Which Paste to Buy

The honest position first: a good commercial Thai curry paste makes a better curry than a mediocre homemade one, and there is no shame whatsoever in buying it. Thai cooks buy paste. Every market in Thailand has a stall selling it fresh by weight.

What matters is buying the right one, and the supermarket aisle is where most people go wrong.

The single most useful rule

Buy the one with the shortest ingredient list, in the smallest print, from a brand you cannot pronounce.

That is only half a joke. The tell is the ingredient list. A good paste reads like a recipe — chili, garlic, shallot, lemongrass, galangal, salt, shrimp paste, makrut lime, coriander seed. A weak one reads like a formula — water, salt, sugar, vegetable oil, “spices,” colour, preservative, thickener — with the aromatics well down the list.

Where “water” or “sugar” appears in the top three, put it back.

The Thai brands worth knowing

These are the ones that come up repeatedly in serious reviews. I want to be straight that reviewers disagree about the ranking, and that the answer depends on what you are cooking.

Mae Ploy — sold in a resealable plastic tub. The strongest and most concentrated of the common brands, with real shrimp paste giving it depth and umami. The usual criticism is that it is salty — which matters, because most recipes then tell you to add fish sauce as well. Start with less paste and less fish sauce than the recipe says, and taste. If I had to pick one tub to keep in the fridge, this is it.

Maesri — the little cans. Cheap, widely available, and a genuinely good flavour base, but noticeably weaker than Mae Ploy, so you need more of it — often the whole 4 oz can where a recipe expects two or three tablespoons. That is not a defect if you know it. The cans are also a nuisance once opened (decant the rest).

Mae Anong — harder to find outside a proper Asian grocery, and frequently ranked at or near the top by Thai cooks. Worth seeking out.

Nittaya — a Bangkok maker with a serious reputation, sold frozen or refrigerated where you can find it. Closest to a market paste.

Aroy-D — the best of the widely available options that avoid shellfish, and a close runner-up on flavour.

Thai Kitchen — the one in every American supermarket. It is heavily diluted and mild by design, and it will make a pale imitation of a Thai curry. If it is genuinely the only option, use two or three times what the recipe says and add fish sauce, shrimp paste and fresh chili yourself. But an Asian grocery or a mail order is an enormous upgrade for almost no money.

🔴 “Is it vegetarian?” is a per-can question, not a per-brand question

This one caught me while I was writing, and it is the most practically useful thing on the page.

Most traditional Thai pastes contain kapi — fermented shrimp paste — and often fish sauce. So a Thai curry paste is usually not vegetarian, let alone vegan.

But it is not consistent within a brand. Maesri’s red curry paste has no shrimp paste on the label — chili, garlic, shallot, salt, lemongrass, sugar, makrut lime, galangal and spices — while other Maesri pastes, including their panang, do contain shrimp paste.

So “brand X is vegan” is the wrong shape of statement. Read the can in your hand, every time, including the next can of the same brand in a different colour. And watch for “shrimp powder” listed separately from “shrimp paste” — some pastes carry one and not the other.

If you are cooking for a vegetarian and want to keep the depth, replace the kapi with a little fermented soybean paste or a good miso, plus extra salt. It is not the same, and it is much closer than leaving it out.

Format matters more than you would think

Format	Keeps	Notes
Plastic tub (Mae Ploy)	Months, refrigerated	Best value; scoop what you need
Small can (Maesri)	Days once open	Decant leftovers immediately; cans taint
Foil sachet	Single use	Convenient, usually weaker
Frozen / fresh (Nittaya, market)	Freezer	Closest to homemade
Jar of oily “curry sauce”	—	Not a paste. A finished sauce. Different product.

Whatever you buy, freeze the surplus in an ice-cube tray. A tablespoon-sized cube goes straight into the pan from frozen. A tub lasts months this way instead of dying at the back of the fridge.

Japanese curry roux blocks

A completely different product — spice already cooked into fat and flour (why) — and here the brands genuinely differ in character rather than quality:

• S&B Golden Curry — the sharpest and most spice-forward of the mass brands. My default.
• House Vermont Curry — mild and sweet, apple and honey, the biggest seller in Japan and the one aimed originally at children.
• House Java Curry — darker, more roasted, more bitter-edged.
• S&B / House “Kokumaro” — richer, more body.
• Torokeru — melts easily, mild.

They come in mild / medium hot / hot, and the “hot” is mild by South Asian standards. It is entirely normal — and a good idea — to mix two brands, which is what a lot of Japanese home cooks do; a box of Golden Curry plus a box of Vermont gets you spice and sweetness.

Indian: jars and pastes

The Indian aisle is the one where I would push you hardest toward making your own, because the premade product is furthest from the real thing.

• Patak’s pastes (not the sauces) are a decent concentrated shortcut — they are a spice paste, and you still build the dish around them.
• Jarred “curry sauce” — a finished sauce, and it skips the entire onion-base step that makes the dish. It is not the same category.
• Ready-ground masalas from an Indian grocery (MDH, Everest, Shan) are legitimately good and used in Indian homes constantly — no snobbery warranted. But buy the dish-specific ones (chana masala, rogan josh, sambar podi) rather than a generic “curry powder.”

The benchmark test

If you want to know how good a paste actually is, make panang with it (why). Panang is nearly dry — there is almost no liquid to hide behind — so a weak paste is instantly obvious. A green curry with a cup of coconut milk in it will flatter almost anything.

And then make some

Once you have tasted a good tub, the homemade version is a step further again — brighter, more fragrant, and adjustable. That is the next page.