Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

My flatmate and myself had set ourselves the task of eating everything in the freezer over the last month so that we could start stocking it up again with fresh food. We reached the last pack of meat and it was chicken.

A quick browse through the chicken curry recipes on the Curry Focus website showed that I hadn’t tried the Thai Green Chicken Curry.

I already had everything except for the vegetables – I even had a small amount of fish sauce in the fridge.

I made the green paste about an hour before we were due to eat. And it was very green and pungent.

I prepared the rest of the ingredients and then started the cooking.

This was a very simple recipe to follow, like most of the Curry Focus recipes.

Soon the chicken was sealed, the bell pepper was stir-fried and the chicken was cooking again with the green paste.

Just at this point Wendy, my girlfriend, arrived to say that a couple of friends of hers were going to be delivering some furniture soon. For some reason, there was no fixed time for the furniture to be delivered (this was not really a great surprise because I had been expecting the furniture to arrive for the last two weeks) and so I stopped cooking the curry once the chicken was cooked and shut down the kitchen.

Luckily the furniture arrived not too long after this and a bit of lifting and staggering soon had the furniture safely inside the spare room.

The furniture delivery team departed just as the dinner guests, who were running late, arrived and so the cooking started again. I reduced the liquid whilst the rice was cooking in the microwave.

Soon the Thai Green Chicken Curry was served on a bed of rice and the eating began.

This was a very green curry and a bit “stodgy�. Most Thai curries I have eaten have a kind of crispness with a clear, thin, liquid. But this was a heavy liquid. Maybe I had reduced it too much? One comment that I received was that it “wasn’t appealing to the eye�. It tasted good, although it needed salt (I’ve added salt to the recipe), but it was not one of the great curries. It had a mild to medium spice rating and received an average score of 7 out of 10.

If you like Thai curry, then why not try this recipe? A couple of extra chillies would certainly spice up the meal and it would definitely be better if the liquid is not reduced so much.

A little while ago we got an email asking if we could supply a list of the vindaloo recipes on the website. We replied with a list of the recipes and pointed out that they would get this by themselves if they used the recipe search feature of the website (just key the word “vindaloo” into the field and click on the Search button).

But this set us thinking about how to improve the recipe searching on the website. We decided to give a recipe the capability of belonging to more than one category. So “Pork Vindaloo” would be in the “Pork” category but also in a “Vindaloo” category.

We have now developed this feature in the website and have started to add the extra categories to the existing recipes. It will take us a while to work our way through all of the recipes.

The first new category is called “Vegetarian Side Dishes“, which has most of the “Side Dishes” recipes in it.

More categories will follow shortly. If you want to view all categories click here.

Let us know if you have an idea for a new feature on the website.

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1 Chicken Biryani
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Hi, Ray here again.

It’s been a long time since I’ve tried one of the Curry Focus website fish recipes. I’ve heard that eating fish is good for you (even though it’s not so good for the fish). I scanned down the list of fish recipes and decided to try the Spicy Fish Cakes recipe. It has been ages and ages since I’ve had fish cakes so now is the time to renew my acquaintance with them.

I bought some middle of the road white fish and didn’t need to buy anything else except for the spring onions (scallions).

I precooked the fish at the same time as I cooked the potatoes. And then I mashed up the potatoes and left them for a while to cool down.

I rinsed and chopped up the spring onions and coriander and prepared the ginger and garlic whilst everything was cooling down.

This is a really easy recipe to follow.

All was ready half an hour before the scheduled dinner time so I relaxed with a beer.

Then it was time to mix everything together, including the first egg.

I rolled the mixture into 16 balls (the recipe said 20 but they were a pretty uniform size and 16 was more than enough).

Soon I was dipping the mixture into the beaten egg, flattening into cakes and covering with the breadcrumbs. This gets very messy – I hope you remember to wash you hands before and after making this meal.

The dinner guests arrived just as I finished making the fish cakes so I just carried on and cooked them. I had already started to preheat the oven so that I could keep the cooked cakes warm.

I simply heated up the frying pan and cooked the fish cakes four at a time. When they were cooked, I put them on some kitchen paper, started cooking the next lot of fish cakes and then dabbed the excess oil off the cooked fish cakes before putting them into the oven to keep warm.

Soon all of the fish cakes were ready and I served them up with some raita, that I had made earlier and roti, that I had bought earlier.

And the fish cakes were very good, even if I say so myself. They had a good texture, were well cooked and tasted great. They were mildly spicy (they would be hotter if the chilli seeds had been kept, instead of being discarded). Everyone praised them and they scored an excellent rating of 7.5 out of 10.

If you like fish cakes then try this recipe – you won’t be disappointed.

Out of all of the cooking oils on the supermarket shelf, which one is best for cooking curries?

As you can imagine, there’s no easy answer to this question.

But I’ll lay out a few points for you to ponder – remember that I’m not a doctor, dietician, nutrition expert or the like.

There are 4 basic types of oil – polyunsaturated, monounsaturated, saturated and trans fats – and, of these, saturated oils and trans fats are bad for you because they adversely affect your cholesterol levels.

So this leaves polyunsaturated and monounsaturated oils to choose from.

But an oil isn’t totally polyunsaturated or monounsaturated or even saturated free. Oil is a mixture of all of the 4 types.

So all you have to go on is the percentage of the types of fat in the oils.

The following table shows the 5 oils with the least amount of bad fat, along with old favourites such as butter, ghee and lard.

The first thing to see from the above table is not to use the old favourite fats, no matter how good they taste.

We’ll drop the bad fats from the table and look at the split between the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated contents of the oils. Why does this matter? It matters because monounsaturated oil is better than polyunsaturated oil.

Going from the above table, it seems you need to decide between canola oil (which has only 6% of saturated fat) and olive oil (which has 73% of monounsaturated fat).

Personally, I use canola oil because, in my opinion, there is little to choose between the two oils and it is a lot cheaper than olive oil.

There is a lot of information on the Internet about cooking oils – probably more than you can handle.

Just make sure you enjoy cooking with whatever oil you choose to use.

Hi, Ray here again.

A couple of vegetarian friends were coming around for dinner this weekend and a quick scan of the Curry Focus recipes brought the Vegetable Pulao recipe to my attention.

It is a very simple recipe and I didn’t even have to leave the house to buy any ingredients (but I did leave the house – I wasn’t going to sit in the house all weekend).

All in all, the recipe would only take about 25 minutes to cook and I had the ingredients already prepared when my friends arrived.

Then I started to cook the curry.

It really was simplicity itself.

The only thing I find tricky about rice dishes that absorb the liquid is not peeking under the lid to see how things are progressing. It seems the trick is to have the rice simmering on a really low heat. Whatever the trick, the rice was not cooked properly after the 10 minutes and I had to add another 1/2 cup of hot water and cook it for 5 more minutes.

Nevertheless, the meal was ready pretty quickly and we eagerly sat down to eat the pulao.

Now this is a very mild curry. In fact, it is so mild that you can hardly taste the spices. We all found the curry really bland and once again the subject of what constitutes a curry reared its head. I appreciate the fact that a curry does not have to be spicy hot in order to qualify to be a curry but this meal barely scraped into the curry category. In fact, in my opinion, the recipe had a nerve calling itself a curry.

The “curry� received a very poor 3.5 out of 10 with a spice rating of very mild.

This is not the first time that I’ve been really disappointed with a curry so I’m bringing in a new standard. In order for me to test a recipe, a curry should have a minimum of onions, ginger and garlic with at least 3 spices (such as chilli, cumin, coriander, cinnamon, etc.). I’ve drawn a line in the sand that I’m not going to cross.