Best Tom Yum Paste: We Tasted 6 Brands, These Are the Best Ones

What you’ll find in this article:

The best spicy tom yum paste
The best powerhouse tom yum paste
The best tom yum paste to layer with other flavors
The best tom yum paste, overall

Walt Whitman’s seminal line, “I contain multitudes,” could only have been written about one thing: tom yum paste. As a lazy person who loves lots of flavor with little effort, I lean heavily on pastes and spice mixes, and tom yum paste has a permanent spot in my fridge door. Packed with hot, sour, savory, and salty all blended together, the most work you really need to put into cooking with this stuff is resisting the urge to make a dad joke about how it’s earned the name “yum.”

Anyway, tom yum is a Thai flavor base usually including lemongrass, galangal, kaffir, chili peppers, shallots, garlic, tamarind, and shrimp paste. You may recognize the name “tom yum” from seeing the popular soup on menus, but the possibilities for this paste are endless. Add it to stir-fries, marinades, noodles, dipping sauces—really anything that needs a quick boost of flavor.

Though it’s generally a safe bet that adding tom yum paste to your food will make it taste pretty darn good, which tom yum paste is best? It’s worth a little research to find out. But hey, research takes time, and you’re busy. You’ve got errands to run, parties to plan. But I’ve got plenty of time because my party invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. So, I tasted and compared a whole lot of tom yum pastes to find the best tom yum paste brand. How did I taste these pastes? I licked them straight off of a spoon because what else was I going to do on a Saturday night?

Here’s the best tom yum paste to buy.

Best tom yum paste brands, ranked

Best Powerhouse Flavor

Por Kwan Tom Yum Paste

Amazon

I roped my mom into doing this tasting with me (in case my “doing this on a Saturday night” thing wasn’t already cool enough), and she is a salt fiend. Her blood is 90% soy sauce and she practically sprinkles salt over potato chips. She smelled this paste and said, “This could be my boy.” Indeed, if you’re like her, this is the best tom yum paste for you. This is a salt bomb. But, it’s also a sour bomb. And a funk bomb. Basically, it’s just really stron—even after diluting it with the directed amount of water. The lime flavor was also the most distinct here out of any of the pastes. For how powerful it is, it’s still incredibly well-balanced, with layers of all of the salinity, fishiness, and sourness that we want from a tom yum.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

8/10

Sporks

Best for Layering Flavor

Mae Ploy Tom Yum Paste

Amazon

What a fascinating product. Though it has the classic big flavors of tom yum, it tastes simple, in a great way. It’s shrimpy, salty, and limey. That’s kind of it, and it’s beautiful. I wasn’t mulling over what flavor I could detect in the background or whether or not I liked that hint of spice on the aftertaste. All the clean, simple flavors play harmoniously together. It’s the best tom yum paste to mix with other spices, but it is also plenty delicious enough to stand on its own.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

8.5/10

Sporks

Best Spicy

Maesri Tom Yum Paste

Amazon

When I say “spicy” I’m not talking to the freaks that practically drink ghost and scorpion pepper hot sauces because it makes them feel alive. This tom yum paste won’t scratch a spice-fiend’s itch, but it does have a pleasant tingle. It smells like a cross between taco seasoning and miso paste. It is initially sweet with a heat that creeps up towards the end of the bite. It won’t make anyone’s nose run, but it’s a tasty paste that’s sweet and bright with a pleasant kick. I’d add a squeeze of lime juice or vinegar—but it’s darn good and the best tom yum paste brand for a hint of heat.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

9/10

Sporks

Best of the Best

Dragonfly Tom Yum Paste

Amazon

I popped open the lid of this jar and was greeted with a big lemongrass smell, so I assumed the lemongrass flavor would be overpowering. I admit, I made an ASS out of U and ME. It was nice to be pleasantly surprised and proven wrong. It’s not overwhelming in terms of any one flavor, and it’s perfectly spiced. As a spice lover, I’d even choose this over the spicier Maesri, because this has the perfect level of sweet, fermented, and salty wrapped up into one. It’s not swimming in oil like some of the others were, and that’s great because I could honestly eat this with a spoon. It’s the best tom yum paste to buy, hands down.

Credit: Liv Averett / Amazon

Rating:

10/10

Sporks

Other tom yum paste brands we tried:

Mekhala Organic Thai Tom Yum Paste, Aroy-D Tom Yum Paste

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