Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again

Just a couple of weeks ago, I made Chicken Xacutti and wrote a review.

At the time I made a comment that the Xacutti wasn’t as hot as I thought it was going to be, having read that a Xacutti is hotter than a vindaloo.

So I checked out the Lamb Xacutti recipe in the great range of Curry Focus recipes. And there was one significant ingredient difference – the Lamb Xacutti had 6 fresh chillies in it whereas the Chicken Xacutti had no fresh chillies.

I just had to try out the recipe.

A quick trip to the shops and I returned with the lamb and fresh coriander.

As for the chicken Xacutti, I had to dry roast lots of spices and grind into a powder. I used my trusty mortar and pestle and produced a pretty good mixture of spices with a stunning aroma. I’m getting pretty good at grinding spices, even if I say so myself.

I made up the paste with my spices and other ingredients whilst the oven was heating up.

And before too long I was cooking the garlic, onion and lamb before putting everything into a large casserole.

From there on in, it was pretty easy going with 3 cooking sessions of 20 minutes with a bit of stirring in between and I added a full cup of hot water to stop the Xacutti from becoming too dry.

The rice when the oven went off and the curry had its final 10 minutes of cooking time.

The Lamb Xacutti was served up on basmati rice to the waiting diners.

Now this is a really hot curry that lives up to the description of being hotter than a vindaloo. The curry had a great sauce and texture, just like the Chicken Xacutti. But it had a tremendous kick. Everyone enjoyed the taste and the general descriptions were “yummy�, “fire in the hole!� and “a chilli too far�. This is easily the hottest curry that I’ve eaten for a long time with a delicious sauce.

If I’d known how hot it was going to be, I would have prepared a side dish of raita to help cool it down for one of the diners who was not used to hot curries.

The curry received an average rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a spice rating of “hot�.

If you like a hot curry then this is one that you should definitely try. It takes a fair amount of preparation and is delicious. But don’t forget a raita for the people who can’t handle a really hot curry like this one.

You may have noticed that the search results page has changed recently.

The search process now checks blog articles and the glossaries as well as recipe titles and ingredients. There are a large number of blog articles on the website and it was becoming hard to find out curry related information using the old version of the search process.

And now the search results are ranked according to importance.

Let’s look at an example.

If you enter vindaloo into the search box and then click on the Search button, you’ll see a new style results page.

All of the results with a ranking of 1 are shown first, followed by the results with a ranking of 2 (1 means the word was found in the title and 2 means the word was found in the content).

Within the ranking, recipes are shown first, followed by blog articles and then followed by glossary matches.

As you would expect, clicking on the hyperlink shows you the page from the website.

This is only phase 1 of the search changes and we are working on moving from a ranking system to a relevance system, as well as expanding the search to look through more of the website.

The new search process finds a lot more information than before - we hope you find what you need.

Latest Articles
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Eating Curry Prevents Alzheimers and Dementia
Chick-Pea Curry Recipe Review
The Most Expensive Curry in the World
Chicken Xacutti Curry Recipe Review

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Hi, Ray here again.

I’m on a roll with these great Curry Focus recipes.

I’d spotted the Chicken Xacutti recipe a little while ago and decided that now was the time to try it out.

Xacutti is such a great name for a curry. There isn’t a great deal of detail information on the internet about Xacutti except that it is a hot curry that originated in Goa (where the vindaloo came from).

The one thing that I immediately saw from the recipe was that there were a lot of spices. I almost decided against making it because of all of the preparation work that was needed by dry roasting the spices and grinding them myself. But I’d invested in a mortar and pestle a few months ago and so now was the time to really use it. It took a full 25 minutes of effort but eventually the spices were roasted, ground and mixed together. I couldn’t get all of the dry chillies ground up and certainly couldn’t remove the seeds – so the seeds got left in and I left out the larger pieces of dry chillies that I couldn’t grind. I was a bit nervous about leaving the seeds in because this was where most of the chilli heat came from. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

After I dry roasted the dessicated coconut, all was pretty much plain sailing.

I cooked the onions and added the spices and immediately all of the liquid disappeared. The curry mixture was very dry but stirring all of the time made sure that the curry didn’t burn or stick to the frying pan.

The cooking returned to normal once the chicken and cup of hot water were added.

Then it was just a matter of simmering the curry and cooking the rice.

The dinner guests were sitting eagerly for their meal and were delighted when the meal arrived.

There was silence for a few minutes whilst the initial sampling took place and then a series of delighted comments erupted from all around.

This is a stunning curry with a great blend of spices and the chicken nice and tender with a lovely texture and a rich sauce. The spice level was medium, which was a surprise because all of the write-ups that I’d seen about Xacutti said that it was a curry that was hotter than vindaloo. But it wasn’t nearly as hot as a vindaloo.

The curry was very well received and scored an excellent rating of 8 out of 10.

And there is a huge curry that easily feeds 8 people (half of the curry was left over for the next night and the final portion went to work with me for a very tasty alternative to a tuna salad sandwich

If you like a tasty chicken curry then this is one for you to try. I’ll certainly be making it again soon.

If you’re in London, feeling a bit peckish and have a couple of thousand pounds in your pocket then you can pop along to the Bombay Brasserie (in Kensington) and ask for the “Samundari Khazana”.

Yes, this special dish sells for two thousand pounds!!!

Amongst the ingredients are crab, white truffle, Beluga caviar, quails’ eggs, sea snails, abalone and lobster coated in edible gold leaf. The fish and seafood are marinated in chilli and tamarind paste and the curry is served on a bed of saffron rice. And no there’s no need to quaff the curry down with beer because it is served with a glass of champagne (presumably a good one). There’s no mention of any poppadoms with the meal but you can probably get a couple if you ask.

This highly expensive meal has been created to celebrate the launch of the DVD of Slumdog Millionaire. But it’s doubtful whether any of the slum dwellers from Mumbai will be dropping by with 150,000 rupees for this extraordinarily expensive dish.

I must admit that I’m usually happy if I manage to get a tasty chicken bhuna, rice, beer and a couple of poppadoms for a tenner. So it’s highly unlikely that I’ll be visiting Kensington to try this new curry

Hi, Ray here again.

After last week’s success with the Gujarati Toor Dal, I decided to try out another of the chickpea recipes from the ever-growing list of curries on the Curry Focus website and chose the Chick-Pea Curry recipe.

The recipe looked easy enough to follow and, believe me, it really was simple.

The only thing to remember with chickpeas is that they need to soak in water for a while. As long as you read the recipe correctly, you’ll soak the chickpeas in plenty of time before the cooking really starts.

Once again, the standard ingredients of onion, ginger root, garlic and chilli were in the curry along with the most common spices of turmeric and garam masala.

I notice that the recipe called for a pinch of hing, black mustard seeds and fresh coriander leaves which leads me to think that the curry is from the Gujarati region in India.

I followed the recipe and there wasn’t a single glitch to report.

The curry and rice were ready bang on schedule and was served up to the waiting dinner guests.

And it went down a treat.

It was a delicious curry with a dahl like flavour. I think the curry is really made with the garnish of fresh coriander leaves.

The chick-pea curry was a big hit and scored an average 7.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of “Mild to Medium�.

It’s easy to see why chickpea curries are highly rated by curry lovers. Do try this recipe and enjoy.

Hot on the heels of the recent claims that eating a curry can help you lose weight (see Lose Weight Eating Curry) comes a theory that eating curry can help prevent Alzheimer’s and Dementia.

This theory was presented at the AGM of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Some UK experts are sceptical about the claim that highlights another health issue that may be treatable with curcumin, which is in turmeric (an often used ingredient in curries).

Professor Doraiswamy, who presented the theory, speculated that a curry pill might be developed from this research.

The premise that eating curries to treat Alzheimer’s and Dementia may be hard to swallow because an awful lot of curry would need to be eaten to provide the same amount of curcumin that was used in the research.

Even so, I think that I would prefer to eat great curries than to pop a pill.

You can ready the story on the BBC news website.

Hi, Ray here again.

I didn’t do a recipe review last week. My girlfriend read what I’d written in my review of the Chicken and Mushroom Pulao Curry and decided that I should make it again so that she could taste it. So I made it again and, thankfully, it was a big hit.

So this week I scanned the great Curry Focus recipes for a good dal recipe. The website has some good dal recipes and this time I chose the Gujarati Toor Dal.

I soaked the dal for two hours before getting it to simmer for about 25 minutes. I’ve been told that the dal should not be soaked for more than two hours because it tends to soften a bit. The cooking time for the first phase of the dal varies depending on how gentle the simmering is.

Then I added the tomatoes and spices before adding a little hot water to thin the dal.

Then I heated the mustard seeds and added the cumin seeds, asafoetida (hing) and curry leaves before covering the pan and going on to the spectacular part of the cooking, which was pouring a cup of dal from the main saucepan to the saucepan with the mustard seeds. With a hot hissing noise, a great cloud of steam rose from the pan before I got the lid back on. Spectacular. I heeded the warning about being careful and there was no problem. I added a second cup of dal to the smaller saucepan but no steam this time.

Then everything was poured back into the large saucepan again and then in went the tamarind paste, coriander and cumin powders, along with the raw sugar.

Finally, I gently boiled the dal for about 15 minutes until it got to the consistency that I liked.

The basmati rice was ready at about the same time as the dal and I served up the meal to the waiting diners with a garnish of chopped fresh coriander and a side plate of roti (which I had bought earlier and quickly microwaved while the dal was finishing its cooking).

And what was the verdict? Just great! This is a really delightful dal with a lovely taste. The only work that the diners had to do was pick out the curry leaves as they were eating the dal – not too hard to do.

Everyone enjoyed the dal and it received an average score of 8 out of 10 with a spice rating of medium.

If you like dal (and who doesn’t?) then you should give this easy recipe a try. You’ll have a delicious meal.