Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

The Indian Defence Food Research Laboratory has developed chicken and mutton biryanis for personnel who need to eat at altitude.

The army put in a request for tasty, non-vegetarian, meals to be developed for consumption in high places, where temperatures and oxygen levels can be low.

The Laboratory responded by developing and packaging the biryanis so that they would stay fresh, nutritious and yummy, for up to a year.

At Curry Focus, we think that this is a great idea. We’re sure that the biryani meals are appreciated high up in the mountains, where it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make a fresh biryani, such as the Biryani Recipes on the Curry Focus website.

You can read the full story at the Food and Beverage News website.

I’ve been promising to buy myself a spice grinder for some time now.

I sometimes come across a recipe to try that needs the spices to be roasted and then ground before being added during the cooking of the curry.

Using a mortar and pestle is time consuming and is not always successful. For instance, no matter how long I crush dried chillies and cinnamon stick, not all of it gets crushed into powder and I end up with pieces of chilli and cinnamon that I usually just add to the curry so as not to waste the ingredient.

I don’t really mind the time too much because I can grind away at the spices whilst watching TV or a DVD. But it often takes over half an hour to successfully hand grind the spices.

So I went out on the hunt for a spice grinder, which was not as easy to find as you’d think.

I went to the appliances section of 5 different department stores and only 2 stores stocked a spice grinder at all. And both stocked the same model .The price at one store was 30% cheaper than the other. So you can guess where I bought my grinder - I love a bargain.

I took my new toy home, gave it an initial wash and popped it into a cupboard.

Then I searched out one of the Curry Focus recipes that needed the spices to be freshly ground, decided to make the Lamb Xacutti recipe, and went out to buy the ingredients.

Pretty soon I was happily roasting the spices and savouring the great aromas that wafted around the kitchen before adding the roasted spices to the spice grinder. I broke the cinnamon stick into a couple of pieces before turning on the grinder.

And, within a minute, the spices were thoroughly ground. I removed the grinder lid and sniffed the contents. Simply divine!!! The aroma from the freshly ground spices was simply stunning.

I tipped out the ground spices into a small bowl for later addition to the curry, quickly wiped clean the spice grinder with a damp cloth and then put it back into the cupboard. I like easy maintenance.

I can’t believe that I waited for so long before buying such a useful kitchen appliance and I’m sure that it’s going to get lots of use in the coming months.

There was a big increase in visitors to the Curry Focus website in 2009 over the 2008 number. Over this period, the number of visitors rose by 121%. This is a really impressive increase and shows that we’re fulfilling a need to know about curry recipes and their ingredients.

Features of the recipes on our website is that they are easy to follow and that the Curry Focus team tests a recipe each week and does a recipe review.

In 2009, 77% of visitors were from the UK and 91% of visitors were from the main English speaking countries (UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland).

The top 10 visitor countries, in visitor number order, were UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, India and Germany. This is the same country sequence as in 2008.

Most UK visitors came from London (which had just over 35% of visitors), followed by Manchester (5% of visitors) and then Birmingham (4% of visitors).

Most US visitors came from California (Los Angeles), New York (New York City) and Texas (Houston).

We received visitors from a total of 166 different countries and territories with 21 new sources of visitors. These new visitor locations include Antigua and Barbuda, Cape Verde, Ivory Cost, Saint Helena, Ecuador, Guadeloupe, Mali, Swaziland, Togo, Tonga and Uruguay.

The Curry Focus website now has more recipes, recipe reviews and blog articles than ever and this will steadily grow as you tell us about your favourite recipes and we hear more about what is happening out there in the world of curries. If you’ve got a favourite recipe that you want to share with us then give us the details on the Add Recipe page and we’ll share it with the curry-loving world.

We have a long list of things that we want to add and change on the Curry Focus website and you’ll be seeing these changes just as soon as we can do them. If you’ve got any suggestions or ideas for the website then let us know from the Contact Us page and we’ll see if we can satisfy your request. After all, the website is for you as well as us.

We publish a FREE monthly email newsletter that lets you know about the latest happenings on the website. If you want to receive this email, then just go to the Curry Focus homepage and input your email address in the “Recipe Newsletter” registration box in the top right of the page.

In the meantime, we hope you keep coming to, and enjoying, this great FREE website.

Tell your friends about us. Spread the word.

We received our first goat curry recipe yesterday. I’ve never eaten goat meat before and so I decided to search on the Internet to find out more.

Goat meat can be sold under the names of goat (obviously), kid (a goat under one year old), cabrito (a goat under 3 months old) and chevon (goat meat). Goat is a red meat that is low in cholesterol and has less fat than chicken (for equivalent weights).

A lot of goat meat is widely eaten around the world with goat curries being popular in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sir Lanka and Jamaica. One website that I found claims that over 60% of red meat eaten in the world is goat meat.

And from what I can gather, goat meat is tenderer than lamb and has a milder flavour than lamb.

One problem some people may have is being able to buy goat meat. I can’t recall seeing goat meat in butchers’ shops or in the meat section of supermarkets. There are a few places in the UK that sell goat meat online but some of them are small operations and will only sell a minimum of half a carcass. You probably can find goat meat for sale in butchers near to places that sell curry spices. I’m sure that you’ll find a supply if you look. I see that some goat curry recipes say that you can substitute lamb for goat if you can’t find a supplier.

At present, we only have the Sri Lanka Goat Curry recipe on the Curry Focus website. If you’ve got a recipe that you’d like to share with us, you can give us the details on the Add Recipe page.

The goat curry recipe looks really easy and I’ll be hunting down a goat meat supply soon so I can try it out.

Once again Christmas is upon us and everyone seems to be stocking up with enough food to keep them going for weeks.

And one of the most popular treats is the traditional Christmas ham.

A ham is pretty big and there is always leftover ham to eat over the holidays.

One tasty way to use the ham is to have a leftover ham curry. There’s a Leftover Ham and Rice Curry recipe amongst the great Curry Focus recipes that you can try out. If you’ve got a personal favourite ham curry, why not give us the details on the Add Recipe page and we’ll publish it for everyone to see?

So once you’re fed up with ham sandwiches, why not try a ham curry? A curry is a very tasty meal.

It may be a surprise to some to read that curried sausages, or currywurst, is one of the most popular snacks in Berlin.

Germany is renowned for its love of sausages and adding a curry sauce, to make currywurst, seems a natural thing to do.

Berlin is so much in love with the snack that they eat over 70 million portions in a year.

The snack was invented in 1949 by a German housewife, called Herta Charlotte Heuwer, and a plaque is at the corner of Kant and Kaiser Friedrich Streets (in Berlin) where Herta first made the popular snack.

Nowadays there are over 200 currywurst stands and shops in Berlin where you can buy this hot and spicy sausage. Like all good fast foods, it is cheap, quick to make and tasty.

We don’t have a recipe for currywurst on the website yet. If you have a recipe then let us know the details using the Add Recipe page and we’ll publish it for everyone to enjoy.

So next time you visit Berlin, or Germany, be sure to look out for currywurst and give it a try to see what all the fuss is about.

Saffron is a spice that is made from the stigmas and styles of the saffron crocus (crocus sativus). The stigma is part of the flower that receives pollen and the style attaches the stigma to the flower.

The main saffron producing countries are Spain, Iran, India, Greece and Morocco.

The stigmas and styles of the crocus sativus are picked by hand. A single crocus has three stigmas that together weigh about 0.5 gram (less than 0.02 oz). After picking, saffron is quickly dried and stored in airtight containers (to stop the saffron from losing its pungency and flavour). The dried stigmas are called threads.

It takes something between 110,000 and 165,000 flowers to produce a kilogram (2.2 lb) of dried saffron (that’s about the size of two football fields full of flowers).

It takes about 40 hours of labour to hand pick the saffron so it’s easy to understand why saffron is the most expensive spice. A kilogram of dried saffron can cost over US$10,000!!! You can buy small containers of saffron at most good supermarkets.

With saffron costing so much, it’s hardly surprising that saffron powder is sometimes mixed with other substances (such as turmeric powder) and passed off as being pure saffron by unscrupulous people. If you always buy saffron threads, instead of saffron powder, then you know that this is not happening.

Saffron is a bitter spice and only a little is needed in cooking. It only needs about 10 threads to be added to rice to give it the typical saffron yellow/orange colour and taste (the saffron threads are lightly crushed between your fingers and then soaked in a small amount of hot water for about 10-15 minutes before being added to the cooking rice). There’s an easy Saffron Rice recipe on the Curry Focus website.

A “pinch of saffron” is 0.1 gram (0.004 oz) that is a measure far too small to measure in the average kitchen. When you buy saffron threads, check the net weight on the container, count the number of threads in the container and then do the simple arithmetic to find out how many threads are in a pinch. My reckoning is that there are about 10 threads in a pinch.

As well as being used in cooking, saffron is also used in medicines (saffron has cancer suppressing and anti oxidant properties), perfumes and clothes dyes (Buddhist robes in India are saffron dyed).

Christmas time is fast approaching and turkey is the traditional roast for Christmas in the UK, with about 10 million turkeys eaten over the holiday period.

The USA is just celebrating Thanksgiving (on November 26th in 2009) and turkey is a very popular for Thanksgiving with about 48 million birds eaten over the Thanksgiving holiday period.

In the UK, around 87% of people will eat turkey this year and, as well as being eaten in lunches and dinners, an astonishing 100 million turkey sandwiches will be consumed between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day in the UK

The average weight of a turkey is 5.5 kilos (12 pounds) – now that’s pretty big for a bird.

But eating turkey sandwiches is not the only way you can use up all of this meat.

You can make a tasty curry with leftover turkey and it’s really quick to cook. Remember that the turkey has already been thoroughly cooked when it is roasted so all you really need to do with a curry is heat up the meat with the spices and other ingredients.

There is a yummy leftover turkey curry recipe on the Curry Focus website that you can try. If you’ve got the whole family over then just double the ingredients if you’ve got 8 mouths to feed.

If you’re a typical UK family, you know that you’re going to be left with turkey after Christmas Day. So why not plan ahead a little and make sure you have the spices, along with the onions, broth and sour cream? You’re sure to enjoy the results and it will save you from having to eat another of those dry turkey sandwiches again.

The first Midlands Curry Awards were held at the St John’s Hotel in Solihull on November 1st.

There are over 3,000 curry restaurants in the Midlands and the Midlands Curry Awards recognise the culinary expertise in the region.

Nominations for the awards were made between 1st July, 2009 and 7th September, 2009. Restaurants opened for less than 2 years qualified for the Newcomer of the Year and restaurants opened for 2 years or more were judged on a regional basis with ten separate regions in the Midlands area.

There were ten regional winners announced on 1st November along with a Newcomer of the Year award and five awards to outstanding individuals.

The 16 award winners are as follows.

Birmingham & Solihull - Asha’s
Black Country & Walsall - Balti Bazaar
Coventry & Warwickshire - Aladdin
Derbyshire - Red Chilli
Leicestershire - T&K Balti
Nottinghamshire - Chand
Northamptonshire - Tamarind
Shropshire - Cafe Monsoon
Staffordshire - Garam Masala
Worcestershire - Maheen’s Signature

Chef of the Year - Babul Miah (Dilshad Restaurant in Cannock, Staffordshire)
Newcomer of the Year - Naya (Henley In Arden)
Lifetime Achievement - Ajay Bhattia (Itihaas Restaurant, Birmingham)
Young Businessperson of the Year - Naz Islam (Saffron Restaurant in Northamptonshire)
Businessperson of the Year - Rais Miah (Balti Bazaar, Stourbridge)
Businesswoman of the Year - Lynne Brooks (Deolali Restaurant of Moseley, Birmingham)

If you are close by to one of the wining restaurants, why not go and enjoy a meal there to see just how good a curry can taste?

The British Curry Awards 2009 ceremony was held at Battersea Park’s Evolution on Tuesday 3rd November 2009 in front of more than 1,600 guests.

The ceremony host was hosted Sir Trevor McDonald with the main guest being David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party.

This was the 5th annual award ceremony and there were a record number of nominations received for the awards.

The restaurants were judged on food quality, service and ambience. The judges said that the standards were higher than before and the nine regional winners were:

Scotland / Northern Ireland: Cinnamon, Aberdeen.

North East: Aagrah, Garforth, Leeds.

North West: Indian Ocean, Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire.

Midlands: Lasan, Birmingham.

Wales: Bokhara Brasserie, Bridgend.

South East: Jaipur, Milton Keynes.

South West: Rajpoot, Bath.

London Central & City: Bombay Brasserie, London SW7.

London Suburbs: Brilliant Restaurant, Southall.

In addition to the regional awards for best restaurants, there were new awards this year.

The “Newcomer of the Year Award”, for restaurants that have been open for less than three years, was given to London’s Cinnamon Kitchen & Anise restaurant.

The “Best Casual Dining Award” went to London’s Tayyabs restaurant.

The “Personality of the Year Award” went to Anjum Anand and a “Recognition for Catering Award” went to Sanjay Anand of Madhu’s.