Chicken Curry and Beyond – The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

Every now and again I get asked if I have a tawa or karahi or tandoor to help me make all of the curries and side dishes that I review on the Curry Focus website.

Are you kidding me? Of course not. I don’t live in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. I have a more or less average kitchen with the usual appliances and utensils.

So just what appliances and utensils do I use for my adventures in curry land?

Well I’ve got the usual assortment of saucepans, knives (the knives must be sharp – I’ve got a small paring knife that I mainly use for removing the skin from ginger root and a large chef’s knife that I use for cutting up vegetables and meat), mixing bowls, sieve, spatulas, pastry brush, wooden spoons and tongs. I’ve got a big slotted spoon and serving spoon.

My favourite kitchen utensil is my big cast-iron frying pan (with its cast-iron lid). I’ve had this frying pan for years and cook most of my curries in it.

I suppose my most often-used utensils are a garlic press, grater (for grating fresh ginger) and teaspoons, with the teaspoons being used the most of all. Most curry recipes have the spices measures in teaspoon units (I suppose this all started way back as most people would have at least one teaspoon).

Spice and ingredient measurements also commonly use the tablespoon. I don’t have any tablespoons but this is not a problem because there are 3 teaspoon measures in a tablespoon measure – I just use 3 teaspoon measures if I need to put in a tablespoon of something. Having said that, I do have a set of measuring spoons but never really use them – the teaspoon is really all I use.

I do have a set of measuring cups (1/4, 1/3, 1/2 and 1 cup measures) but only really use the 1/2 and 1 cup measures.

You can see that there’s nothing in that lot which wouldn’t be in most kitchens. Well, apart from the pastry brush which I did buy specifically to use when making samosas and naan bread.

The one set of utensils that I did buy was a roti board and rolling pin. These are a must for making roti – I find is easier using the roti board than trying to use the workbench – and the board is just the right size for making roti, funnily enough.

I bought a mortar and pestle early on in my curry-making days. But I hardly use it because I soon learned that a spice grinder makes grinding spices so easy. My spice grinder is only for spices – I don’t use it for grinding coffee.

Which now brings me to the kitchen appliances.

The one that I use the most, apart from the spice grinder, is the kitchen scales. I’ve got digital scales that can measure liquid (water) volume as well as weight. It’s pretty nifty, if I say so myself. I measure every ingredient accurately when I’m trying out a recipe for the first time.

I’ve recently had to buy a new food processor since the old one started to shake itself apart. And the food processor gets well used.

Of course, the standard kitchen oven is used now and again but most of the cooking takes place on the ceramic (electric) hobs.

And finishing off my list of kitchen appliances is a deep fat fryer. It has a temperature gauge that stops me from setting fire to the kitchen and is great at making chips (yes, I do know that chips are not part of a standard curry, but they taste great).

Another extra thing that I use a lot is a stopwatch. I use it all of the time when cooking. I don’t have a separate stopwatch – I just use the one in my mobile phone. It lets me time cooking steps down to the second.

One thing that I have never gotten round to buying is a full size rolling pin. I don’t need one because I’ve got an empty wine bottle that works just as well (if my roti rolling pin is too small for the job in hand).

So there you go. Mostly of my curry-making utensils and appliances are pretty standard. Only the roti board and spice grinder have been specially bought to help satisfy my curry cravings.

Not a tawa or karahi or tandoor in sight.

We seem to be getting a lot of people visiting the Curry Focus website to look for rezala recipes.

We aren’t too familiar with this dish so our fingers hit the keyboards as we carried out a few Internet searches.

It seems that rezala curries come from the Bengal area, nowadays mostly in Bangladesh. More specifically, rezala curries come from Kolkota (Calcutta).

And following on from this, it seems that rezala curries have not really spread into the rest of the Indian subcontinent very much – they are still predominantly a Kolkota dish.

So what is a rezala?

Well, it is often described as being a white curry which is because the ingredients often include yogurt, cream and milk (or various combinations) so the final curry is white (or grey) in colour. And a rezala is usually quite hot because it has a few chillies.

The most common recipes for rezala are for chicken and mutton.

I’ve had a couple of rezala curries recently from my local curry house and the curries have been pretty dry. The recipes that we read on the Internet would always end up with a curry with a sloppy sauce. Not that there’s anything wrong with having a sloppy sauce.

At present, there is only one rezala recipe on the Curry Focus website and this is a chicken rezala curry recipe. So if you have a favourite rezala curry recipe, why not share it with us so we can publish it for the rest of the world to try?

Now and again we get an email about different types of curry dishes. And in the last couple of weeks we’ve had emails asking about a tindaloo.

Now none of us in the Curry Focus office has ever eaten a tindaloo, although we have eaten (hot) vindaloos and the occasional (very hot) phal. We agree that vindaloo is the hottest one that we like and that anything hotter is risking having an exploding mouth, stomach or heart. This is not just a glib comment – we regularly see curry-eating contests where people are challenged to eat a super-hot curry and the common feature of these competitions is that the person doing the eating has to sign a disclaimer saying that they are eating the curry at their own risk.

We asked around at our favourite local curry houses and did some searching on the Internet and the general result was that a tindaloo is a vindaloo with more chillies or chilli powder. So a tindaloo is hot – very hot.

So is a tindaloo hotter than a phal? Expert opinion from the curry houses is divided. Some say that a phal is the hottest whereas some say that a tindaloo is hottest.

But opinion is really not that important when you reach these really hot curry levels because tindaloos and phals are hot, hot, hot. To our knowledge, hardly any curry houses have tindaloo on the menu so maybe a tindaloo is hotter than a phal (why bother having tindaloo on the menu if it is so hot that hardly anybody would ever order it?). But then again, not many curry houses have phal on the menu.

I remember regularly eating phals years ago when I was younger. But this was after consuming large amounts of beer so my tastebuds would have been unconscious even before I reached the curry house. Things have changed since then and I now prefer tasting what I’m eating and a madras is more my style.

There is a chicken phal curry recipe on the Curry Focus website and a few vindaloo curry recipes.

But there is no tindaloo recipe on the Curry Focus website yet. If you have a tindaloo curry recipe then why not email the recipe to us so we can publish it for the world to see?

And let us know if you have any knowledge of a tindaloo and how it rates with vindaloo and phal.