As many visitors to my once world famous food blog know, I like to travel and visit other countries in an effort to learn their culture and stuff myself with their amazeballs food and it was on a recent trip to Malaysia I learned – via an amazing cookery school – how to make perfect Tom Yum soup!

Tom Yum is a delightfully tart and aromatic dish and my then girlfriend (#lovehurts) was so intrigued she suggested I come over to where she worked and cook it for her!

But before we begin lets see what you need:

2 lime leaves, 2 stalks Lemon grass, 3 fresh green chilies, sprig corriander, good chicken stock (home made), prawns de-shelled and de-veined, 1cm galangal, juice of 1/2 lime, tbsp fish sauce, tsp Mae Pranom chili paste.

Everything should be relatively easy to source, the only thing I found hard to find was the chili paste which I had to bulk order from here (you can also contact me as I have some jars I can sell you). My advice is don’t bother making this soup if you can’t find the paste, it is essential.

Right, lets get back to Malaysia and my GF never mentioned she had no kitchen, only a staff canteen:

It has a hot plate and a kettle so I suppose that’s something \o/

The first thing to do is make chicken stock by boiling 4 drumsticks with 2 pints water in my improvised hot-plate-sauce pan:



After 45 minutes:

I remove the bones and reduce the stock to about a 1 pint volume and set aside.

Next I de-shell and de-vein some prawns and set aside:

So it gets a bit technical from here on in. First I get my aromatics ready:



That’s the crushed galangal, lime leaves, lemon grass, chilies and I’ll be adding these to the stock to make an infusion in due course.

Next up I create a balancing sauce which I’m going to be adding the soon-to-be-created infusion into (are you infused or confused?):

This is lime juice, fish sauce, chili paste.

I put a teaspoon of the chili paste and a tablespoon of the lime juice and fish sauce into a bowl:

And mix it up and leave it aside along with an identical bowl for GF:

Now it’s time to create my infusion by adding the galangal, lime leaves, lemon grass and chilies to the stock (which is back in my trusty hotplate ‘natch):

After about 5 minutes infusing, I add the prawns and cook for about another minute:

The final step is to add everything to the two bowls containing the balancing sauce and garnish with corriander:

Annnnnnnnd how’s it taste?

Phenomenal. Perfect restaurant quality amazingness that you NEED TO TRY! Tart, savoury, sweet, complex and aromatic, it’s killer. And if I can cook this in very challenging circumstances then I think you have no excuse (the sauce is £5 for a 500g jar + P&P FYI).

So, what do you think? Glad I’m back foodblogging? Cool! Maybe leave some comments down there or hook me up on Twiiter (ps my account was hacked so if you used to follow me and can’t see me, this would be why).