Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

From time to time, I’ve come across a recipe that contains yeast (such as the great Curry Focus recipe for Naan Bread). And quite often, the recipe calls for fresh yeast.

But fresh yeast is hard to find nowadays. Probably because relatively few people use it and it goes off so quickly. I had a chat to the owner of my local Indian supply store and he said that it was rare for it to be in the shop and, once he received a supply, the yeast was quickly removed from the shelves. He reckoned that news of a delivery spread around like wildfire and his shop would be cleared of its stock within hours.

I tried to find fresh yeast for days so I could try the Naan Bread recipe but couldn’t find any for sale anywhere.

I saw that shops and supermarkets had jars of dry yeast so I did a bit of investigating on the internet to find out how much dry yeast was the equivalent to fresh yeast.

I soon entered a world of confusing terminology and strange numbers.

But I eventually worked it out and here are the results for you.

There are lots of different types of yeast but I’m only going to talk about dry active yeast (the type that you buy in jars) and fresh yeast (which I still haven’t even seen yet).

Active dry yeast is traditionally sold in envelopes, or packages (a package is the same as an envelope) but more lately you’ll find it in 4oz (130g) jars (plastic or glass).

Fresh yeast is sold in cakes.

So how much is in an envelope, how much is in a cake and how much dry yeast is the same as fresh yeast?

An envelope has 7g (1/4 oz) of dry active yeast.

A cake of fresh yeast can be 19g (2/3 oz) or 56g (2 oz) in weight.

If you’re lucky enough to find fresh yeast then you can cut off a measure from the cake but how do you measure dry active yeast?

Luckily, you can measure dry active yeast with a teaspoon.

Now this is where the number crunching starts.

2 1/2 teaspoons of dry active yeast weighs 7g (1/4 oz).

An envelope of dry active yeast is the same as a 19g (2/3 oz) cake of fresh yeast.

You can see a dry active yeast to fresh yeast quantity conversion table here.

One advantage that dry yeast has over fresh yeast is in how long you can keep it before it goes stale. Whereas fresh yeast goes stale after only a few days, dry active yeast can be safely kept for around 4 months (longer if the jar is kept in the fridge).

I found most of the above details on yahoo answers. If you want to read about all of the different types of yeast, you can check out this great article.

So now you know about yeast cakes or envelopes.

Hi, Ray here again.

The weekend is upon us and so it’s time to make another curry from the great range on the Curry Focus website.

I haven’t made a beef curry for a few weeks so I chose the Beef and Onion Curry.

One of the attractions was that there are so few ingredients and this definitely appeals to my minimal cooking regime.

In fact, the only spicy ingredient was dried chillis.

The curry takes over 2 hours to cook, with the beef taking over 90 minutes. I’ve found that this is quite common with beef and usually results in a very tender beef curry.

I soaked the dried chillis and then cooked half of the onions so that they were well browned.

One thing that I noticed was that a lot of oil was used in this recipe. I know that onions soak up oil but not a full 10 tablespoons.

Plenty of oil was left over once I’d taken out the cooked onions.

I had made the chilli paste whilst the onions were cooking so quickly cooked it for the required 30 seconds before adding the remaining onion to cook.

Once the onion was cooked, I added the beef, cinnamon, lemon juice, sugar, lemon grass and water and mixed everything up well. Then I covered the frying pan and the curry simmered for 90 minutes.

I started cooking the rice when the beef had been simmering for 90 minutes and removed the frying pan lid so that the liquid would reduce a little.

Some liquid went away but I thought that there would be too much left. However, the browned onion thickened up the sauce very nicely. The curry wasn’t dry but wasn’t runny either.

I removed the lemon grass and cinnamon and served up the curry on the rice.

The food was quickly eaten by the 4 diners. There was a hint of sweetness with a great taste of cameralised onion. The beef was lovely and tender.

The curry received an excellent taste rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a spice rating of mild.

This curry provoked quite an argument as to what constituted a curry simply because there was only one spicy ingredient (the dried chillis). One person was adamant that it wasn’t a curry because there was no curry powder or garam masala. Another argued that it was the taste that made a curry and this was a curry because of the taste. Another contributed that they had eaten lots of curries that didn’t have curry powder or garam masala. The argument raged for a few minutes but was abandoned when dessert of strawberries and ice cream arrived.

Whatever you think constitutes a curry, I thoroughly enjoyed this dish. If you like a mild curry that is easy to cook then why not make this Beef and Onion Curry? You won’t regret it.

Hi, Ray here again.

I thought it was time to try another chicken recipe from the Curry Focus website after last week’s Lamb Biryani. I scanned through the great recipes and decided upon the Jeera (Cumin) Chicken recipe.

As usual, it was a very easy recipe to follow which fitted my cooking criteria.

Jeera (or Jira) is Hindi for cumin so it’s not surprising that there is a lot of cumin in the recipe – three tablespoons in total.

One thing that surprised me was that there is no onion in this recipe – there can’t be many Indian curry recipes that don’t contain onion.

Anyway, there was only a little preparation to do in getting the chilli, garlic and ginger ready before cooking started.

After only a couple of minutes the kitchen was full of the lovely aroma of cumin being roasted.

Cooking was going well but my heart was in my mouth when the spices were added after the garlic and onion had been stir-fried. Why? Because all the liquid disappeared and the curry was really, really, dry. I added the chicken, mixed everything up pretty well, reduced the heat and covered the frying pan. At the same time, I boiled up some water in case I needed to add it to the curry.

But I shouldn’t have worried because juice/liquid was supplied by the chicken thighs and was retained in the frying pan because of the lid. I suppose I should have realised that the chicken would supply the liquid but, as I’ve said before, I’m not an expert cook.

Anyway, I kept checking the chicken every five minutes and started the rice when the chicken was part way cooked.

Everything came ready together and the chicken thighs were served on rice to the waiting dinner guests.

This is a stunning curry. It was very tasty with a great cumin taste on well-cooked chicken thighs. I always think that chicken cooked on the bone is better than when it is cooked off the bone and this is particularly true with chicken thighs.

There was a nice after taste in the mouth when the curry was finished but it wasn’t really spicy.

The Jeera Chicken received an excellent rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of “mild to medium�.

If you like a great tasting chicken curry then you simply must try this recipe for yourself.

Hi, Ray here again.

The weekend is here and time for another recipe test from the great range on the Curry Focus website.

What I most like about the Curry Focus recipes is that they are easy to follow. So non-cooks like me can produce a great tasting curry without too much effort.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a natural cook. I’ve spent years “grazing� and being fed.

But that’s not true anymore. I’m beginning to understand how the ingredients interact with each other and how they contribute to the finished meal.

I can make a basic curry without following a recipe but it is a very basic curry.

But I can make a great meal when I follow the Curry Focus recipes.

There’s been a lot of interest in Biryani recipes on the website so this week I tried the Lamb Biryani.

Once again, I had most of the ingredients and all I had to buy was the lamb and yogurt.

I got up fairly early on Sunday morning, put the lamb into marinate, and then sneaked back to bed for a well deserved couple of hours rest.

Cooking time arrived in the early evening. I’ve been asked how I know how long it’s going to take to make the meal, seeing that I’ve usually never cooked the dish before.

Well, that’s pretty easy to work out. I just add up the minutes in the recipe, then add 15 minutes for the initial preparation and then 10 minutes for getting things ready, such as heating up the oil or getting a curry up to simmering temperature.

So for the Biryani recipe, it’s 61 minutes cooking time plus 15 minutes preparation time plus 10 minutes – a total of 86 minutes. It takes a few minutes to serve up the meal so the Biryani probably took 90 minutes.

Plus this dish took a few hours to marinate the lamb but I can’t really include that in the cooking time, can I?

Anyway, I followed the recipe, step by step, and about 90 minutes later the lamb biryani was served up to the waiting diners.

I was a bit anxious about the biryani drying out in the last phase but I didn’t need to worry. I checked it every 10 minutes, stirred it well to stop it sticking to the casserole, and it turned out great.

The biryani had a lovely delicate flavour and was well received by the diners, with “tasty� being the most frequent comment. The biryani had a medium heat rating and scored a good 6.5 out of 10.

I must admit that I’m not a great fan of biryani but one of the guests was a fan and said that it was great. Why not give the recipe a try and see for yourself?

Reviews, new features and the latest hot gossip from the Curry world, we have some great content for you once again!

The British Curry Awards 2008 - The Results are in and why not head along to one of the award winning restaurants and sample for yourself what an award winning curry really tastes like!

A delicious spicy scrambled eggs breakfast is reviewed and guess what? It’s simple and easy to cook as well!

A mild Coriander Lamb Korma meal is well received from the diners. If you are an expert on Indian cooking perhaps you can answer the question asked within the article. We will give special mention to whoever can help in our next newsletter.

With more of a focus on Lamb this month, we look at a Keema Lamb Curry that has a kick to it, for the spice lovers amongst you, and is quick and easy to cook.

A popular meal handed down through generations of curry lovers, Curried Beef Sausages comes across a bit bland, so Ray advises how this could be spiced up a little to improve its taste.

Recently, we received an email asking us which were the mild recipes on the website from somebody who wanted to try a “safe” curry as they had a bad experience eating a curry when they were younger.

We have been reviewing recipes for a long time but the information was buried amongst the reviews making it almost impossible to find a “mild” curry without reading all of the recipe reviews.

So we were inspired to create a new web page to help you find a recipe that suits your heat/spice levels.

A quick change to the database, a little bit of data entry and writing some code has produced a review page that will help you.

You can reach the new page by clicking on the “Recipe Reviews” link in the main navigation line or from the navigation links at the foot of the website pages.

You’ll see a list of recipes, the taste rating (out of 10), the heat rating and a link to the recipe review.

If you click on the orange triangles, the details are sorted. A triangle pointing upwards sorts the details into ascending/increasing order whereas a triangle pointing downwards sorts the details into descending/decreasing order. So you can sort into recipe name, taste rating or heat rating sequence.

Some of the early reviews didn’t include ratings, which explains the “unrated” values.

Remember that everyone has different tastes and the listed ratings are the opinions of our regular staff reviewers. But we think that they are pretty accurate.

We hope that the new page is useful to you and inspires you to try different curries from the website.

The page content will grow as more recipes are reviewed.

Tell us, from the Contact Us page, if you’ve got any ideas for new pages on the website and we’ll see what we can do..

Top 5 Recipes for October

1 Chicken Biryani
2 Chicken Bhuna
3 Easy Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Jalfrezi
5 Chicken Curry

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

Hi, Ray here again.

I saw that there was a recipe for Achaari Chicken on the Curry Focus website. I don’t think that I’ve ever tried this dish so now is as good a time as any.

Although there are a lot of ingredients, it looked an easy recipe to follow.

I had to buy some onion seeds and fennel seeds - I don’t think I’ve ever used them before. Luckily my local Indian supply store has big containers of spices and you can take as much, or as little, as you want. I only bought a little of the 2 types of seeds in case I never used them again.

The usual onion, ginger and garlic ingredients were in the recipe so I prepared them, along with cutting up the chicken and the red chillis.

I prepared a couple of small plates with the spices so I could just tip them into the cooking.

And then I started the cooking.

I stir-fried the seeds, mixed in the other spices and the water and mixed the curry up well.

Then in went the chicken and I stir-fried for the 3 minutes.

I started the microwaving of the rice whilst the chicken was being stir-fried.

And then I covered the frying pan and simmered the curry for 10 minutes.

Finally, I added the chopped red chillis and the coriander before serving the curry on rice.

The Achaari Chicken Curry had a lovely texture and a great taste. All of the spices blended well and there was the delightful coriander taste, amongst others. This is a light curry, but be careful, it is spicy hot.

The curry received an excellent rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of hot.

I usually shy clear of dishes that have a lot of ingredients because they are “too complicated�. This curry has 10 spices and a total of 21 ingredients. But there are only 7 steps in the recipe so it’s really easy to make. I can recommend that you try this curry but you need to remember that it’s a hot one.