Nam prik pao

A paste that seasons as well as dips

Nam prik pao (Thai: น้ำพริกเผา) is a dark, roasted chilli paste. The name breaks into three words: nam, water or relish, prik, chilli, and pao, roasted. It is also sold and cooked as Thai chilli jam or chilli paste in oil. It belongs to the large Thai family of nam prik, chilli relishes that appear in small saucers beside a meal, but it differs from most of them in one way: it works as a seasoning that is cooked into dishes, not only as a dip.

Its flavour is balanced rather than fierce. Roasted dried chillies give a smoky, rounded heat; sugar sweetens it, tamarind adds a little sourness, and fish sauce and shrimp paste carry salt and savour. The Thai PBS recipe aims for a sweet-salty paste with only mild heat.

Roast, then blend

The Thai PBS method roasts the aromatics and the chillies before blending. Dried chillies are soaked, seeded and cut small. Shallots and garlic go into a dry pan and are roasted until fragrant and cooked, with light charring allowed. The chillies are roasted until cooked and charred. Everything is then blended smooth with shrimp paste, sugar, fish sauce and about two spoons of tamarind juice, and the cook tastes and adjusts, adding sugar for sweetness or fish sauce for salt.

Roasting does two jobs. It removes the raw edge of garlic and shallot and turns their sugars toward caramel, and it chars the chillies, which gives the smoky depth the paste is known for. A second account describes the same ingredients as traditionally roasted or grilled but now usually fried, with dried shrimp added and the frying oil stirred back in until the paste is thick and jam-like. These are different routes to a similar paste, and the amounts and times are missing or differ in each. Neither account says which route is older.

The shrimp paste and fish sauce are fermented products, but the paste itself is not a ferment. It is cooked and blended, and no stage depends on microbes working in it.

How it is used

Thai PBS cooks with it in two ways: stir-fried chicken with cashew nuts, where the chicken is coated in more paste at the end, and a spaghetti stir-fried with tom yum flavours and snakehead fish. It is also eaten with steamed rice. Other accounts add tom yum and tom kha soups, the squid salad phla pla muek, salad dressings, a peanut sauce, and a spread on toast, like jam. These are modern and home-cooking uses reported by the cited pages; none of them is dated.

As a table condiment it sits with the rest of the nam prik: a spoonful to season plain rice, vegetables or grilled food.

What is not recorded

The Thai PBS recipe gives almost no measurements: no weights for the chillies, garlic, shallots, shrimp paste, sugar or fish sauce, and no roasting times. The claim that the paste keeps well in the refrigerator for a long time has no number behind it, and the other account's claim of many months is a home-cooking statement, not a tested storage life. Because the paste is moist, keep it cold and treat any storage period as unknown.

The sources also give no origin, no region and no date, so nothing here claims where or when nam prik pao began.