Tom Yam Goong

I prepared this Thai shrimp soup on New Year's Eve, according to the recipe from Weldon's 'THAILAND The Beautiful Cookbook'.

Serves 4

250 raw shrimps, peeled, keep the shells
750 ml water
2 garlic cloves, chopped finely
5 bergamot leaves
3 slices of fresh galanga or ginger
2 tbsp fish sauce
2 stalks of lemon grass, only 1/3rd (the lowest part), cut in 3 cm pieces
2 shallots, sliced
50 g straw mushrooms, sliced
juice of 1 lime
2 tbsp fresh coriander leaves, chopped

for the black chilli paste:
1-2 chilli peppers
1 shallot, chopped finely
1 garlic clove, chopped finely
pinch of shrimp paste
1 tbsp fish sauce
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp sunflower oil

Make the black chilli paste: fry chilli peppers, shallots and garlic in oil for a few min. Add the other ingredients and fry for a bit longer. Set this aside.

Rinse the shrimp shells. Put them in a pan with the water and bring to the boil. Then pour through a sieve, conserve the liquid and throw away the shells.
Add garlic, bergamot leaves, galanga or ginger, fish sauce, shallots and mushrooms to the stock. Bring to the boil on medium heat and let it simmer for 2 min on low heat.
Add the shrimps, bring to the boil again and let them simmer until cooked. This takes only a few min., at most.

Add lime juice, chilli paste and coriander leaves to the soup and serve.


Notes
A difficult thing with this soup is estimating how spicy it will be. I used 2 dried chilli peppers (1 small and 1 medium size) for 8 persons and this was definitely too much. Steam came out of everybody's ears. 1 small one would have done the trick.
You might try using fresh chilli peppers, which are less hot.
You might also add the chilli paste little by little to the soup and taste in between.
The recipe doesn't mention salt, but I added some.

Fortunately I had also prepared blinis again, so we could cool our palates with those after the hot soup. Since we were 8, I doubled the quantities mentioned in the recipe and we got through most of that.



As a main course, we had two types of guinea fowl: one with the typical Belgian ingredients gueuze beer and witloof (endives), and the other one with a raisin and cream sauce. They were served with mashed potatoes and mashed parsnips. Very yummy, all of this!