Satay Sweet Potato Recipe

Thai cuisine was a cuisine that I used to eat out sometimes, but for some reason, I was not very keen to cook at home. The main reason for this is that my husband is not very fond of Thai cuisine. The second is that the ingredients are not easily available in Turkey. I don't cook for pleasure, as cooking is primarily my job than something to fill my stomach. If I'm going to eat for pleasure, instead of dealing with it myself, I prefer to eat it outside, in a place that serves that meal well. Since it is a kind of professional nutrition for me, it turns into a job again, but I ignore it because I don't put any effort into it.

Nowadays, it is quite easy to find and make a recipe for any dish anywhere in the world. But if you haven't eaten that meal or a few dishes from the cuisine where that meal belongs, it's impossible to know if what you're doing is the original recipe. Since certain methods and certain ingredients are widely used in the main dishes of many cuisines, when you eat several kinds of food from that kitchen, you will understand the logic and have an idea. For example, to get to know Indian cuisine, it is enough to taste a few dishes such as butter chicken and aloo gobi. Lebanese cuisine is similarly distinctive. Thai cuisine is also a cuisine with its own general characteristics like Indian cuisine and Lebanese cuisine. When you eat a different dish without knowing where it belongs after eating several kinds of food, you can say that it should belong to Thai cuisine.

For example, although the satay sweet potato recipe looks like Indian food visually, you can understand that it is Thai food when you smell and taste it. Thai food does not use as many kinds of spices as Indian dishes. Various curry pastes are used rather than spices. Since these curry pastes are already spicy, not much extra spice is added.

Red curry paste is also used in the satay sweet potato recipe. Here, it is necessary to address the problem of finding ingredients, which I underlined at the beginning. It is possible to buy red curry paste online in Turkey. But while it's not cheap, it would be a waste to buy a package for one-time use unless you're cooking Thai food every day. In this recipe, I created a good alternative for red curry paste from easily available ingredients. Red curry paste is a hot pepper-based paste and it is not an ingredient with a single recipe. Different red curry pastes can be obtained by adding many different ingredients to the pepper base. In the alternative I prepared, I used pepper paste as a base. Since the pepper paste I used is not hot, I added extra hot pepper sauce, but if your paste is hot, you do not need to use hot pepper sauce. I did not use fish sauce or oyster sauce as I wanted the recipe to be vegan. I think it turned out to be a very successful alternative.

How Is Coconut Milk Made?

Another ingredient frequently used in Thai dishes is coconut milk. Again, it is a n ingredient that cannot be found easily and cheaply in Turkey. But its solution is also quite easy. You can obtain your homemade, additive-free and very cheap coconut milk by pulsing 2-3 tablespoons of grated coconut with 400 ml of water in a blender and then straining it through a fine cheesecloth.

Another signature ingredient of Thai cuisine is peanut butter and peanuts. I think there is no one who hasn't tried it yet, but at this point, it's okay to remind the peanut butter recipe.

In summary, although the ingredients of Thai cuisine are easy to find and not cheap, it is possible to make economical alternatives of most of them at home. While this requires an extra investment of time, I think the result is definitely worth it.

Can I Use Potatoes Instead of Sweet Potatoes?

Finally, I would like to end by answering a question that I think many will ask. Although the name of sweet potato is potato, it is actually a vegetable that does not look like a potato at all. Therefore, my personal opinion is that potatoes will not be a suitable alternative for this recipe. If you can't find or don't want to use sweet potatoes, I recommend using pumpkin instead of potatoes as an alternative.

Enjoy the recipe...

Bon Appetit...