Experimental Cooking: Curry Shrimp Chicken Mango Thai Pizza

One of the things I love to do is cook (when I can afford it). It's one of the great joys in life and goes well with eating as long as you do them in the correct order.


I don't always cook, but when I do, I do my best to make something delicious. I thought that maybe some people might like to try some of these things that I cook, though keep in mind that I'm not a professional Chef and I'm not plagiarizing anything from other cooking channels. I'm pretty adventurous when it comes to food, and certainly adventurous when it comes to trying new ways to combine things. This recipe is the result. This is something that I made in mid April of 2020, around the time that the social distancing measures were enacted.

A Thai Pizza that I cooked in my kitchen in mid April

So this experiment is called Thai Pizza, which will combine the aromatic flavours found in cooking originating from Thailand and Pizza, which originates from Italy originally though the flatbread dough upon which Pizza is built can be traced back through many early cultures the world over. So its only natural that Thai cooking should be combined with the convenience of Pizza. I'm not Italian, but you don't have to be Italian to eat Pizza.


What I'm going to attempt is an ad hoc recipe, that is made up of easy to buy items in your grocery store so that you don't have to do everything from scratch. That also includes the Pizza crust itself which can be bought in kits, that include tomato sauce, though we won't be including the tomato sauce in this recipe. You can very easily substitute your own favourite pizza dough recipe (such as those found with many Breadmakers). Rather than get into making your own dough, I'm just using the pre-made pizza crust kits. There are plenty of resources for making pizza dough out there.


Pizza dough kits come with premade pizza crust and tomato sauce and cost about $4 CDN.

Curry Shrimp Chicken Mango Thai Pizza

Each pizza is enough for a modest meal for 2 people. I eat alone, so each pizza lasts me about three days. These pizzas can be frozen as well. So you can pre-cook them for meals.

Ingredients:

2 precooked Pizza crusts (they usually come in twos or cook your own from your favourite pizza crust recipe)

Peanut or vegetable oil (for cooking shrimp and chicken)

Lemon and ginger (crushed into a pulpy juice in which to marinade the chicken and shrimp for about 1/2 hour)

1 400g block of cheese (preferably Goudah or Monterey Jack) (works for two pizzas)

1 can of Thai Red or Green Curry Paste (both of which are sweet rather than spicy)

1 mango, skinned and thinly sliced into thin 1 inch lengths

1 cup Fresh Celantro, chopped

Shrimp and/or Chicken (both will be pre-cooked to prevent possible poisoning)

Sriracha sauce (to add some tanginess to the curry paste which we need to compliment the cheese)

1/2 cup of Bean sprouts (1/4 per pizza)

2 Thinly sliced carrots, cut along their length into thin wedges or just grate a carrot

Preparation:

• Grate the block of cheese into two equal halves, one for each pizza
• Prepare the ginger and lemon by juicing the lemon and finely chopping the ginger.
• Combine ginger and lemon juice and pulp and marinade chicken (and shrimp) in it for about 1/2 hour.
• Preheat two tablespoons of oil in frying pan or wok to medium high heat (3/4 of the way to max). (Hint, to check if oil is hot, flick a drop of water into it. If it sizzles and evaporates quickly, its hot enough to cook.)
• Flash cook shrimp and chicken for about three minutes stirring occasionally and then put aside.
• Open can of Thai curry paste and spread evenly between two pizza crusts. Optionally you can mix it with tomato sauce as well if you'd prefer which makes it a bit more tangy.
• Sprinkle shredded cheese evenly amongst pizzas to cover most of the Curry sauce.
• Add the shrimp and chicken, distributing the bits evenly over the pizzas.
• Spread the mango slices, carrots, bean sprouts and celantro on top of the other ingredients.
• Add Sriracha sauce to taste atop of both pizzas. If you like it spicy, then add a fair bit though keep in mind that it has a bit of a kick if you're not used to spicy food.
• Cook each pizza in the middle rack of your oven for about ten minutes at 300 or longer if you want your crust crunchy.

After you pull it from the oven, give it about five minutes to cool. Remember that curry paste and tomato sauce are both substances that both retain temperature more efficiently than just about any other substance used in cooking. So give them enough time to cool before eating. Say about 5 minutes.


Eat and enjoy.

Brian Joseph Johns
https://www.shhhhdigital.com