Are red curry and green curry the same?

Challenging quiz! Just blindfold you and let you taste them both. How do you think about their both tastes? Do they have the same taste, don’t they?

I love recalling my childhood memories, a scene of my grandmother being busy with her job in her rice mill, giving most people in a small rural village a service, always impressively kept in my mind. Almost every day at about noon, a middle-aged lady has come and carried two bamboo baskets of her goods with a shoulder pole on her shoulder. One basket contained 4-5 pots of sweets or khanom, and the other often consisted of a small basket of vermicelli, called khanom jeen in Thai, and 4-5 pots of curries and some fresh vegetables to eat along with. Red curry or kang phed and green curry or kang kheow whan have always been popular menus for that.

Both red curry and green curry have been popular in Thai society for hundreds of years. Believe that they were adapted from kaeng pa curry, a kind of Thai curry without coconut milk made with meat, some vegetables and curry paste, by using coconut milk instead of water.

Indeed, both red curry and green curry are the same curry. The way to prepare both of them and the ingredients used are quite similar. However, except only you have a chance to look deeply into their recipes, you may see a minor difference between them. In making their curry pastes, their main ingredients, only the different point, the red curry paste uses dried red chilies, but green curry paste uses fresh green chilies. The colours of chilies added connect with their colour appearances than flavours causing these curries look reddish and greenish respectively.