how some text don't really work ;)

Servings: 20 mini puffs
Ingredients:

Water-based dough
120g plain flour
10g sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
Lime paste clear water about 25 teaspoon (sorry I forgot to measure that in grams)
Cold water 2-5 teaspoon
Vegetable oil 25g
Mix all together till it comes together as a soft dough, it shouldn't be too dry so you should vary the amount of cold water according to the absorption rate of the flour you are using.

Oil-based dough
60g plain flour
25g vegetable oil
Mix together till it comes together. It should be a very soft dough.

Filling
1 medium potato, diced
1 onion, diced
100g of meat (chicken or pork, whichever is preferred), diced
A handful of frozen green peas
AAA Globe Brand meat curry paste, about 1-1.5 tablespoon
Fry the onions and potato first, add in the meat and green peas and add ready made curry paste and a little water, season with sugar and salt. The final result should be dry mixture. Let it cool before using.

Steps:

 

1. Divide the dough into 10 equal portions, the water based dough should be around 20g each while the oil based dough is about 8 g. Use a digital weighing machine, makes it much easier, otherwise, 'eye power!'

2. Wrap the oil-based dough (8g) with the water-based dough (20g) and seal it well.

3. Using a rolling pin, flatten the dough vertically

4. Roll it up lengthwise like a swiss roll

5. Lay it long side up and flatten it again

6. Roll it up again and you should end up with a little fat swiss roll like this - cut it breathwise into half

 7. You should be able to see the pretty spirals like this

8a. Take one half and roll it out lengthwise and breath wise to get this puff skin. Some flaking might appear, but don't worry about it.

 

8b. It should naturally curved upwards, like a little bowl

 

9. Pinch in the sides, this take practice but you basically pull a little bit of the dough out, then pinch it back inwards with the tip of your nails or finger tips. I took a bit of time to get it.

10. Take a small pot and fill it with enough oil to deep fry it. It should be able to 'float' while you are frying it so you can turn it round every now and then till they are a delectable golden brown colour. Use a low-medium heat, your oil should not be smoking hot but gently bubbling around the puffs.

11. Done! Drain it on kitchen paper

Filling of curry pork, potatoes, peas and onion

Pretty spirals

 

I think its pretty magical how this can be done with a few turns and twirls