Chicken Curry Laksa

By Lara Lee

Updated March 4, 2025

Chicken Curry Laksa
Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
Total Time
1 hour
Prep Time
25 minutes
Cook Time
35 minutes
Rating
4(69)
Comments
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While chicken curry laksa is a popular restaurant dish across Southeast Asia, making it at home is entirely doable. It’s as simple as blending a spice paste, cooking it off and poaching some chicken thighs. It gets its complexity from rempah, a fragrant spice paste made with ingredients such as lemongrass and galangal (which can be swapped for ginger). This recipe calls for making your own rempah, but to save time, you can buy a good-quality paste and enhance it with fresh lemongrass, ginger and garlic (see Tip 2). The coconut milk-based broth is spicy, savory and rich, but not heavy, based on the curry laksa found at hawker centers in Malaysia and Singapore. The flavor improves over time, so it’s a dish worth making in advance.

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Ingredients

Yield:4 servings 

    For the Chicken

    • 1pound chicken thighs, skin-on and bone-in
    • 1(½-inch) piece ginger, unpeeled, bruised and sliced into 5 pieces
    • 3lemongrass stalks, woody and dark green parts only (white parts reserved for the paste) 
    • 6cups unsalted chicken stock (see Tip 1)

    For the Laksa Paste (if Using Store-bought Paste, See Tip 2)

    • 6 to 10dried chiles, such as tianjin, Sichuan er jing tiao or chile de arbol, soaked in boiling water
    • ⅓ cup dried shrimp, soaked in ½ cup boiling water (See Tip 3)
    • 6 to 10garlic cloves, peeled
    • 1ounce candlenuts, or macadamia, cashew or Brazil nuts
    • 2 to 3medium shallots, peeled, roughly chopped
    • 3lemongrass stalks, white parts only, roughly chopped (reserved from above)
    • 1(4-inch) piece ginger, peeled and sliced 
    • 1(3-inch) piece fresh turmeric root, peeled
    • 4teaspoons belacan or terasi (optional) (see Tip 3)
    • 1tablespoon table salt
    • ½ cup peanut oil, or neutral oil
    • 1tablespoon ground coriander
    • 1tablespoon ground cumin
    • 3tablespoons Thai or Vietnamese tamarind paste (see Tip 4)
    • 2½ teaspoons sugar

    For the Soup

    • One 14-ounce can full-fat coconut milk
    • ½ pound raw peeled jumbo shrimp or king prawns, tails on
    • 6fried tofu puffs, halved or quartered
    • 14ounces fresh Hokkien egg noodles (see Tip 5)
    • 2ounces dried rice vermicelli noodles
    • 3½ ounces fresh bean sprouts

    For Serving

    • Store-bought crispy shallots
    • Vietnamese mint (laksa leaves) or a combination of mint and cilantro leaves
    • Sambal belacan, sambal nasi lemak or sambal oelek 
    • Lime wedges
Ingredient Substitution Guide
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Preparation

  1. Step 1

    Poach the chicken: Place the chicken thighs, ginger slices, bruised lemongrass and chicken stock in a large saucepan. Cover with a lid and bring to a simmer. Adjust the lid to allow some steam to escape, and reduce the heat to low so the stock is barely simmering. Cook for 10 minutes, then remove from the heat and leave submerged for an additional 10 minutes. Remove the chicken, set aside to cool slightly, and discard the aromatics. Reserve the stock. When the chicken is cool enough to handle, remove the skin and bones and roughly shred the chicken into large pieces and strips. Set aside.

  2. Step 2

    While the chicken cooks, make the paste. Drain the dried chiles and dried shrimp and discard the water. Combine the dried chilies, dried shrimp, garlic, candlenuts, shallots, lemongrass, ginger, turmeric, belacan and salt in a high-speed blender (or food processor) and blend until smooth, scraping down the sides, if needed.

  3. Step 3

    Heat the oil in a large, wide-bottomed saucepan over a medium heat until the oil begins to shimmer. Add the paste and cook, stirring regularly, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the paste darkens slightly. Add the coriander, cumin, tamarind paste and sugar and stir together, and cook until fragrant, 1 to 2 minutes more.

  4. Step 4

    Add the coconut milk and reserved chicken stock to the spice paste and stir together. Bring to a low simmer and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the soup thickens slightly. Add the prawns and tofu puffs, and simmer until just cooked through, about 2 minutes. Taste the soup and season with salt, if needed.

  5. Step 5

    Meanwhile, cook both noodles according to the packet instructions and divide evenly among four large bowls.

  6. Step 6

    Divide the soup, prawns, tofu, chicken and bean sprouts evenly among the bowls. Top with crispy shallots, Vietnamese mint and a little sambal and serve with lime wedges.

Tips
  • If using salted chicken stock, omit the 1 tablespoon salt in the recipe, and season to taste.
  • If using store-bought laksa paste, use one 7-ounce jar, such as Por Kwan brand. Skip Steps 2 and 3. Roughly chop the white parts of 3 lemongrass stalks, 3-inch piece of peeled ginger and 2 garlic cloves. Blitz in a high-speed blender or food processor. Add 1 tablespoon peanut oil (or neutral oil) to a large heavy-bottomed saucepan over a medium heat. Add the paste and lemongrass mixture and cook for 5 minutes or until fragrant. Add 1½ tsp ground cumin, 1½ tsp ground coriander, 1 tablespoon Thai or Vietnamese tamarind paste and 1 teaspoon sugar and cook for 1 minute. Proceed with Step 4.
  • Dried shrimp is readily available online and at most Asian supermarkets and is essential to the recipe. Belacan and terasi are Malaysian and Indonesian fermented shrimp pastes. Belacan and terasi can be bought online and at some Asian supermarkets, but can be more difficult to find.
  • Thai and Vietnamese tamarind paste is recommended, instead of more intense Indian variety. If using Indian tamarind paste, season sparingly and to taste.
  • Laksa is often served with both Hokkien (egg) noodles and vermicelli (rice) noodles, but you can replace the Hokkien noodles with vermicelli if you want to cook just one type of noodle.

FAQS

  1. Laksa is a spicy curry soup popular in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia and Singapore. Key ingredients are noodles, coconut milk, spice paste and dried shrimp. Toppings vary, but can include shrimp, chicken, fried tofu puffs, bean sprouts and hard-boiled egg.

Ratings

4 out of 5
69 user ratings
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Comments

Nancy

@AZ Rouge can we refrain from referring everyone to Amazon please?? At least for this week when there’s a movement to avoid it for a statement against Bezos?!

AZ Rouge

We fell in love with Laksa when we went to Singapore. It’s much easier to make than this New York Times recipe would lead you to believe. Here is the recipe that I use and it consistently turns out to be phenomenal. https://www.recipetineats.com/laksa-soup/ Definitely use the Por Kwan Laksa paste out of the jar. You can find it in most Asian stores or you can even order it from Amazon. The other ingredients, including the dried shrimp and the tofu puffs can also be found in most Asian stores. I think this New York Times recipe is unfortunate because it will lead people to frustration with how many steps when this really should be something that you can throw together very quickly.

Tim

I thought this was an interesting project and I learned about some new foods and techniques. (One surprise: dried shrimp are refrigerated.) It took me two hours from start to plate and I ended up with a lot of bowls and pots to clean. The result was tasty and filling, if not revelatory. I wouldn't attempt it on a weeknight again. You could certainly get six servings from this.

New Yorker

I try to use Amazon as little as possible, for political reasons, but really appreciate knowing I can get these hard to find ingredients there and will order them from there. Thanks for the tip!

Gareth

This was a fun evening of cooking. Having lived in Singapore for a decade, I think fair to say that while this is really tasty, it's a way off the real macoy Laksa. Also, you get a million points if you can do this from scratch in an hour :-) .. it took two of us - pretty decent cooks - a full two hours to do it from start to finish. Worth it though.

Jim

I can’t find many of these ingredients

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