Hi, Ray here again.
The weekend has rolled around again so it’s yummy curry time. This time the curry recipe selection method would be slightly different than usual. There was half a can of coconut milk in the fridge and a pack of chicken thighs in the freezer. Instead of searching down the list of curries, I used the recipe search feature on the Curry Focus website. I typed the words “coconut milk chicken thighs” into the search box and clicked on the “Search” button. A page of results was returned with the best matches at the top. The search found 4 recipes and I checked them out by clicking on the result hyperlinks. I found that I had already tried 3 of the recipes before and so this weekend it would be the Kerala Coconut Chicken Curry recipe that I would test.
I took the chicken thighs out of the freezer so that they would have plenty of time to defrost before the Sunday curry cooking. I didn’t need to buy anything for the curry when I was out shopping except for a couple of onions. My spice stocks are dwindling but I don’t replace anything until all I have left is a teaspoon or two – it’s pointless buying huge amounts of spices that are not used often because all that happens is the spices go stale, which is just a waste. My jar of ground turmeric is almost empty so I need to remember to refresh the turmeric next weekend otherwise the range of curries that I can make will be pretty small seeing that turmeric is one of the staple curry ingredients.
The one thing that I noticed about this recipe is that it is amazingly easy to follow. There are no complicated steps with minimal preparation needed – apart from cutting up the chicken, the preparation mainly consisted of the usual peeling and chopping/crushing of the onion, ginger and garlic – oh, and cutting up the fresh chillies.
I saw that it would only take about 30 minutes to cook the curry, which was no time at all really.
I started the cooking half an hour before the scheduled eating time and all went according to plan (not that there really was a plan – I just followed the steps in the recipe).
The dinner guests arrived just as I was starting to cook the rice, which is about their normal time for arriving. As usual, they brought along some kingfisher beers with them and I helped them out with their heavy load.
As I said, the cooking was pretty easy and I was soon serving up the Kerala Coconut Chicken curry on basmati rice.
The first thing that must be said was that there was a lot of thin juice, rather than a nice thick sauce.
There was so much of this juice that I kept it back and had it as a soup the next day. So there were no points for the sauce. The chicken was well cooked and the curry had a “clean” and light taste. Unsurprisingly, the curry had a lovely coconut taste. The heat level was “Very Hot”. Overall, the group was not very taken with the curry – it had no nice sauce, the only real taste was the coconut and the heat – so it received a taste score of 6.5 out of 10.
All in all, a bit of a disappointing curry. If you know how to improve the recipe then let me know.
