Recipes

Failure Tom Kha Gai

Name: Failure Tom Kha Gai
Yield: 8 servings
Cuisine: Thai
Ingredients: 1 tbsp coconut oil; ½ onion, sliced thinly; 3-4” ginger, peeled and matchsticked; 2 cloves garlic, minced; 1 tbsp red Thai curry paste; ¼-½ tsp cayenne; 2 cups chicken stock; 3 limes’ zest; 2.5 cups coconut milk; 2 chicken thighs, cubed; 8 oz button mushrooms, quartered; 1-2 tbsp fish sauce; 1-3 tbsp lime juice; 1-2 tbsp coconut sugar; salt to taste

A Thai coconut-based chicken soup recipe, only with half of the ingredients swapped out, and they're the important ones, but it's good anyway.

Humu Trott

14 Feb 2025 • 4 min read

Rich and I have a running joke that grew out of this old Patton Oswalt bit about KFC's "Famous Bowls":

Any time we have some food or drink that is embarrassingly lazy and kinda depressing, we call it "failure [blank]." Like, even though I can be a miserable coffee snob thanks to my Seattle upbringing, I gave up on life years ago and drink instant coffee—we call it Failure Coffee.

This recipe is my Failure Tom Kha Gai. I love Tom Kha Gai (it's the coconut milk-based chicken soup found at Thai restaurants), but I have no business trying to make it. The "kha" in Tom Kha Gai means galangal, a root that I'm vaguely aware exists, but have never laid eyes on myself, much less held or purchased. I haven't let that stop me! Because I really, really love Tom Kha Gai. I have had excellent Tom Kha Gai that has sadly cursed me with Inconvenient Opinions, and now I no longer like the Tom Kha Gai I can get at about ¾ of restaurants. So I want to make my own, but apparently I want to do it in a crappy way? I dunno man, I contain multitudes.

Rather than actually try to source galangal—which would take me a little off my beaten path, but not that much, I'm sure there are a dozen places to find it in SF—no! rather than do that very reasonable thing, I got lazy and came up with a messed-up way to make Tom Kha Gai without the Kha.

Another key ingredient in Tom Kha Gai is lemongrass. I had a comedy of errors with lemongrass a couple years ago, a story best left for another day, but the upshot is that I wound up with more than a pound of lemongrass, roughly a lifetime supply, and then of course it went bad, and my brain still feels like "nope, we've had our allotment of lemongrass, sorry." I'm kind of scared the universe will dump more lemongrass on me in an out-of-control way, like maybe it dispenses lemongrass from a hopper with a touchy lever that has two settings: "none" and "jackpot!"

And then there are the makrut lime leaves, which almost certainly could be reasonably purchased at the same place where I could get both galangal and a not-insane-amount of lemongrass, but I'm on a roll here, I've already established that I'm hell bent on doing this the wrong way.

Also also, I can never get the right kind of red Thai chili (see previous re: I'm just shopping at the wrong effing stores in a city that is full of the right stores, and I actually do love going to those stores, what is wrong with me?).

One day I'll get the right ingredients from the right store, but in the meantime, this is my Failure Tom Kha Gai, with absolutely no kha, and half of the wrong ingredients.

My One Neat Trick here is that I use a bunch of lime zest and ginger. That gives me the sort of sharp, vegetal, floral, grassy thing I think I would get from galangal/lemongrass/lime leaves. It smells about right when I'm making it, and it tastes like it's in the same general neighborhood as a proper Tom Kha Gai. Only with ingredients I can get at any old grocery store, no problem.

You want doubt? This recipe has doubt galore! Starting with whether it should even exist! Go find a real recipe from an actual Thai person instead, and get the right ingredients. We're deep in Mock Apple Pie made with Ritz crackers and lemon juice territory here. Proceed at your own risk.

But it actually is really good.