Easy Laksa Sarawak Paste Almost Authentic

We have tried a few of  the Commercially sold Laksa Sarawak Paste brands at the supermarket such as Cap Helang Matahari, Cap Burun Bayan, MUSC Sarawak Laksa Paste. They are all good but the only thing we did not like was the spiciness. The paste are usually very spicy to our taste.

Since you cannot change the spiciness of the paste we decided to make our own at home. This started our quest to find the best laksa Sarawak recipe to make at home.

The first recipe we tried to make at home was too hard to do. A lot of grinding work involved. We picked up that recipe from this blogger. 

You can watch our video making that recipe by click on our YouTube link below. This recipe although hard but it is the closest to the taste of an authentic laksa Sarawak paste in our opinion.

Since it was so hard to make, we decided to improvised, do some R&D and created a new recipe with less work involved.

Our latest recipe is 24 ingredients long. I know it looks incredibly not easy but seriously it requires less work than the 15 ingredient recipe we did.

Take note the most important ingredient in Laksa Sarawak is galangal and coriander powder. You can replace galangal with ginger but the flavor is not the same. Nevertheless even if you tweak here and there I guarantee that the overall soup will still be amazingly delicious. 

Here are the steps

STEP 1 GRINDING THE FRESH HERBS

Ingredient

3 stalk lemongrass 

300g Shallots

1 tbsp preserved radish

50g garlic

1 tbsp Salted Taucu

30g shrimp paste

30g Tumeric

5 fresh red chilies

5 dried chilies

200g Galangal

Add 100ml oil or more to help the grinding process. You can also use water but preferably more oil than water.

Use your food processor to grind and blend the herbs into paste.

[TIPS for you is to fry the raw ingredient until soften first then grind them in your food processor. This will help make processing easier]

STEP 2 FRYING THE DRY SPICES

Ingredient

2 star anise

5 pieces clove

6 pieces cardamom

1 stick cinnamon 

4 chopped garlic 

5 chopped shallot

150g coriander powder

50g cumin powder

50g curry powder

100g peanuts (grind into powder)

6 pieces candle nut (grind into powder)

200 ml oil or more

STEP 3 COMBINING THE DRY SPICES AND THE HERB PASTE

Pour the fresh blended spice mixture into the wok. Keep at low heat. Constantly stirring to avoid burning. Keep stirring until the paste turns dark brown.

This process is the hardest and has discourage many from doing the paste at home. 

Add more oil if the mixture gets dry.

Although laboriously hard to do at home but homemade paste taste far more superior than the commercially made paste. Since learning this recipe we have never bought the commercial made paste anymore.

After sometime the oil will start to separate and the paste will emit a strong fragrant. When you see the oil has separated it is time to add the sauce

STEP 4  ADDING THE SAUCE

Ingredient

20ml tamarind juice

20ml fish sauce

20g palm sugar

The quantity of the above sauce is adjustable to your taste.

You can add this sauce at the blending stage or earlier in the frying process. The timing to add the sauce is not important.

Finally the paste is ready. We can now make our soup.

This recipe will produce 600g to 900g of paste which you can divided into portion and store for future use. The paste must be stored in the fridge. The paste will turn moldy if kept at room temperature.

MAKING LAKSA SARAWAK SOUP

Ingredient

3 garlic

2 shallots

300g Sarawak Laksa Paste

1 liter of water. (Use prawn stock water which you used earlier to boil your prawns in)

2 chicken stock cubes

200ml Coconut Milk

30ml Oil

Boil the soup for 20 to 30 minutes

Strain out the spices. Make sure you squeeze out every drop of that precious flavorful spices

The longer you keep the spices in the soup, the better infused the soup will be.

Now we are going to season the soup by adding sugar, tamarind and salt. You can adjust the seasoning to your taste

Finally our Sarawak Laksa soup is ready.