I make a lot of curries, and I eat a lot of curries (English husband, and I love spicy food). And I agree that there’s nothing better than a freshly made curry with your own blend of spices that you’ve toasted, ground (and a lot of indian chefs actually use coffee grinders for that bit, so nyaaaah ), fried and cooked yourself. It’s a thing of beauty, and there’s layers of flavours and subtlety that you never imagined that there could be in food.
But then there’s also the nights where you just want to throw some shit in a frying pan and get it over with. On those nights, I use Patak’s. It’s a UK brand that they happen to sell in AU, but I don’t know if it’s available in the US. But the point is that I do eat curries from restaurants, and I make my own and Patak’s are a pretty good substitute where I can’t be bothered spending ages in the kitchen doing all that work. Not all pre-made curry bases are blah, you’ve just got to try a few until you find a brand that you like.
Also, some of my most successful curries have been baked in the oven. But what you’re looking at there is to use a tougher meat (like chicken thighs or gravy beef), put in most of the base of the curry first (paste, tomatoes, onions etc.) and just let it stew in the oven for a good couple of hours. Then add chickpeas toward the end, and add cream/coconut cream/yoghurt after taking it out of the oven. You also need to have a very good paste as a base for that first. But you end up with beautiful meat that’s just falling apart and it can be wonderful if done right.
(In the course of researching for this post, I’ve just found a recipe for butter chicken pizza… Dare I?)
Half Jamaican here. Curry, either chicken or goat, is pretty much as common at my house as meatloaf was at my all-American friends’ houses.
Even though I’ve done it before, virtually nobody I know makes their own curry. Way too time consuming and the difference is taste isn’t worth the effort. The commercial curry makers know what they’re doing.
I’m very choosy about my curry brands. There’s Blue Mountain and Indian Head which are Jamaican brands - I use these religiously. I also like Madras. Madras is in every supermarket in Boston. Blue Mountain and Indian Head are usually in the ethnic food aisle. McCormick’s - a friend bought it once and I didn’t rate it, personally.
I agree that to get that deep curry taste, you need to create a paste with oil, onions, garlic, and ginger for it to really express itself. Once you’ve got that going, I brown the chicken (seasoned with salt, pepper, and more curry powder), then you can add the chicken stock and/or coconut milk and toss in the fun veggie stuff. Leave it to simmer, stir occasionally, throw in some Wondra flour to thicken, and then you’re in business…
Vindaloo? Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe, and countless others, contain vinegar. I don’t think I’ve come across a vindaloo recipe that doesn’t have vinegar although I suppose something like tamarind might be able to add the appropriate tartness.
I say, start with Patak’s or Madras paste and just follow the recipe on the jar. Sometimes I’ll make Indian and Thai curries from scratch, sometimes I’ll use paste and augment it with certain fresh ingredients. Of course, if you know what you’re doing, nothing beats making it from scratch with fresh spices (less than 6 months old), toasted on the pan for a minute, and hand ground in a mortart & pestle (coffee/spice grinder works well, too, but I like the feel of a mortar and pestle.) That said, Patak’s and Madras pastes are great, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with a curry made with it. It’s quick, it’s not intimidating, and you will get a product that looks, smells, and tastes like curry with it. I do insist on garnishing with cilantro/coriander to at least give it some element of freshness.
So don’t stress yourself out. Just buy a jar of paste and start from there.
Find Patak’s or Sharwood’s and follow the directions. In Australia they are available at any suburban supermarket plus several lesser brands. It requires no skill using them to turn out restaurant quality Indian meals, for Americans at least. In Australia and Britain some restaurant meals are indescribably good. Why good to great Indian food is not as common in the US is one of life’s great mysteries.
No mystery at all. It’s just the immigrant population. I don’t know about Australia other than its proximity to the subcontinent, but England has a lot of people from India and Pakistan and, thus, the cuisine is well represented there and mainstream.
In Chicago, there’s plenty of good-to-great Indian and Pakistani restaurants as we have a sizeable community from the subcontinent. Go down Devon Street and you’ll have your choice from at least a dozen or two restaurants, most of which serve very good meals, some are simply exceptional. You’ll get north Indian, south Indian, vegetarian Indian, halal Pakistani, etc… In the middle of Maine, probably not so much.
We have a restaurant here that has a fusion of French and Indian foods that is run by a chef who is Indian. Some of her cooking methods were written up several years ago, she said she grinds her own spices and then browns them together in a non-stick skillet with ice cubes. I think the point was to keep the spices from browning too fast.
Macy’s has a spice grinder. coffee grinder on sale for $20.00. I bought one for my mother.
Oh. My. God. This sounds so good. I’m starving (and I just ate!).
Thanks to all for the great information. I’m headed to Philadelphia next weekend (probably a bigger selection there than in Harrisburg), so “Curry” will be a the top of my list.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with your spices/pastes as well. A favoured meal around house is Chicken Korma Gnocchi (Indian and Italian chefs both just started sending me eye-beams of hate, right?)
Patak’s korma paste, chicken, cream and lightly cooked gnocchi. Fry the chicken in the paste, thin down with the cream and toss the gnocchi in to finish cooking. Our housemate introduced us to it, and I’ll admit at first I was a bit “WTF?”. But we love it. Authenic curries are da bomb, but it’s always great to experiment and put curry in where noone expects it.
Patak’s is ok. I’ve had a lot more success with Shan mixes. I regularly use the Pilau Biryani, Chicken Tikka, Korma, and we’ve had their Kheer as well. All of which have given good results. I sometimes doctor up the recipies with extra tumeric(instead of using the coloring packets in the Biryani) or mix things up a little differently, but the recipes out of the box have always been good. Your best bet would be to get an Indian friend to show you around the kitchen and to help you do some shopping at the local Indian Grocery shop. Spices there tend to be an order of magnitude less expensive than the average supermarket, but keep in mind the quality controls in the country they are packed and shipped from are not like they are in the US, where the supermarket generally gets their goods from. Everything from long stems on the coriander seeds to worms in the almonds is what I’ve seen, and that is from the least scary Indian grocery in the neighborhood(we have about seven of them within three miles, my Indian co-workers call this area “little Pakistan”). I’d recommend sticking with the Shan or Patak’s until you get more comfortable or get a friend to show you around the grocery.
:dubious: Can you tell me what “curry paste” or “curry powder” actually is? It’s just a mix of spices. There’s nothing special in a box just because it’s labeled with the word “curry.” In Indian cuisine, “curry” means a saucy dish. It doesn’t specify any particular spice combination.
Phall, I forgot the powdered coriander seed. It goes in with the turmeric/cumin/red pepper slurry.
I think we’re using “curry paste” in the generic. There’s vindaloo paste, garam masala paste, mild curry paste, korma paste, hot curry paste, etc. These curry pastes are quite good and save the headaches of grinding your own. They’re already formulated for each dish (as you well know). For me, curry powder usually means a base of coriander & cumin, and then any of a dozen other posisble spices balanced for the particular dish they’re made for. But cumin & coriander are definitely the flavors most people associate with curry. Even my Indian college roommate wouldn’t bother grinding her own, and just used some Madras curry powder (not even a paste) from the store, and she made some killer curried chickpeas.
Actually, that is a question I have. Are there any curries that do not contain coriander seed or cumin? I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a dish that doesn’t contain both of these. (We’re not counting Thai curries in this. I actually find that while Thai curries work well with pastes, those are definitely much, much more fragrant prepared fresh, as you use many more “wet” ingredients like galangal, lemongrass, fresh kaffir lime leaves, fresh chiles, etc…)
Not to hijack, but at the local Publix grocery store they have a small section of English specialty foods in the ethnic foods aisle and they carry packets of something called “Chip Shop Curry”. It seems to be a dry sauce/spice packet that you reconstitute with water. My question to the UKers is, can it be used to make a decent Curry to put over rice, or is it more of a side sauce to dip French Fries/Chips in? What exactly are its uses?
I’m putting “mixing your own” in the same category in “grinding your own.” If you’re going to go through the trouble of assembling the curry spices yourself (which, granted is not a whole lot of trouble), you might as well go the whole hog and make a really good curry using fresh spices and grinding your own.
To be absolutely perfectly honest, I prefer good spice pastes to anything I’ve made throwing dried pre-ground spices together. Whole coriander and cumin, toasted briefly over a pan, adds such an extra dimension to food. The times I’ve used dried coriander and cumin–who knows when it’s been ground and how long it’s been sitting around–has been worse that just getting out a jar of Patak’s or somesuch.
), fried and cooked yourself. It’s a thing of beauty, and there’s layers of flavours and subtlety that you never imagined that there could be in food.