Farang London Gives Birth to Payst London

The difference between a fresh curry paste and an ambient one is the same as the difference between a fresh tuna steak and a tin. I've thought this since I first started cooking Thai food, the best part of ten years ago. The curry is one of the most widely eaten things in the country. The paste that goes into it has been, for most of that time, represented really badly on UK supermarket shelves.

There are a few decent products out there. But in general the ambient pastes on most UK shelves don't come close to fresh. So much flavour and freshness is lost in the pasteurisation process. It's understandable commercially: they're cheaper to produce, store and deliver, they have a much longer shelf life, and most are manufactured outside the UK where the ingredients are more readily available, then shipped in by boat. By the time they hit the shelves, they're already a few months old.

There's a place for those products. But there was no reason not to sell the real thing too. Payst's aim is to change that.

The idea had been at the back of my mind for years, constantly pushed further back because I was cooking 50 to 70 hours a week at Farang and managing the business on my days off. Then the pandemic happened, and my brother Tony was temporarily made redundant from his job as an aerospace engineer building engines for planes. The pandemic screwed most of us in one way or another, and it hit the travel industry particularly hard. Plane production stopped immediately. A lot of well-trained people lost their jobs overnight.

Me and Tony had been trying to build Payst on our days off, but moving slowly. We took the opportunity for Tony to go full time on it. From that, after years and years of thought, Payst London was actually born, and Tony could finally put his engineering degree to proper use. He was offered his old job back when things settled and happily told them to shove it. We hope to one day connect his experience producing vertical take-off engines with his role as director of the UK's first wholesale fresh Thai curry paste brand. We haven't come up with anything to date.

We started off making all the products in the back prep kitchen at Farang. We quickly realised that catering for an entire country out the back of a busy restaurant in Highbury was a pretty dumb thing to attempt. We attempted it all the same.

We're now stocked in over 600 shops UK wide, including Harrods, Selfridges and Daylesford. UK-wide next day delivery via the webshop. Wholesale across Europe, Kuwait and Dubai.

Give Payst a go.

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Visit us at faranglondon.co.uk. Sauces and pastes for cooking Thai at home at payst.co.uk.

For more recipes, signed copies of my cookbooks are available at Payst: Cook Thai and Thai in 7.