You should choose Tom Yum ingredients carefully, the best ingredients make the best, most delicious soup. Before selecting the ingredients, you must decide which of the three versions of the soup to make. Royal Lao has a small amount of rice in it, while the Typical Laotian and Thai versions do not.
A typical Tom Yum soup contains distinct hot and sour flavors and fragrant herbs, which give it a distinct taste. To make the soup tasty, the broth is made of stock and fresh ingredients like Kaffir lime leaves, lemon grass, galangal, fish sauce, lime juice and crushed chilli peppers.
Different Tom Yum Soups
Quite often Tom Yum is made with prawns, and called Tom Yum Goong or Tom Yum Kung. When you use chicken, it is called Tom Yum Kai. If you use fish instead, the soup is known as Tom Yum Pa in the Laotian language and Tom Yum Pla in the Thai language. If you choose a mixture of seafood, it is called Tom Yum Thale or Tom Tum Po Taek. Tom Yum soup made with pork is called Tom Yum Moo, while beef based soup is Tom Yum Neua. You can use vegetables too, straw or oyster mushrooms are common in the modern variant of this soup. Freshly chopped cilantro or coriander is a common garnish for all these soup variants.
How each Tom Yum Ingredient Contributes to its Taste
Tom Yum means, hot, sour and spicy. Kaffir limes are citrus fruits and its leaves are sour in taste. Lemon grass is a little sour, but it has a very nice smell that it imparts to the soup. Galangal, a type of ginger is not as hot as traditional ginger. Lime juice is sour, and crushed chilli peppers make it hot. All this complements the fish sauce that makes this a seafood soup.
Other Tom Yum Variants
Tom Yum’s popularity has caused many cooks to experiment with it. A new version uses coconut milk, called Tom Yum Nam Khon. In Tom Kha galangal, the ginger component dominates the flavor. Prawns are usually used in Tom Yum Nam Khon, but for Tom Kha, chicken is the preferred ingredient and then it is called Tom Yum Kha Gai, meaning chicken galangal soup. Tom Khlong is a typical Thai soup of the same lineage, but less popular outside of Thailand. Thai chilli jam is sometimes added to the soup which gives it a bright orange color and chilli flavor dominates.
Commercial Substitutes for Tom Yum
A special Tom Yum paste is used in making Tom Yum soups commercially. Crushing and stir-frying the herbs yields a paste. Other seasonings and preservatives are added to it for long storage. Typically sold in bottles, this paste is available world-wide. If you make Tom yum soup from this paste, it tastes different from that made with fresh ingredients. If you have the time, it is better to use fresh Tom Yum Ingredients.
