The peanut sauce served with satay — made from red curry paste (Entry TH-04), roasted peanuts, coconut milk, tamarind water, palm sugar, and fish sauce. It is a rich, substantial sauce — more like a thick, flavoured peanut preparation than a loose dipping sauce — that must balance the sweetness of the coconut milk and palm sugar against the sharpness of the tamarind and the salt of the fish sauce, with the peanut providing a fatty richness that rounds every other element.
**The peanuts:** Raw or roasted peanuts (skin on), ground in a blender or food processor to a coarse-fine texture — not butter-smooth, not rough-chunky. A texture where the peanut is clearly present as individual fragments but small enough to distribute evenly through the sauce. **The preparation:** 1. Crack coconut cream. Fry red curry paste 2 minutes. 2. Add ground peanuts. Stir and toast briefly in the paste. 3. Add thin coconut milk. Bring to a gentle simmer. 4. The sauce will thicken rapidly as the peanut starch and fat distribute through the coconut milk. 5. Add tamarind water: for sourness. The peanut sauce should be perceptibly sour — not merely sweet and salty. 6. Palm sugar: for sweetness. 7. Fish sauce: for salt. 8. The finished sauce should be: thick enough to coat a satay skewer when dipped, pourable but not thin, deep orange-brown from the curry paste and peanut. **[VERIFY]** Thompson's specific nam jim satay formula. Decisive moment: The tamarind quantity. Peanut sauce is frequently made over-sweet outside Thailand — the tamarind's sourness is the element that lifts the preparation from sweet-rich to genuinely complex. The sourness should be present as a clearly identifiable note in the background of every mouthful. If only sweetness and peanut richness are present: more tamarind.
David Thompson, *Thai Food* (2002); *Thai Street Food* (2010)