Hi, Ray here again.
The weekend is here and so it is curry recipe testing time again. I love the way different recipes keep arriving on the Curry Focus website. There are hundreds of recipes there already and even if I manage to try out one recipe a week, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever run out of curry recipes to sample.
I see that the Curry Focus website gets lots of visitors looking for bhuna (bhoona or boona) curry recipes. I don’t know much about bhuna curries except that they are supposed to be dryish curries. So to continue my curry education, I looked through the bhuna curry recipes on the Curry Focus website and decided to try out a lamb bhuna curry recipe.
It wasn’t until I was out shopping that I realised how expensive lamb had become. I often buy chicken for curries (usually chicken breasts) and was shocked to see that lamb was over 50% more expensive than chicken breasts. But the recipe that I was going to test was for lamb so I gritted my teeth and forked out the money for lamb. I already had a tin of coconut cream at home and had all of the other ingredients as well.
The one good thing that I noticed about the lamb bhuna recipe was that it was an easy recipe to follow. There was nothing tricky or difficult about this recipe.
I made the onion paste, sealed the lamb and had the final lamb cooking stage underway before the curry tasters arrived, bearing gifts of kingfisher AND cobra beer.
It wasn’t too long before the rice was underway and then I was serving up the lamb bhuna curry on basmati rice.
The first thing that was wrong was that there was way too much juice in the bhuna – it was a lot runnier than I would have expected. The second thing that was wrong was that the lamb was a bit chewy. The version of the recipe that I followed called for the lamb to be cooked for 20-25 minutes and I cooked it for the full 25 minutes. But really, the lamb need more time and so I adjusted the cooking time to 35 minutes. Maybe if the bhuna had cooked for 35 minutes, the sauce would have thickened more.
The bhuna itself was a simple curry dish to make and had a lovely taste from using the coconut cream. All that was wrong was that the lamb was a bit chewy and the sauce was too thin. The revised recipe may get a better result but this time the bhuna curry only received a taste score of 6.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat level of mild.
