This is a hot and sour Thai soup that is great as a main dish when served with rice. You can add fish, chicken or seafood stuff instead of shrimp but shrimp is the most popular and well-known. My personal favorite is mixed seafood such as squid, shrimp,mussel and crab served with hot rice, a wonderful taste.
1. Pour water into a medium sized pot then bring it to a boil.
2. Add sliced lemongrass, sliced galangal, kaffir lime leaves, shallots and garlic in to the pot and reduce the heat for simmering about 5 minutes.
3. Turn the heat to high then add shrimp and straw mushrooms. Boil it until the shrimp are cooked for about 2 minutes.
4. Remove from stove, add Thai peppers, spring onion, fish sauce and lemon juice and stir.
5. Filled in a bowl and serve with rice.
Tips:
Some people like covered cap mushrooms some like big cap mushrooms but we mostly use mushrooms with little opened cap. If it’s small we just cut off the dirt and use the whole mushrooms but if it’s big one, we cut it into half, length side.
Some people remove lemongrass and galangal before they add shrimp and mushrooms or before serving but if you thinly slice them you can even eat them as they are very healthy herbs including shallots and garlic. But the original “Tom Yam” we cut lemongrass about 2” length and batter it. For some people who don’t like to eat fresh herbs they just use its smell for seasoning. Anyway, it’s still one of the healthy dishes.
Some add fish sauce, lime juice,Thai chili and spring onion while it’s cooking on the stove but I add them after remove from stove due to the heat will destroy all the taste and you cannot adjust the taste while it’s boiling. If you add too much lemon juice and the taste still ok while it’s hot but once it’s cold it will get too sour.
As I always tell you that you canad just fish sauce and lemon juice, refer to your favorite taste. I adjust all ingredients for people who have average taste not too salty or sour so it depends on you. The most important thing is it turns up as you like and it’s good enough to have it again.
Normally I like to add instant stock mixes like Knorr in the soups but I mostly add it in clear soups. In this case you can add spicy seafood Knorr stock but I don’t. I like to smell fresh herbs and eat them.
