"Golden Curry" product - anyone use it or familiar with it?

Cafe Society
21

It basically comes from the idea of adding Indian-style spices under various blends sold simply as “curry powder” and adding them to a dish and calling it “curry.” If you look at old American cookbooks, you’ll find various curries that are formed like this; you have stuff like chicken curry salad which is essentially roast or boiled chicken in a mayonnaise-curry powder base; you have curry pumpkin soup, that sort of thing. At Chinese takeaways, at least around here and some I’ve had in England, you will have “chicken curry” on the menu which is essentially just some curry powder mixed into a typical soy sauce-based Chinese takeaway sauce. It’s food flavored with curry powder.

Japanese curry is roux-based. So you make your roux, add curry powder, and build your stew from that. Chinese is kind of similar except thickened with corn starch, and it’s usually not quite as involved as Japanese curry, which can have stuff like honey and apple in it.

I love Japanese curry. It’s one of my favorite comfort foods. Last November I had a prostatectomy and all I could think about post-op was having a bowl of Japanese curry and rice, and that was, indeed, my first proper meal after getting out of the hospital.

Golden Curry is a reasonable introduction to Japanese curry and is extremely easy to make. You just get your vegetables (coarsely cut onions, carrot chunks, and potato) and your protein, add the correct amount of liquid, then add the appropriate amount of curry cubes (directions are on the box.) Some people will add additional ingredients: grated apples, honey, ketchup, kobacha squash, soy sauce, dashi, etc. Everybody seems to come up with their own variations.

My favorite brands are Java and Kokomaru. Oh, and Vermont Curry (which is on the milder, sweeter side, but not overwhelmingly sweet). One of the best expressions of curry is, as mentioned above, with tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet).

It’s really quite different from any Indian style of curry, but it’s wonderful and comforting in its own right. And it’s really convenient to make, a true throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-in-the-pot weeknight meal. For the effort involved, it has a huge payoff. (And I’ve made it from scratch a couple of times, and really didn’t see the point as the improvement over using cubes [and mixing various brands up] really wasn’t worth it to me for the extra labor involved.)

22

I like the hot variety of Golden Curry but rarely have it. Just not a habit. Would Golden Curry be good with coconut milk? I’m reluctant to try it because I don’t want to ruin two things that are good separately.

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Well, no kidding. It’s not Indian food. It’s Japanese curry. They are definitely misguided.

This whole authenticity gate-keeping thing with regard to food (in society,not the SDMB) is starting to annoy me. The only way something’s inauthentic is if it’s actually trying to be something, and doesn’t actually hit the mark. But there are lots of different variations on things that are not actually trying to be what they’re a variant of, and as a result are authentic in their own right. Japanese curry is one of those things that isn’t trying to be an Indian dish, so it’s perfectly authentic as Japanese curry. Kind of like how Cincinnati chili isn’t actually some kind of weird Midwestern attempt at actual chili; it’s a sort of an American fusion dish of a Greek meat stew/pasta sauce (saltsa kima), not an outgrowth of the Mexican chili con carne that originated in San Antonio.

Golden Curry is pretty decent; maybe not as amazing as the curry I got in Honolulu at a Japanese restaurant, but still pretty good.

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Amen.

Gatekeeping “real curry” is like gatekeeping “real soup.” It’s too broad a category to have a single gold standard. Authenticity is usually about honoring a specific regional tradition rather than meeting one universal definition of the word.

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Yeah. A lot of that comes back to unimaginative or inexperienced people demanding words have exactly one meaning: the one they’re personally familiar with.

Just in this thread we’ve encountered various folks wanting to enforce a single definition for “hot”, “spicy”, “curry”, and “chili”. Language (and cooking) don’t work that way.

Sometimes gatekeeping really is about the food. But often it’s just about the terminology. Which IMO is an easier thing to educate folks out of.

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Or the culture. But we’ve had other threads about culinary cultural appropriation.

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I agree, I was thinking hot dogs. What you might go out for locally vs eat on vacation vs make at home today vs made at home growing up (ketchupy!) are more different than similar.

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And “curry” has become a catch-all term for heavily spiced dishes via the original British borrowing of the term from Tamil and applying it to all sorts of stuff. Southeast Asian curries, for instance, have little in common with South Asian curries (maybe some minor crossover of ingredients) but we call them all curries.

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TL;DR

I made it and it came out great!

Long version with detail:

In my internet research I came across someone who said that the early step of simmering meat (in my case, beef) and veggies (in my case, onions, potatoes, and carrots) in water for 20-30 mins wasn’t enough to tenderize the beef. (Probably okay for chicken, esp. chicken breast). So he said he first pressure cooks the beef for 15 minutes, then proceeds with the recipe. I said to myself, “Self,” says I, “why not cook everything for 15 mins in the Instant Pot, then proceed with the recipe? Just make sure the veggies are cut big enough that they don’t turn to mush.”

So that’s what I did. Browned the beef and onions in the IP on saute, then added carrots cut in BIG chunks and whole baby Yukon gold potatoes. Also added three cloves of frozen minced garlic (a real convenience item!), and set pressure for 15 minutes. That process took about 40 mins. from start to finish.

Next step was to add half the brick of curry paste, which I chopped up into small pieces. The box said it was for one pound of meat and I only used half a pound of beef.

Another internet site suggested adding (so I did) a dash each of ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and honey.

Then I simmered–really boiled, as there is no simmer function on the IP-- for about 10 minutes. Tasting it when done, I thought it needed something else so I added salt and a bit of balsamic vinegar (my universal remedy for dishes that need “something else”).

I still wasn’t thrilled with it, but I had to leave to go to a class, so I left it on the IP’s setting, “keep warm.” When I got back home an hour and a half later, it had developed into something fantastic! I guess it needed to get mellow.

I had two helpings with plain white rice made in my rice cooker. The meat was perfectly tender and the potatoes were melt-in-your-mouth. But the big surprise was the carrots! They were tender without being mushy and had a sweetness and depth of flavor that was out of this world. I like cooked carrots anyway, but these were incredible. Next time: more carrots.

I used the package labeled “medium hot,” but to this Texas gal, there wasn’t any noticeable heat. There was a whisper of something in the background that might have been deluding itself into pretending it was heat, but no. No heat. Maybe I’ll try the one labeled hot next time.

The end.

:hot_pepper:

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Hooray!

31

I’m getting hungry!

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Yeah, this is me, too. I sometimes find Indian dishes a bit “muddy” – too many spices that end up not really tasting of anything in particular. Indian curry is actually not my favorite dish called curry. My fav is Thai, followed by Japanese (had it a lot as a kid so it’s comfort food), Chinese, then, Indian.

I always saute onions and the veg first than add the sauce to that then add the meat (if I’m doing meat in the dish).

33

When you really get into it, a LOT of popular Japanese foods are foreign creations they adapted to their tastes. Ramen was originally Chinese. Tonkatsu is schnitzel. Tempura was a Portugese Lenten food. Bread was mostly unknown until after WWII, but it’s so popular there now that it prompted the invention of the world’s most finely engineered, precise, and espensive toaster.

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I love katsu curry, it’s great at home for leftover katsu, where the coating is no longer pristinely crisp.

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And befitting cultural importation, the names in Japanese are transliterations from the donor culture as well.

ramen :left_arrow: Mandarin lamian (拉麵)
tonkatsu :left_arrow: ton (Japanese word for pork) + katsu (short for katsuretsu, “cutlet”)
tempura :left_arrow: Latin tempora, a word used by Spanish and Portuguese merchants for Lenten times when they would eat batter-fried fish
bread – pan :left_arrow: Portuguese pão

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FYI you can make arrows using a hypen adjacent to a greater-than or less-than symbol:

  • -> gives →
  • <- gives ←
  • <-> gives ↔
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Just to close the loop on a previous post of mine, I asked my husband about how to cook Japanese curry, although these instructions are on the box for most if not all brands. First sauté the meat, then add the vegetables (onion, potato, carrot are most common) then take off the heat and add (water and?) the curry, which is basically a roux and will apparently get lumpy or something if you try to mix it in under heat. Then, when smooth, turn back to simmer and let it simmer in the curry until everything is tender.

Among brands, Golden is one of the better ones, he says, and if you like it sweeter and less hot, Vermont brand is good. You can add spiciness by adding SB brand curry powder (sparingly, until you know how much you like) to any of them.

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Thanks!

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I wouldn’t, the Golden is pretty rich already and probably won’t benefit from the milk. But you could reserve a few shavings of the curry for next time you use milk and make a microbatch.

40

I knew about Japanese curry before I knew about Indian curry.