Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Naan (or Nan) is a leavened (it rises using yeast) flatbread that can be eaten with most curries.

Many hundreds of years ago, the Moguls brought naan bread to India (the Moguls came from Persia and the Persian word for bread is naan).

Nowadays, naan is almost a mandatory part of an Indian meal. It’s usually eaten with the main curry dish and is often used to scoop up the curry, instead of using knives and forks.

The main ingredients in naan are flour, yogurt and yeast (sometimes a substitute such as baking powder is used instead of yeast).

You make naan by first making a dough with the flour, water and yeast. Then you add any other ingredients that you want. Then you roll out the naan and, finally, you bake the naan in an oven (traditionally, tandoor ovens are used but western style ovens make naan just as well).

Making naan is a lengthy process because you have to wait for the yeast to make the dough rise. But this isn’t difficult because you just mix the ingredients together and then put them in a warm place for a few hours to let the yeast do its job. But you can batch up making naans and freeze the excess breads to warm up and eat at a later date (all you need to do is make sure that the naans are individually wrapped with clear film, or something similar, so that you can take out the number of naans that you want without facing pulling apart a pile of naans that have set together).

There are lots of different types of naan that you can make with the most popular ones being plain, garlic, keema (naan with minced lamb) and peshwari (naan with nuts and raisins).

There are recipes for making naan on the Curry Focus website. There’s one for plain naan, one for garlic naan and one for peshwari naan. We don’t have one for keema naan yet – if you have one then we’d be delighted to add it to the website – all you need to do is input the details on this simple form.

Next time you make a curry, why not also have a naan to go with it? They are simple to make and are delicious.

Anise is a plant that originated in the Middle East and is now widely grown in Europe, Asia and North America. Another name for anise is aniseed.

The seeds and leaves are both used in cooking and have the taste and aroma of sweet liquorice and Indian anise has a slightly bitter taste.

In India, anise is used mainly with breads and savoury dishes. The seeds are dry roasted and added to fish and vegetarian dishes.

As well as having culinary uses, anise is widely used to flavour alcoholic drinks such as French pastis, Greek ouzo and Turkish raki.

Anise has a few medicinal applications and is used to aid digestion as well as being used as an antiseptic.

The sweet taste of aniseed has led to it being used in breath fresheners and to flavour cough medicines and lozenges.

Dill is an herb that grows to about 60cm (2 ft) in height.

The leaves are slender and feathery and grow to a length of about 15cm (6 in) in length.

The leaves and seeds are used in cooking.

The fresh dill leaves are sometimes called dill weed.

In Indian cuisine, dill is used to make curry powders, masalas and to flavour spinach and other leafy green vegetables. Dill seeds have a flavour that is similar to caraway seeds.

Elsewhere, dill is well known for being used in pickling, such as in dill pickles and sauerkraut.

It is a very versatile herb and can appear in lots of different recipes for a wide variety of dishes, particularly fish and seafood dishes.

Like most herbs, dill has some medicinal applications. Dill tea is a treatment for insomnia and dill is a remedy for stomach problems.

Dill grows in most types of soil but does need a sunny location to thrive.

Hi, Ray here again.

I don’t know about you, but I love a good mango lassi. It’s a very refreshing drink and there’s an easy mango lassi recipe on the Curry Focus website.

I had previously spotted cans of mango pulp at my favourite Indian supermarket so that’s where I got the mango pulp. The smallest can was 850g (nearly 2 lbs) so I had enough pulp to make the recipe 8 times.

The smallest mango that I could find was about 300g (10 ½ oz) and I decided to use the whole mango. After all, mango is delicious by itself so using a bit too much won’t do any harm.

The original recipe submitted by a J Campbell stated ¼ teaspoon of crushed cardamom pods. I found this to be an unusual measurement for cardamom pods so have changed the recipe to use 4 crushed cardamom pods If you find the cardamom taste to be too strong, you can reduce the number of pods down to 3 (or even 2).

The recipe is simplicity itself. All you have to do is put the ingredients into a food processor and process them until you’ve got a smooth drink. It really only takes 2 minutes.

I made 2 batches of the mango lassi, changing the method slightly for the second time. On the second time, I processed the cardamom pods until they had more or less disintegrated. I did this because I ended up chewing a piece of cardamom pod from the first batch – maybe the pods didn’t get close enough to the processor’s blades because of the other ingredients.

The only part of the recipe that takes any time is putting the drink into the fridge for a couple of hours.

I tried the results out on a small group of friends and got very positive comments.

The drink is lovely and smooth and tastes great.

Overall, the mango lassi scored an excellent rating of 8 out of 10.

Personally, I found the lassi a bit sweet so am going to make some few batches with less sugar. Maybe one without any sugar will be good. After all, mango by itself is quite sweet.

Why not try out this recipe for yourself? The result is really delicious.

Nigella is a spice that is mainly used when cooking Indian flat breads, such as naan, and vegetarian dishes.

The spice has a strong taste that is similar to oregano.

The Nigella spice is the seeds of the plant called Nigella Sativa. The seeds are tiny and black in colour. The seeds themselves don’t have much of an aroma but the oregano aroma is released when the seeds are fried or crushed. The taste is a bit like cracked pepper and is bitter.

Nigella is usually sprinkled on the top of Indian flat breads before they are cooked, as well as being used in a more traditional spice way with vegetarian dishes.

Other names for Nigella are Black Cumin (Nigella is NOT a type of cumin), Wild Onion Seed and Kalonji.

The main production place for Nigella is India.

You can buy Nigella in most Indian shops and supermarkets (it might be called Kala Jeera, Shahi Jeera or Black Cumin).

Nigella does have a couple of medicinal applications. It is used to treat indigestion and bowel problems.

Hi, Ray here again.

The holiday season is well and truly out of the way so it’s time to pick up my favourite Sunday activity of cooking another curry. The Curry Focus website had a relatively new recipe for Sri Lanka Chicken Curry which looked pretty simple, despite the long list of ingredients.

There were only going to be 4 of us for dinner. With the usual 2 extra portions needed for Monday night’s dinner, I decided that 1.5kg (3 lbs) of chicken was an overly generous amount of food so only bought 1kg (2 lbs) of chicken.

Jointing a chicken looked a bit of an ordeal because I’m a bit accident prone with sharp knives (the local emergency clinic and hospital have seen me recently). So I decided to buy a pack of chicken thighs – they would be ideal.

I needed a couple of spices (and the curry leaves) and got them from my usual Indian shop, along with a pack of frozen paratha that “accidentally” fell into my shopping basket.

Preparation time arrived and I peeled and chopped the onion and garlic and grated the ginger root.

I set up some plates with most of the ingredients – one plate held the onion, garlic and ginger – a second plate had the turmeric, chilli powder, coriander, cumin, fennel, paprika and salt (an egg cup was set up with this plate with the vinegar) – a third plate had the tomatoes, cardamom pods and lemon rind. All very organised.

After this, the cooking was a breeze.

On went the oil and in went the fennel and curry leaves for a stir-fry.

When the curry leaves started to go brown, I added the ingredients from the plate with the onions and stir fried for 5 minutes.

Then I added the ingredients from the plate with the turmeric and tipped in the egg cup of vinegar. I mixed everything up really well and did another stir-fry for a minute.

Then in went the chicken and I made sure the chicken was well covered in the spice mixture.

Then in went the ingredients from the plate with the tomatoes and this was mixed in well.

The mixture looked pretty dry so I added half a cup of boiling water to make sure that the curry didn’t stick to the pan.

Then I let the chicken cook in the covered frying pan and stirred every few minutes.

After 30 minutes I started off the rice in the microwave.

After 45 minutes of cooking, I added the coconut milk and lemon juice and cooked the curry for a further 5 minutes without the pan cover, to let the sauce reduce and thicken. During this time I quickly heated up the paratha.

It all came together at the same time I served the curry on a bed of rice along with a plate of paratha for the dinner guests.

The curry was delicious. It wasn’t too spicy and had a wonderful blend of spices and coconut.

Overall, the curry rated an excellent 8 out of 10.

This is another curry to add to the list of curries to cook again (it’s getting to be a long list).

Jaggery and gur are both types of raw, unrefined, sugar. The two terms are often confused but the end result is a natural unprocessed sugar that you can use in various types of cuisine.

Jaggery is made from raw cane sugar and gur is made from palm sugar (traditionally, the date palm is used but the coconut and sago palms are also used to produce gur).

Jaggery and gur are both made by simmering the sugar cane syrup (or palm sap) in large pots until the sugar hardens. Both types of sugar are usually sold in blocks (that can be bought from your local Indian supply shop) – the darker the colour of jaggery, the better.

The preparation process does not use any chemicals and retains a lot of natural mineral salts (which are lost when traditional sugar refining takes place).

Both jaggery and gur are used in Indian cooking, in sweet and savoury dishes. The most obvious uses are to make candy or to add to dal in order to give the dish a good flavour balance.

Here’s a recipe for a delicious jaggery caramelised walnut.

Ingredients:
100g (3 ½ oz) jaggery
50g (2 oz) walnut halves (with the shell removed)

Method:
Gently heat the jaggery in a small pan, stirring often, until the jaggery has melted
Add the walnut halves to the pan and mix well so that the walnuts are well coated with the jaggery
Quickly pour the walnuts and jaggery onto baking paper and spread evenly with a knife
Let the jaggery cool
Break into bite-sized pieces
Store in an airtight container

Simple and delicious.

Ray here again, with another review of one of the delicious Curry Focus recipes.

I went for another vegetarian recipe this time, choosing the Chickpea and Spinach curry.

I had everything in the house except for the can of chickpeas, spinach and the ginger root. I can’t believe how much ginger I get through nowadays – all I can say is that it goes into nearly every curry recipe that I try out and it adds a stunning flavour. I actually had more than enough dried chickpeas, in a large jar, but chose the recipe too late to soak them for the curry.

As usual, I did all of the peeling and chopping before I started cooking.

This makes the cooking pretty straightforward.

On went the oil and in went the onion, garlic and ginger.

Then in went the potato and cumin seeds for a couple of minutes of quick stir-frying.

After that the spinach, tomatoes, chickpeas and water went into the frying pan.

The original recipe that was submitted didn’t include any water. But I found that the curry became very dry and very quickly. I decided to add the water otherwise the potato would never have cooked, and I don’t like eating raw potato. So I added the 2 cups of water pretty early on and it reduced out of the curry pretty quickly.

As usual, the basmati rice was cooking whilst the main cooking phase was underway.

I added the garam masala and chopped coriander at the end and quickly heated up a couple of paratha (that I grabbed from my local Indian supermarket) whilst the final 2 minutes of cooking was happening.

The curry was served on the basmati rice with the paratha on the side.

This was a superb curry. The diners were full of praise for the flavours. And it wasn’t too (spicy) hot for anyone.

The curry rated an impressive 8 out of 10.

And with all of those vegetables, and only a small amount of oil, it seems to be a pretty healthy, as well as delicious, curry. Why not try it yourself?

This is the December 2007 edition of the Curry Focus newsletter.

Well, hasn’t the year been a great one? Happy New Year to all our Newsletter subscribers. More articles and recipes have been added in December and we hope you enjoy them ….

Fenugreek and Your Health
Fenugreek is a spice that is widely used in curries, being an essential spice in five-spice powder and in curry powders. But as well as adding flavour to curries, fenugreek also has medicinal applications….Read more.

Balti Curry. What Is It?
The Balti curry was invented in Birmingham (in the West Midlands region of England) in the 1970s, by Pakistani and Kashmiri immigrants. Balti cafes opened in Birmingham, during this time, serving cheap food and they became very popular.…. Read more.

How To Make Curry Powder
Curry powder is a mixture of spices that have been ground into a powder. When cooking, you use curry powder instead of the individual spices.There’s an article describing curry powder here in the Curry Focus blog section and there is also a recipe for making curry powder here.…. Read more.

Blog Articles

We had a couple of comments to say that now there are so many website blogs, it is time-consuming to search through them. So we have grouped the blogs into subject areas to make it easier for you to navigate around the articles. You’ll sometimes see that some articles appear in the index more than once because they cover more than one subject. You can check out the new blog index by clicking on the Blogs menu link.

If you would like to see any new features in the website, or have suggestions as to how the existing pages can be improved, then just let us know - we promise that we’ll listen to your ideas.

Recipes

The recipes that were viewed most by our visitors in December were:-

1 Chicken Curry
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Chicken Curry (Kodi Kura)
4 Chicken Jalfrezi
5 Balti Chicken

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a recipe at http://curryfocus.co.uk/newrecipe.php and a restaurant at http://curryfocus.co.uk/add_restaurant.php.

Regards,

The Curry Focus Team