The Spice Valley Balti curry house has won the 2010 Bromsgrove Curry Award. Spice Valley Balti is located in Worcester Road, in Bromsgrove, and has been a favourite in the area for over 10 years.

And Redditch Spice has won the 2010 Redditch Curry Award. Redditch Spice is in Evesham Road, in Headless Cross.

The national curry awards, such as the British Curry Awards, the Scottish Curry Awards and Welsh Curry Awards get most award publicity but it’s great to see these local awards for local curry houses.

I don’t know about you, but I mainly eat locally and have my favourite curry houses. But it’s good to know which ones are the highly rated local curry houses because if they’re local then I can try them out. I’ll probably return to my favourite places but it’s good to try something different.

Congratulations to the Bromsgrove Advertiser and the Redditch Advertiser for organising these competitions.

If you’re in Worcestershire and near the Spice Valley Balti, or Redditch Spice, curry houses then why not drop in and find out for yourself why they won these awards?
and near the Spice Valley Balti, or Redditch Spice, curry houses then why not drop in and find out for yourself why they won these awards?

Ray here again.

We recently received a Mushroom Biryani Recipe that we published on the Curry Focus website. It was a vegetarian recipe (healthy) as well as being a biryani recipe (yummy) so I decided to try out the recipe.

Now this isn’t the normal type of biryani recipe where you fry up the onions and spices and then add the rice at the end to cook. This recipe called for the rice to be cooked first, then for the onions to be fried and then the ingredients to be all added together.

I thought that it was a strange way to make a biryani but, as I’ve often said before, I’m not a chef. I’s my job to try out a recipe to make sure that it works - with the end result, hopefully, that I get a tasty meal.

As usual, I got together and prepared all of the ingredients before starting to cook the curry - I ended up with a set of saucers that would have their contents added to the curry, one after the other. As well as being my usual way of making a curry, this seemed to be the best way to prepare for this curry because most of the ingredients would be going into the curry at about the same time.

I had all of the ingredients ready and started to cook the rice. Once I had cooked the rice for 10 minutes and removed it from the heat, I started to cook the onions (I had the oil already heated in the frying pan) - I wanted to make sure that the rice was still hot when I mixed it in with the other ingredients.

Once the onions were cooked, it was just a matter of adding the ingredients to the frying pan. I already had some boiling water ready by the time that the onions were cooked.

I served the Mushroom Biryani curry to the hungry diners and they tucked into the curry. But all was not well. There were not many mushrooms in the curry - 100g (3 1/2 oz) of mushrooms isn’t a big number of mushrooms. The main comments that I heard were “spicy” and “bland”, which sounds like a big contradiction. The spice rating was medium to hot and the taste rating was only 5 out of 10.

So what happened? Well first, I think that the curry needs more mushrooms - 100g (3 1/2 oz) of mushrooms was only 6 button mushrooms - maybe there should have been 4 times this number.

And the question as to whether any of the spices, and chillies, was even cooked arose. I can’t see how any of this was cooked seeing that they were added right at the end before being served. The chillies were definitely raw which is OK for somebody like me. But a bit of time cooking the chillies and spices would have made them disintegrate and blend, more like a traditional biryani.

Maybe I messed up with this recipe. I found it a disappointing curry and will probably keep to the more traditional biryani recipes in future (I certainly won’t stop making biryanis - they’re usually so yummy).

The main heat of a chilli is in the membrane - the white pithy substance that joins the seeds to the flesh of the chiili. Capsaican is produced in the membrane and it’s the capsaican that gives the heat. The capsaican in the membrane does get into the seeds and the flesh but the main heat is in the membrane.

If you cut open a chilli and then cut away the membrane and seeds then the chilli will not be as hot. If you cut away just the seeds then you’ll reduce the heat a little but not by much.

There’s a blog on the Curry Focus website that explains a little more about why a chilli is hot.

If you try out a new variety of chilli and are a bit wary of how hot it is, then cut away the membrane and seeds before trying - if the resultant curry isn’t too hot for you, next time you could just use the whole chilli and see how that goes.

Over time, you tend to build up a resistance to the heat from chilli. So if you’re making a curry with 2 or 3 chillies, at some stage you’re going to want to make it hotter and the easiest way is just to add another chilli.

A time to be careful of is when making a curry for a few people. You need to know how hot they like their curries. If you’re not sure then you can make a guess and then have a side dish of raita for people to “cool down” their curry (raita is easy to make - check out the easy raita recipes). There’s another good Curry Focus article on how to cool down a curry that’s too hot that is worth reading.

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Vegetable Biryani Recipe Review
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Saffron Improves Your Eyesight
Indian Army Marches on its Biryani
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Curry Ingredients Fight Prostate Cancer and Kennedys Disease

Top 5 recipes for last month

1 Chicken Biryani
2 Chicken Bhuna
3 Poppadoms
4 Chicken Curry
5 Madras Curry Paste

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One piece of research has found that eating pungent foods containing onions and garlic might reduce the risk of getting prostate cancer.

And another piece of research has found that curcumin, one of the wonder spices extensively used in curries, to be effective in the fight against Kennedy’s disease (also known as spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy).

Curcumin has featured in lots of medical research and looks to be an extremely useful compound that can battle numerous diseases – just check out the “Curcumin Kills Cancer Claim” and “Curcumin, Turmeric and Your Health. An Update” articles.

Yet more reasons for eating and enjoying curries.

You can see the full article here.

This weekend my girlfriend would not be around for the weekly curry dinner and this meant that I could try out one of the hotter dishes. I checked out the vindaloo curry recipes and decided to try out the Lamb Vindaloo.

I bought the lamb when I was out shopping and made the marinade on Sunday morning. It was at this point that I found out that I’d run out of malt vinegar so I did a quick emergency dash to the supermarket to buy another bottle. It’s a strange feeling only buying one item at a supermarket.

I returned home, finished making the marinade and soaked the lamb in the marinade for about 8 hours.

When the cooking time arrived, all I had to do was prepare the onions and then start the cooking.

All was going well until I added the hot water when I realised that there was something badly wrong with the recipe. The recipe called for adding 3 cups (750ml or 1 1/4 pints) of hot water. I did this and looked at the result. There was far too much liquid in the saucepan.

There wasn’t much that I could do at this stage so I just blundered on with the cooking.

It’s not a difficult curry to make and the curry was ready on time and I served it up to the dinner guests on a bed of basmati. I used a slotted spoon to serve the Lamb Vindaloo so that there wouldn’t be too much liquid on the plate.

The lamb was nice and tender and the curry had the typical flavour of vinegar to go with the taste of spices. The heat level was “hot”, which is to be expected with a vindaloo. The dinner guests gave a generous taste rating of 7 out of 10. It would have been so much better with a less runny sauce.

I’ve adjusted the recipe so that there is less liquid and I’ve left the saucepan lid off so that the liquid reduces during the cooking. So if you give the revised recipe a try, I’d be interested in what you think.

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.

Scientists in Australia and Italy claim that saffron improves your eyesight and may be able to prevent blindness.

We recently published an article about saffron spice but had no idea that the wonderful spice could make you see better.

There are lots of articles about this recent research and one of the better ones is from the Hindustan Times.

As we all get older and more prone to failing eyesight, maybe all of us will be like Donovan and be wild about saffron.

It’s weekend curry time again. I had some good friends coming around for dinner that I hadn’t seen for a while so I wanted to make a curry that wouldn’t keep me pinned down in the kitchen.

I looked through the great Curry Focus recipes that I had still to make and settled on one of the beef recipes that claimed it was a Quick Beef Curry. Beef takes a while to cook and this recipe was no different than most in that the final cooking time was 90 minutes. So the curry would be underway when my friends arrived and I’d hardly need to be in the kitchen at all.

I bought a lovely piece of beef when I was out shopping and I pretty much had everything already in the house.

I cut up the beef and prepared the onion and garlic before starting to cook. Before too long the final phase of simmering was underway and I got a bowl of basmati all ready in the microwave so that I just had to hit the “start” button when the time came.

My friends arrived and pretty soon a few beers had disappeared and we did a lot of talking to catch up over the last few months. My cooking during this time was limited to wandering into the kitchen every 10 or 15 minutes and stirring the curry. It was that easy.

I started the rice near the end of the coking and was soon serving up the curry.

I had warned my friends that this was an untried recipe and, with it being described as a Quick Beef Curry, not to expect too much. But the warning was totally unnecessary because the curry was great. The beef was well cooked and the sauce was thick and delicious. The curry received appreciative comments and earned a good taste score of 7/10 for flavour and a spice/heat rating of “medium”. There was a lovely afterburn on the lips even though it was not a spice hot curry.

This really is an easy curry to make and has a great taste. Yummy.

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.

It’s curry time again and I checked out the great Curry Focus recipes looking for something new to try.

I’ve been trying out a lot of meat recipes lately so I thought that I should have a look at the vegetarian recipes. I don’t know about you, but I love a good biryani and I saw that a Vegetable Biryani recipe had recently been posted on the website. There were lots of vegetables so the curry just has to be healthy.

I made a quick list of the ingredients that I needed to buy and went out to do my usually weekly shop.

It wasn’t until I got back to the house that I had a close look at the recipe. And there was something definitely wrong. The recipe had, amongst other things, 2 cups of rice, 1/2 cup of lentils, 700g (1 1/2 lbs) of vegetables and large potatoes. This is a really big curry but the recipe said that it only had from 4-6 servings. This is definitely an error. Even if you leave out the potatoes, the curry will easily feed 8-10. I adjusted the recipe by making the potatoes optional and reducing the number of potatoes down from 6 to 3.

I prepared the ingredients and cooked the curry without any great difficulty – even my amateur cooking abilities weren’t taxed. The only thing that had to be watched was that the frying pan was absolutely full when the final group of ingredients was added. Luckily I had decided to only use 3 potatoes otherwise the ingredients would have spilled over.

So when you start following this recipe, just make sure that you’ve got a big frying pan or saucepan.

I let the final phase of cooking last for 25 minutes before tasting the rice. And it was perfect. This must be a first for me because I often have trouble getting rice to cook using the absorbtion method.

I served up the Vegetable Biryani to the dinner guests and everyone had a large portion of curry. There were lots of healthy and nutritious vegetables. Everything was cooked well the curry tasted just great, with a background taste of the lentils. The curry was well liked by everyone and received an average taste rating of 8 out of 10 with a spice rating of “medium to hot” – there was a lovely aftertaste 5 minutes after finishing eating.

I really can recommend this delicious curry and it would be an ideal dish if you are cooking for a large family meal. The curry is delicious and very filling.