Panang Curry and the Practice of Contained Fire
A Thai Coconut Curry for Warmth, Focus, and Forward Momentum - Heat, Endorphins, and the Ancient Dialogue Between Plants and People
Panang curry is a masterclass in how fat, heat, and spice work together to warm your body, steady your energy, and wake up your senses in about 35 minutes.
In this post you’ll learn what’s happening nutritionally, chemically and perhaps on a deeper level inside the pot and the body. Plus how to make a deeply flavorful, weeknight-friendly version at home, even if you’re new to cooking.
Hey food friends! 👋 I'm Kaitlynn—software engineer, kitchen tinkerer, and explorer of nutrition science, traditional medicinal wisdom, and plant magic woven into our ingredients.. Here we build a recipe collection for people with lives to live, share restaurant gems (in DC & beyond), smart pre-made picks, and occasional further reading, listening or art find worth your time. 🍴
Welcome to the Golden Middle Kitchen, a series for anyone who might be thinking, “I want my nervous system to unclench, but I also want dinner to slap.”
Sparked by a deeply satisfying bowl of curry on a cold day, the series follows ingredients, techniques, and ideas that show up again and again across kitchens and cultures along the spice road. By deconstructing and occasionally reconstructing familiar dishes, these posts trace patterns that repeat across climates and centuries: soft power and hot spices, warming fats, grounding roots, and the gentle, steady work of steam and spice.
The series draws loosely from Thai food traditions, Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and everyday kitchen knowledge that have fed people well for up to 3,000 years. Many of these systems developed independently, in different parts of the world, yet arrived at strikingly similar conclusions. The best ideas tend to do that, and modern science seems to just be catching up.
This is more about balance, nourishment, and food that feels good to cook and eat than optimizing anything. I’m not a chef or a clinician, just a regular human learning through cooking and reading. If you’re curious too, historically and practically, come pull up a chair.
🍲 The Bowl That Lit The Golden Middle Kitchen Series
This particular dish began for me on a deep winter day. The kind where the air feels metallic and your bones want to power down for a season.
I ordered a bowl of Panang curry from Thai Pantry, a favorite spot in NW DC my family and I return to often. It moved down my throat and into my chest like someone had quietly lit a hearth inside me.
That bowl became the spark for this entire series.
Delicious and comforting, yes. But it also felt activating. It got my attention in a way that surprised me. It was just lunch, and yet something in me leaned toward it, like a plant instinctively turning toward light.
Maybe connected or not but somewhere between then and now I’ve been thinking about what I’ve heard talked about online recently a lot called “growing horizontally.” Following your curiosity. Meeting with people that genuinely interest you - not just to make a pay raise or a promotion, but to lean into what you are genuinely excited about. It is perhaps expansion outward, but not proliferating projects.
To me, it has felt like reclaiming a vertical slice of my own attention. Stepping away from algorithms and notifications and to do lists and even the comic relentlessness of asking my child to put on her socks for the hundredth time. Stepping back from the constant drone of practicality and asking a quieter question: how much have I let logistics and necessity of income and responsibility quietly cannibalize the part of living that feels alive?
Curiosity rarely shouts. It nudges. It warms. It asks for connection, even if that connection is simply paying attention to your own internal signals.
This curry became one edible strand of that question. A way to practice noticing. A way to follow a small spark without immediately turning it into productivity.
Yes, there are bills. Yes, there are obligations. But within that structure, can I carve out a portion of this one life to follow what lights a contained fire? To let interest wake up fully before I dismiss it for obligation or passivity?
There’s a lot more to it swirling in the background that I hope to put into this writing more and more, though if you’re just here for the delicious recipes that’s cool too.
This might have been where I was heading the whole time but it just took me a year of trying to sit still to hear my own self.
If you’ve been cooking through the Golden Middle Kitchen series, you may notice the arc tightening here.
Golden milk taught us that turmeric needs fat and pepper to become bioavailable. Warmth is a collaboration.
The Thai aromatic stir fry showed us what high heat does to volatile compounds. Ginger, lemongrass, galangal, chilies. Fragrance is chemistry in motion.
Coconut rice slowed everything down. Fat steadies starch. Energy can be engineered.
Ground. Infuse. Volatilize. Panang curry is where those lessons converge.
Activation. Not escalation. Contained fire. The kind that steadies you enough to stay present and see what else might wake up.
🔥 Thai Panang Curry Science: What Fat, Heat, and Spice Actually Do in Your Body
You’ve already met the cast. Ginger. Galangal. Chilies. Coconut milk. Lemongrass. Makrut lime leaf.
Individually, they’re interesting. Together, they’re a multi-pathway biological powerhouse.
Scientists call this synergy. The combined effect exceeds the parts. In Panang, that happens on three levels at once: chemical, digestive, neurological — and the cooking process itself is what unlocks it.
🔓 Multiple unlocks, one pot
Not all plant compounds release the same way.
Some are fat-soluble. They need oil or they stay trapped.
Some are heat-activated. No temperature, no party.
Some are volatile. They vaporize and hit your brain before the spoon reaches your mouth.
Different keys, different locks, same pot. Panang’s method is a sequence of unlocks:
Crack the coconut cream → fat separates
Bloom the paste in fat → fat-soluble compounds dissolve
Apply heat → aromatics volatilize
Simmer gently → remaining compounds extract
Traditional cooks arrived at this sequence through generations of taste and observation. Food science arrived at the same conclusion through a completely different route. They are describing the same thing.
What your body is actually receiving
When you eat a bowl of panang, your nervous system is receiving input from several directions simultaneously. Here is what is actually happening.
🌶 Why Panang Curry Feels Warming (Capsaicin, TRPV1 + Circulation Explained)
Chilies contain capsaicin.
Capsaicin binds to TRPV1 receptors, the same receptors that detect actual fire. Your nervous system cannot tell the difference.
This results in increased circulation, endorphin release, open sinuses, mild metabolic lift
It’s molecular mistaken identity, and your body fully falls for it every time. A vascular study in MDPI, among other studies, has documented how regular dietary capsaicin activating these receptors can support circulation and cardiovascular function — which, to be clear, traditional spice-heavy food cultures had already figured out empirically before anyone had named the receptor or written a study about it.
Now here’s the Golden Middle twist:
Capsaicin dissolved in fat spreads evenly across receptors instead of detonating in one spot. This is why panang warms rather than burns. Same molecule. Different delivery. Completely different experience in the body.
🫚 Ginger, Galangal, and the Compound Effect
Ginger contains gingerols, which convert to shogaols when heated. They interact with the same TRPV1 pathways as capsaicin.
So ginger and chili are running parallel circuits. Galangal adds digestive stimulation and anti-inflammatory compounds through different pathways.
Three roots. Overlapping actions. The paste is doing a lot.
🥥 Coconut Milk Benefits: MCTs, Fat-Soluble Compounds, and Why Cream Tames Heat
Coconut milk is doing two opposing jobs at once.
It contains medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs), which are metabolized quickly in the liver and converted into usable energy. Research in Frontiers in Nutrition characterizes MCTs as among the more efficiently metabolized dietary fats.
But coconut milk is also:
• The solvent that unlocks fat-soluble spice compounds
• The buffer that softens their intensity
It amplifies and moderates simultaneously. That is not an accident of recipe design. That is a genuinely elegant system.
🍋 Aromatics & the Nervous System: How Lemongrass and Lime Affect Mood
Lemongrass and makrut lime leaves release volatile compounds like citral and limonene.
These hit your olfactory system, which feeds directly into the limbic region of the brain, responsible for memory and emotional tone. They activate the parasympathetic nervous system – the part that makes you relax and feel lovey.
Citrus scent is not just pleasant. It signals alertness and calm at the same time. Much of what you experience as “flavor” is actually retronasal smell: aroma detected through the back of the nasal passage while eating. You are being fed through your nose before the bowl ever touches the table. This is not poetic license. It is neuroscience.
Why it feels like it does
The warmth that moves down your throat and settles in your chest is circulatory, driven by capsaicin and ginger working the same receptor system from different angles. The steadiness is partly the fat moderating the spice and partly the MCTs providing smooth, quick-access energy without a spike. The lift — that quality of alertness without agitation — is the aromatics at work on your olfactory and limbic pathways.
When was the last time a meal actually changed your mood? The body does not experience this as abstract nutrition. It experiences it as state change.
Maybe that’s why, to me, a bowl of Panang can feel like armor on a hard week. Or like fuel before a conversation that matters. Or like a small, controlled sun in the middle of February.
Grounding and invigorating at the same time is not a contradiction. The chemistry is doing both simultaneously, through different mechanisms, in the same bowl.
That is what synergy actually means in practice.
And it is also, not coincidentally, almost exactly how traditional medicine systems have been describing this dish for centuries — just in different language. Which is where we go next.
🔥 🔥 Traditional Thai Medicine Meets Modern Food Science
A traditional medicinal practitioner might call this dish a moderated, sweetly clearing fire
These kinds of disciplines have been coming to similar conclusions as much of modern science for thousands of years, through observing bodies across lifetimes, across generations, and developing frameworks often precise enough to still be in clinical use today. The language is different. The underlying insight often isn’t.
Thai traditional medicine — which draws on a complex synthesis of Ayurvedic influence, Chinese medicine, and indigenous botanical knowledge developed over roughly 2,500 years — categorizes foods and herbs by their effect on the body’s elemental balance. Ingredients are described as hot or cool, heavy or light, capable of moving energy or consolidating it.
In that framework:
• Chili, ginger, galangal → warming, circulation-moving
• Coconut → moistening, stabilizing
• Lime leaf → aromatic clearing
A Thai traditional medicine practitioner looking at this dish would not see a recipe. They would see a precisely balanced therapeutic formula: fire moderated by moisture, movement balanced by stability, stimulation lifted by aromatic clarity.
Ayurveda centers on agni, digestive fire.
Chilies and ginger increase agni.
Coconut prevents overheating and depletion.
Aromatics support prana, the life force linked to breath and nervous system clarity.
Cooking herbs in fat to increase potency is called anupana. Blooming curry paste in coconut cream is literally the same thing.
Traditional Chinese medicine classifies foods by thermal nature and organ systems.
Ginger and galangal → warming, digestive activation.
Chili → disperses cold, moves stagnation.
Coconut → nourishing, supportive of defensive energy.
Panang would be recommended in cold or damp conditions. Which is when many of us crave it anyway.
The pattern underneath
Three systems. Different continents, different centuries, different philosophical frameworks. And yet: warming agents moderated by cooling fat, digestive stimulation balanced with protective moisture, aromatic herbs for mental clarity, and an intuitive understanding that how you combine ingredients matters as much as which ones you choose.
Modern nutritional science calls this synergy and bioavailability and receptor activation.
Traditional systems called it balance. Harmony. Right combination.
⚖️ The Golden Middle Principle: Moderated Heat, Balanced Energy
Panang is warming. But it is moderated warming. It is fire contained in fat, protecting from depletion or overload. Engagement with insulation.
In a culture oscillating between over-stimulation and exhaustion, moderated fire feels like relief.
Awake and steady. That’s the Golden Middle.
🌿 A Handshake Written in Molecules: Humans, Plants, and Co-Evolution
Long before journals and meridians, there was something simpler.
Relationship.
The chili plant did not evolve capsaicin for your tacos. It evolved capsaicin to deter mammals from eating its fruit while allowing birds, who don’t register the heat, to spread its seeds. That’s strategy. That’s intelligence expressed in chemistry.
Lemongrass didn’t wake up one day aromatic for your curry. Its volatile oils developed in response to heat, humidity, insects, soil. Defense and attraction woven into scent.
These compounds exist because the plant needed them.
When capsaicin binds to your TRPV1 receptors and your body responds with heat, circulation, and endorphins, that’s not random.
🧠 Not Trickery. Dialogue.
There’s a popular idea that capsaicin “tricks” the brain.
But what if it’s less trickery and more dialogue?
Your nervous system has receptors tuned to heat because heat matters for survival. The pepper evolved a compound that presses that button for its own survival. When those systems meet, a response unfolds.
Endorphins release. Blood moves. Your breath shifts. You feel awake.
That is not deception.
That is two evolutionary strategies colliding and creating a third experience neither could produce alone. A handshake written in molecules. It’s actually not so unlike what software programs do all day to power the internet.
Humans and peppers have been in conversation for at least 6,000 years. Archaeological evidence places cultivated peppers in the Americas long before they traveled across oceans and embedded themselves into Southeast Asian cuisines so completely they now feel native there.
🌱 Co-Evolution in the Kitchen: How Spice Shaped Culture and Metabolism
An ethnobotanist might tell you humans and these plants have been co-evolving. Not in the strict genetic sense necessarily, but in behavioral and agricultural patterns.
We selected for sweeter coconuts. For hotter chilies. For more fragrant citrus leaves.
The plants shaped us too. Our tolerance for spice increased. Our cuisines reorganized around new metabolic rhythms. Entire regional identities formed around particular plant alliances.
So when you feel that warmth spreading across your chest, that slight lift in your mood, that steady focus settling in, you are not experiencing random chemistry.
You are stepping into a relationship thousands of years old.
🏡 The Hearth Effect: Why Blooming Curry Paste Feels Grounding
Panang slows this whole exchange down.
It extracts the fire from chili. It dissolves it into fat. It carries it gently across your nervous system.
This is hearth fire, not wildfire.
Across cultures, the hearth was the center of the home. Not necessarily in a religious sense, but in a human one. It was where transformation happened. Raw to edible. Cold to warm. Separate to shared. Hungry to fed.
Take a little stove-top sensory meditation journey with me:
(in your real kitchen or in your minds eye, up to you)
There is something psychologically steadying about watching coconut cream melt.
You apply heat. The emulsion breaks. Oil rises. You add paste. It blooms. The kitchen shifts from stilled to fragrant in under a minute.
You are participating in something profoundly ordinary and profoundly human. You are watching transformation in real time. Matter reorganizing. Energy redistributing.
It is transformation you can see, and feel. There’s something commonplace yet powerful in that moment. Because it is chemical, neurological, and ancient.
And then, maybe, a little mystical too.
And if the word mystical feels loaded, we can use a simpler one.
Attentive.
Because this is what humans did for most of our history. We went into forests and fields. We smelled leaves. Crushed stems. Tasted cautiously. Observed what happened. We paid attention not for content, but for survival. For nourishment. For understanding.
We spent long stretches of time in quiet relationship with the living world.
If anything feels strange now, it might be how far removed many of us are from that kind of contact. From plants. From animals. From the slow noticing that shaped our species.
And when people say something feels slightly off, a low hum of restlessness beneath the logistics of modern life, I cannot help but wonder if part of that hum is disconnection from this older rhythm.
Not as a critique. Just as an observation.
Now, when you think about, or actually make this recipe, think about what it all might mean. For powering your sweet body that has carried you through all these years. For connecting you to these ancient relationships that are hard to feel or understand in our modern world.
For all that you are in this moment, and how you want to carry that into who you’re becoming
Now for some of us, maybe it just feels like a good dinner. And that’s so great.
But if we let it, it is a remembering of this connection humans have always had. A small rehearsal for how to carry activation without tipping into burnout.
And maybe that’s why it feels the way it does in late winter, when the ground is still cold but something underneath is already moving.
Feel the fire in the soil.
Feel the fire in the bowl.
Feel the fire, contained, activated in your body.
On to the feast
What Makes Panang Different?
Unlike thinner red curries, Panang, or phanaeng, is thick, concentrated, and slightly sweet. It clings. It coats. It wraps deliberately around rice instead of pooling at the bottom of the bowl.
It is less about flooding the senses and more about focus.
And now that you have seen what the pot does to the plants, and what the plants quietly do in response, the rest is simply practice.
Ready to try it your way? Let me know how it feels.
👩🍳 Easy Panang Curry (Thai Coconut Curry with Chicken)
Creamy, warming, and deeply flavorful. Beginner-friendly and weeknight doable
Serves 4 to 6
This version keeps the soul of the dish intact without requiring you to source 18 ingredients or own a stone mortar older than your house. FWIW, you can totally make your own curry paste, I chose not to explore that route at this time but if you’d like to make homemade curry paste, you can blend something like dried red chilies, lemongrass, galangal, makrut lime zest, garlic, shallots, coriander seed, cumin, shrimp paste, and white pepper. If you try that, I’d love to know how it goes. For this version, we’re keeping it simple and letting the paste do the heavy lifting.
🛒 Ingredients (With Easy Substitutions)
🥥 Curry Base
🌶 1 (4 oz) can Panang curry paste (ps if. you’re in DC the only places I’ve found that carry this are Thai Pantry and Rice Market)
🥥 2 (13.5 oz) cans full-fat coconut milk
🍗 1.5 lbs thinly sliced chicken (or your protein of choice)
🧂 Seasoning
🍤 2 to 3 tbsp fish sauce (or soy sauce)
🍯1.5 tbsp palm sugar (or brown sugar)
🌿 5 to 7 makrut lime leaves, torn (or zest of 1 lime)
🥕 Vegetables (Optional but Recommended)
🥕 1 to 2 cups veggies - anything you have on hand works great but some ideas are carrots, broccoli, bell peppers, green beans, or peas
🌿 Handful Thai basil for finishing (optional)
🍚 Serve with jasmine rice, steamed rice, or coconut rice.
🌶 How to Adjust Spice Level in Panang Curry
Panang curry is usually milder and thicker than Thai red curry, but spice tolerance varies.
If you prefer mild curry:
🥥 Use 3 tablespoons of paste instead of the full can
🥥 Add ¼ to ½ cup extra coconut milk
🍚 Serve with more rice
🍯 Add sugar 1 teaspoon at a time to soften the heat
If you like it spicy:
🔥 Use the full can of paste
🔥 Add a spoonful more paste
🔥 Slightly reduce the amount of coconut milk or rice
Fat and starch help mellow capsaicin, so coconut milk and rice naturally soften the heat.
🔥 Step-by-Step: How to Make Panang Curry at Home
🥥 1. Crack the Coconut
Open one can of coconut milk without shaking it. Scoop the thick coconut cream into a wide skillet or sauté pan over medium heat.
Simmer 3 to 5 minutes until glossy and beginning to release oil. This step is traditional in Thai cooking and deepens flavor.
🌶 2. Bloom the Curry Paste
Add the curry paste directly to the thick coconut cream.
Cook 2 to 3 minutes, stirring constantly, until fragrant and slightly darkened. This “blooming” step unlocks the aromatics in the paste.
If it smells intense or very spicy, don’t panic. It will mellow once the full coconut milk is added.
🍗 3. Cook the Chicken
Add sliced chicken directly into the curry paste mixture. Toss to coat evenly.
Cook 4 to 6 minutes until mostly cooked through.
You can substitute:
🍤 Shrimp
🥩 Thinly sliced beef
🍄 Tofu
🥦 Extra vegetables for a vegetarian Panang curry
🥥 4. Build the Sauce
Pour in the remaining coconut milk (both cans total).
Add:
🧂 2 tbsp fish sauce or soy sauce
🍯 1.5 tbsp palm sugar or brown sugar
Simmer gently 8 to 10 minutes until the sauce thickens but remains spoonable. Panang curry should be richer and thicker than typical Thai red curry.
🌿 5. Add Aromatics and Vegetables
Stir in:
🌿 Torn makrut lime leaves
🥕 Vegetables of choice
Simmer 3 to 5 minutes more until vegetables are tender but not mushy.
Texture tip: Makrut lime leaves are for flavor infusion, not eating. Tear into large pieces and remove before serving.
Turn off heat and fold in Thai basil if using.
🥄 Final Taste Adjustments for Perfect Balance
Taste and adjust as needed:
🧂 More fish sauce or soy sauce for salt and depth
🍯 More sugar for balance
💧 Splash of water if the curry thickened too much
🌶 Extra paste if you want more heat
🍚 Serve with jasmine rice, steamed rice, or coconut rice.
It doesn’t just burn. It glows.
There’s a warming line that runs down the throat and settles in the chest. Circulatory. Nudging. Energizing without agitation.
This is Panang curry at home: accessible, adaptable, and deeply satisfying.
And hey—if paid membership isn’t doable, we get it. But even a one-time donation keeps the feast going. Thanks for being part of this table.
🔄 Where Feast Mode Goes Next
This post feels like a crest in the Golden Middle Kitchen series. Not the end. Just the point where the elements have all met in the same pot.
There may be something softer next in the feast. Something cooling. Something sweet.
Because balance never stays still.
Have a favorite dish or ingredient you’d like to see us dive into? Let me know in the comments. We love to get to know a new food friend.
For now, though, make the curry. Let the coconut melt. Let the paste bloom. Let your kitchen smell like something ancient and alive.
Then sit down and eat it slowly.
You’ll know what it’s doing. 🌿🔥