Tom Kha Gai

Name: Tom Kha Gai
Total time: 35 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Thai (Central)
Ingredients: 400 g Chicken thigh, boneless, sliced thin; 400 ml Coconut milk; 400 ml Chicken stock or water; 10 slices Galangal, sliced into coins; 2 stalks Lemongrass, bruised; 6 Kaffir lime leaves, torn; 150 g Oyster or button mushrooms; 3 Bird's eye chillies, lightly crushed; 2 tbsp Fish sauce; 3 tbsp Lime juice, freshly squeezed; 2 tsp Palm sugar; Coriander leaves

Tom yum's gentler cousin: the same lemongrass-and-lime-leaf perfume, but carried in coconut milk and led by galangal, so the heat becomes a warm hum instead of a shout.

Source

Recipe by Central Thai home kitchens · 🏺 Traditional · Household cooking of the Chao Phraya plain — the Bangkok-centred style most of the world means by 'Thai food'

Central Thai · traditional dish — An ownerless traditional dish, so no cook is credited. The cited article confirms that the name reads literally as 'chicken galangal soup', lists the defining coconut-milk base with galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, chilli, mushroom, fish sauce and lime, and records the dish appearing in a Thai recipe book around 1890 in an earlier form, tom kha pet, made with duck. It also notes that the soup is shared with Lao cuisine. Quantities and method here are this book's own.

Background on Wikipedia ↗

Watch it being made · 3 videos

ThaiChef Food Mark Wiens Rin S

⏱ 35 min🍽 4 servings🔥 340 kcal🇹🇭 Thailand🌶️

HalalDairy-free

Steps

Put the stock, galangal, lemongrass and half the lime leaves in a pot and bring it to a simmer. Give it 5 minutes with the lid off so the kitchen starts to smell of it.
Pour in the coconut milk and bring it back to a bare simmer — small lazy bubbles at the edge, never a rolling boil.
💡 Hard boiling splits coconut milk into oil and grain. Once it splits it does not come back together.
Slide in the chicken and cook for 6–7 minutes, until it is just done through. Add the mushrooms and the crushed chillies and give them 3 minutes more.
Turn the heat off. Season with fish sauce, palm sugar and lime juice, then drop in the rest of the lime leaves. Taste and adjust.
💡 Coconut milk mutes everything, so this soup needs noticeably more fish sauce and lime than you expect. Season it, taste it, then season it again.
Rest it for 5 minutes off the heat before serving — the galangal keeps working — then ladle out and scatter coriander over each bowl.

💡 Tips

Ginger is not a substitute for galangal here. The whole dish is named after galangal — swapping it makes a decent coconut chicken soup, but not this one.
Tom kha is not the mild version of tom yum — they are separate soups with different lead flavours. Tom yum is led by sourness and chilli; tom kha is led by galangal and fat.
For a prawn version (tom kha goong), swap the chicken for 350 g of peeled prawns added in the last 90 seconds. For a vegetarian pot, use vegetable stock and firm tofu — but you must also replace the fish sauce with light soy plus a pinch of salt, or it is not vegetarian at all.