I made a straightforward curry chicken recipe tonight: so many tsp of off-the-shelf curry powder to so many cups of cream. It’s good, but it’s not nearly as good as the chicken curry I used to get at my favorite Indian restaurant. Besides fresher ingredients and a professional cook, theirs tastes better for a different reason: it has a sort of … sweetness, for lack of a better word. But it doesn’t seem to come from sugar, as far as my limited palate can tell.
Can anyone suggest what I could maybe use to sweeten up my curry?
Lots of curries have a foundation of aromatics, like onions, garlic, ginger and chilis. These are usually pounded up and sauteed before adding the rest of the ingredients. The alliums, in particular, add a lot of sweet notes to a curry.
I make a pretty damned good curry, if I say so myself. Well, my favorite recipe is chicken makhani which does require a bit of sweetness. I don’t rely on a curry powder; I toast all the bits myself. I use a recipe from a cookbook, but this is pretty close:
I think the sweetness is mostly due to the sauteed onions and cinnamon and such. Also the cream. I don’t add any sugar.
As far as dishes like saag paneer, they aren’t really meant to be sweet, so I don’t try for that. But to add my 2 cents, I don’t care much for the Indian bland cheeses so I use soft feta.
Edit: Also, it is super easy to make your own naan with flour and yogurt, so give it a whirl! I had been making my own pita for years, and it’s basically the same, only with yogurt. Now I make them interchangeably.
Try caramelized shallots instead of onions, and temper the spices as suggested above. In a worst-case scenario, add some raisins toward the end of the cooking process.
It’s also possible it’s Carnation evaporated milk (or even table cream) that you’re tasting, depending on the type of curry. I’ve seen it used in a number of British Indian restaurants as part of the “base gravy.” Also carrots. I know it sounds weird if you’ve cooked recipes from the Indian subcontinent, but the British and some other Western styles of curry often start with a base curry sauce. Just google “Indian base gravy.” Here’s one recipe. That one doesn’t have milk/cream, but other recipes do.
Definitely lots of caramalised onions. My curry base takes onions, ginger and garlic and whizzes it up to a smooth paste in a blender, that gets gently fried to start with and not only does it give the sweetness, it also gives that proper “grainy” texture to the sauce.
NThing the carmelized onions, that’s key to a good curry.
Also, you might want to try making your own curry powder. It won’t necessarily add sweetness, but it’ll add an extra dimension of flavor you might be missing with premade powder. It’s not that much trouble really. If you can find an Indian grocery nearby, they sell the whole spices really cheap, and the whole spices stay fresh a lot longer than preground.
The only ingredients you’ll probably want to start with in powdered form are ginger and turmeric. The others- cumin, coriander, black peppercorns, couple dried red chiles, fenugreek, cardamom seeds, maybe mustard seeds (check out curry powder recipes online and see what sounds good) you can toast up whole in a pan, then grind up (I use a repurposed coffee grinder). Then after the onions start to carmelize add the ground spices before adding sauce to further cook and ‘bloom’ the spice flavors.
Can your palate tell the difference between sugar and palm sugar? Sometimes restaurants use that, in addition to the caramelising and the coconut milk etc.
Making your own curry powder or paste is a great idea but just a couple of points. Firstly, I wouldn’t go near powdered ginger in a curry. Fresh root ginger is the way to go. Secondly, don’t be stingy with the quantities. Many recipes err on the side of caution but I usually take the recipe as a starting point and double the amount of ginger, garlic and all the spice ingredients except for cardamom pods and cloves (a little goes a very long way for those)
Well, my favorite recipe is chicken makhani which does require a bit of sweetness. I don’t rely on a curry powder; I toast all the bits myself. I use a recipe from a cookbook, but this is pretty close: