Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

It was time for another chicken recipe from the Curry Focus website after last week’s Lamb Biryani. I scanned the great recipes Curry Focus and decided upon the Jeera (Cumin) Chicken recipe.

As usual, it was a very simple recipe to follow which matched up well with my cooking abilities.

Jeera (or Jira) is Hindi for cumin and it isn’t surprising to see that there is a lot of cumin in the recipe – three tablespoons in total.

One thing that surprised me was that there is no onion in this recipe – there aren’t too many Indian curry recipes that don’t have onion in them.

There was only a small amount of preparation work by getting the chilli, garlic and ginger ready before starting to cook.

After only a few minutes the kitchen was full of the lovely aroma of roasting cumin.

The cooking went well but I got a bit worried when the spices were added (after the garlic and onion had been stir-fried). Why? Because all traces of liquid had disappeared and the curry was very dry. There wasn’t a trace of liquid in the frying pan. I added the chicken, mixed everything up pretty well, reduced the heat and covered the frying pan. At the same time, I boiled up some water in case I needed to add it to the curry.

But I didn’t need to have worried because plenty of juice/liquid was supplied by the chicken thighs and was retained in the frying pan because of the lid. I should have realised that the chicken would supply the liquid but, as I’ve said before, I’m not an expert cook.

I kept checking the chicken every five minutes and started the rice when the chicken was part-way cooked.

Everything was ready together and the chicken thighs were served on a bed of rice to the waiting dinner guests.

This is a simply stunning curry. It was a very tasty with a great cumin taste on well-cooked chicken thighs. I always think that chicken cooked on the bone is better than when it is cooked off the bone and this is particularly true with chicken thighs.

There was a nice after taste in the mouth when the curry was finished but it wasn’t really spicy.

The Jeera Chicken Curry received an excellent rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of “mild to medium”.

If you like a great tasting chicken curry then you simply must try this recipe for yourself.

Hi, Ray here again.

The weekend is here again and it’s time to try another recipe from the great recipes on the Curry Focus website.

What I like most about the Curry Focus recipes is that they are very easy to follow. Non-cooks like me can make a great tasting curry without too much effort.

As I’ve previously said, I’m not a natural cook. I’ve spent years being fed and buying ready-made meals.

But that’s not what happens nowadays. I’ve started to know how ingredients interact with each other and how they contribute to the finished meal.

I can make a very basic curry without following a recipe but it really is a very basic curry.

But I do make a great curry when I follow the Curry Focus recipes.

There has been a lot of interest in Biryani recipes on the website so this week I decided to renew my acquaintance with this rice dish and decided to make a Lamb Biryani.

Once again, I had most of the ingredients and all I had to buy was the lamb and yogurt.

I got up early on Sunday morning, put the lamb into the yogurt to marinate, and then went back to bed for a well deserved couple of hours rest.

The cooking time arrived in the early evening. I’ve been asked how I know how long it’s going to take to make the meal, seeing that I’ve usually never cooked the dish before.

Well, it’s fairly easy to work out. I just add up the minutes in the recipe, then add 15 minutes for the initial preparation and then 10 minutes for getting things ready, such as heating up the oil or getting a curry up to simmering temperature.

So for the Biryani recipe, it’s 61 minutes cooking time plus 15 minutes preparation time plus 10 minutes – a total of 86 minutes. It takes a few minutes to serve up the meal so the Biryani probably took 90 minutes.

I know that the lamb marinated for a few hours but I can’t include that time in the cooking time, can I?

Back to the cooking. I followed the recipe, step by step, and about 90 minutes later the lamb biryani was served up to the waiting diners.

I was a bit anxious about the biryani drying out in the casserole phase but everything turned out fine. I checked the biryani 10 minutes, stirred it well to stop it sticking to the casserole, and it cooked just great.

The biryani had a lovely delicate flavor with very tender lamb and was well received by the diners, with “tasty” being the most frequent comment. The biryani had a medium heat rating and scored a good 6.5 out of 10.

I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of biryani but one of the guests was such a fan and said that it was great. Why not give the recipe a try and see for yourself?

Reviews, new features and the latest hot gossip from the Curry world, we have some great content for you once again!

A delicious spicy scrambled eggs breakfast is reviewed and guess what? It’s simple and easy to cook as well!

A mild Coriander Lamb Korma meal is well received from the diners. If you are an expert on Indian cooking perhaps you can answer the question asked within the article. We will give special mention to whoever can help in our next newsletter.

With more of a focus on Lamb this month, we look at a Keema Lamb Curry that has a kick to it, for the spice lovers amongst you, and is quick and easy to cook.

A popular meal handed down through generations of curry lovers, Curried Beef Sausages comes across a bit bland, so Ray advises how this could be spiced up a little to improve its taste.

Recently, we received an email asking us which were the mild recipes on the website from somebody who wanted to try a “safe” curry as they had a bad experience eating a curry when they were younger.

We have been reviewing recipes for a long time but the information was buried amongst the reviews making it almost impossible to find a “mild” curry without reading all of the recipe reviews.

So we were inspired to create a new web page to help you find a recipe that suits your heat/spice levels.

A quick change to the database, a little bit of data entry and writing some code has produced a review page that will help you.

You can reach the new page by clicking on the “Recipe Reviews” link in the main navigation line or from the navigation links at the foot of the website pages.

You’ll see a list of recipes, the taste rating (out of 10), the heat rating and a link to the recipe review.

If you click on the orange triangles, the details are sorted. A triangle pointing upwards sorts the details into ascending/increasing order whereas a triangle pointing downwards sorts the details into descending/decreasing order. So you can sort into recipe name, taste rating or heat rating sequence.

Some of the early reviews didn’t include ratings, which explains the “unrated” values.

Remember that everyone has different tastes and the listed ratings are the opinions of our regular staff reviewers. But we think that they are pretty accurate.

We hope that the new page is useful to you and inspires you to try different curries from the website.

The page content will grow as more recipes are reviewed.

Tell us, from the Contact Us page, if you’ve got any ideas for new pages on the website and we’ll see what we can do..

Top 5 Recipes for October

Chicken rules the roost yet again.

1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
3 Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Curry (Kodi Kura)
5 Chicken Tikka Masala

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

Hi, Ray here again.

There is a recipe for Achaari Chicken on the Curry Focus website. I don’t think that I’ve ever tried (or heard of) this dish so now is a good time to check it out.

It looked and easy recipe to follow even though there are a lot of ingredients.

I needed to buy onion seeds and fennel seeds - I don’t think I’ve ever used them in cooking before now. Luckily my local Indian supply store has large containers of spices where you can take as much, or as little, as you need. So I only bought a little of the 2 types of seeds just in case I never used them again. Buying loose spices like this is very economical when compared to buying glass containers of spices from a supermarket.

As usual, the ingredients needed onion, ginger and garlic. I prepared these ingredients, along with cutting up the chicken and the red chillis.

I then prepared a couple of small plates with the spices so I could just tip them into the cooking.

Then I started the cooking.

I stir-fried the seeds, added in the other spices with the water and mixed the curry up well.

After that, in went the chicken which I stir-fried for the 3 minutes.

I started cooking the rice in the microwave whilst the chicken was being stir-fried.

Nearly there now.

I covered the frying pan and simmered the curry for 10 minutes.

Finally, I added the chopped red chillis and the cilantro before serving the curry on rice.

The Achaari Chicken Curry had a lovely texture and a great taste. All of the spices blended well and there was the delightful cilantro taste, amongst others. This is a light curry, but be careful, it is spicy hot.

The curry received an excellent score of 7.5 out of 10 with a spice heat rating of hot.

I usually keep clear of making dishes that have a lot of ingredients because they are “too complicated”. This curry has 10 spices and a total of 21 ingredients. But there are only 7 cooking steps in the recipe so it’s really easy to make. If you like a chicken curry then I can recommend that you try this curry, but you need to remember that it’s a hot curry.

Hi, Ray here again.

I love scrambled eggs, with it being such an easy and filling breakfast to make, and it’s a frequent Sunday breakfast in my house. Usually I just add cheese and have the eggs on toast with bacon and tomato.

I noticed a spicy scrambled eggs recipe on the Curry Focus website earlier this year but just hadn’t got around to trying it out.

So this morning I printed the recipe and checked it out.

I already had the ingredients and all I had to do was go into the kitchen and start.

If you look at the recipe, you’ll see how few ingredients you need and how easy it is to make the meal.

After only a few minutes, I had prepared the eggs, onion, chillies, tomato and cilantro and started the cooking.

It’s really simple stir-fry recipe – the onions and chillies to start, followed by the tomato and, finally, the eggs and cilantro.

I started the toast just after the tomato went into the saucepan.

In a little less than 10 minutes, the scrambled eggs were served up on the toast and being eaten by my flatmate and myself.

And they were delicious.

This is a really filling breakfast with a great spice taste.

The spicy scrambled eggs received a good rating of 6.5 out of 10 and a spice/heat rating of medium hot.

If you need a spicy, simple, breakfast then I definitely recommend that you check out this great recipe.

Hi, Ray here again.

I continued my recipe reviews with another Curry Focus lamb curry, after last week’s wonderful Keema Lamb Curry. I love the flavor that cilantro gives to a curry and decided to try the recipe for Cilantro Lamb Korma.

The recipe is for a large curry and serves from 6 to 8 people. I had lots of space in the freezer so the leftover curry can be stored away for later.

Yet again, this is a very simple recipe.

I prepared the first set of ingredients, mixed them up in my largest saucepan, and it wasn’t too long before the curry was nicely simmering.

I think that I may have put too much water into the curry because there was a lot of juice in the curry when it was only half way through the simmering phase. So I took off the lid completely to let more of the liquid to evaporate. The curry thickened up quite a lot because of this so I had made a good call.

I started to microwave the rice with about 15 minutes of simmer time still to go.

I added the milk and ground almonds into the curry when the simmering was finished. After mixing well, I mixed in the cream and cilantro.

The korma was served to the diners on the rice.

The curry was well liked. There was a lovely creamy taste with a great flavor of cilantro and almonds.

I was a bit worried about the large amount of onion in the curry. But there wasn’t a problem because there was not an overpowering taste of onions.

One thing that did confuse me was the addition of ½ cup of vegetable oil. Why was the vegetable oil needed? I can only assume it has something to do with the combination of flavours that are in the cooked curry. If you know why the oil was added can you email me and let me know?

The Cilantro Lamb Korma curry received a score of 7.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of mild.

This is a great curry that is very easy to make, with delicate flavours, and won’t destroy your tastebuds.

Another month passes by and September was another busy month at Curry Focus headquarters with more and more delicious recipes, reviews and information added to the site.

We add fish to the menu this month with a review of the tasty Fish Cakes Recipe.

Diwali, its that time of year again so read more about the Festival of Lights.

If you like hot spicy curries you need to read Ray’s Review on our Beef Madras Curry Recipe.

Here’s an excellent chicken curry that we recommend you try! Remember to buy the right chicken though as Ray finds out the hard way when cooking this dish. Read the Jaipur Chicken Curry Recipe Review

Ray tries a vegetarian dish and finds it edible, but a little disappointing, read the Gujarati Potato Curry Recipe Review.

One of our site visitors had a great idea, which was to provide a “hotness” or “spice” rating to the recipes on our site. We think that’s a fantastic idea and are already beginning to work on the addition so keep an eye out for this exciting new feature in the near future. If you have any ideas of features or things you would like to see on the site, please contact us and tell us about it!

The 2008 British Curry Awards will be held in London on October 19th. We’ll keep you posted on who won the awards around the UK so you can see who makes award winning curries - maybe you could go and try a meal at one of the restaurants to see what great food is all about.

As mentioned earlier, it’s Diwali at the end of October. Try and get along to a celebration near you for good food and entertainment.

Chicken curries rule the roost yet again!!!

Top 5 Recipes for September

Chicken rules the roost yet again.

1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
3 Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Tikka Masala
5 Balti Chicken

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

Hi, Ray here again.

I’ve been checking out some really impressive curries from the Curry Focus website recently.

After last week’s review of the Curried Beef Sausage recipe, I again decided to test a recipe for a simple dish. I was also hoping for results that were a lot better than I got with the curried sausages.

I went for the Keema Lamb Curry. I really don’t know many people who don’t like ground meat and peas and a spicy version should be great.

I immediately thought that it would be a bit of a mission to find ground lamb but my local supermarket surprised me by having a lot of it. Maybe the ground mince is there all the time and I haven’t noticed before.

This is really a very simple recipe.

As I’ve often done before, I prepared the onion, ginger, garlic and chillis (it really is amazing how often a curry recipe starts with preparing these ingredients).

Then I started the cooking.

First, I stir-fried the prepared ingredients in the oil.

Then I added the curry powder and the whole mixture became incredibly dry.

Next, I added the lamb and stir-fried for 3 minutes, making sure that the mixture was always moving so it wouldn’t stick in the pan.

Then I added the peas, salt and lemon juice.

All OK so far except that now I had to simmer the curry for 15 minutes. But there was next to no liquid in the pan. So I added a cup of boiling water and simmered the curry at the same time as I cooked the rice in the microwave.

The curry was ready to eat in less than 30 minutes from starting to cook it. It was a very easy recipe to follow and a very quick meal to prepare.

I served up the Keema Lamb curry on the rice and the waiting diners quickly ate up the meal.

The diner’s comments ranged from “very good” to “tasty”. The curry had a great spice taste and was highly rated by the diners.

The curry received an excellent rating of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of medium to hot.

As said previously, I needed to add some hot water so that the curry would simmer without burning the curry. Maybe I had the heat turned up too high. After the 15 minutes of simmering, all of the water had been absorbed into the curry. I changed the recipe so that it has the hot water as an extra ingredient – I’m sure that the submitter, J Baynes, won’t mind this small change to the recipe.

Hi, Ray here again.

I was checking out the recipes on the Curry Focus website and saw the was one for Curried Beef Sausages.

I eat lots of sausages and decided to make the very easy recipe.

I boiled the sausages in water, let them cool and then removed the skins from them. This really was about the most complicated part of the recipe.

I made the beef stock and prepared the onions and apple and then started to do the cooking.

The recipe was easy to follow and I didn’t have any problems.

The curried sausages were served on rice to the waiting diners.

And the verdict was that the meal was bland. There was not much spice/heat in the meal. Everything was cooked correctly but it was just too bland. In even looked bland and some colour would have helped.

And the portions were big. There were 3 sausages each and that is a lot. I think the curry would easily have served 6 people, rather than 4, as written in the recipe (I have changed the recipe to say that it serves 4-6).

Overall, the meal got a very average rating of 5.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of mild.

This was a very disappointing meal, especially since I like sausages so much.

If you do try the recipe, then perhaps you could spice it up a bit with a couple of teaspoons of garam masala and a teaspoon of cumin – the spices could be stir-fried in the butter for a minute before adding the onions, apple and curry powder. And also maybe some grated fresh ginger root. And it wouldn’t do any harm to add a bell pepper (red or green) and garnish with cilantro to add a bit of colour.

Hi, Ray here again.

Once again the weekend arrives and it is time to chose a dish from one of the great Curry Focus recipes.

I checked my previous reviews and was surprised to learn that I haven’t tried a fish recipe since I started reviewing the Curry Focus website recipes. I saw the recipe for Fish Cakes. It has been a long, long, time since I’ve eaten fish cakes. And so it was the fish cakes recipe that I chose to make.

Most of the ingredients for the meal were already in the house and all I had to buy was the fish and spring onions (scallions).

It’s really such an easy recipe that it’s difficult to write much about it.

I cooked the fish and then let it cool while I boiled the potatoes and made the mash.

Then I crumbled up the cooled fish and mixed in all of the remaining ingredients.

I beat the second egg to use as a binder for the breadcrumbs.

Then I made the fish cakes. They were a bit small and quite crumbly and I had to handle them carefully to stop them from falling apart. The fish cakes were so small that I decided to make them bigger and I finished up with 12 fish cakes.

I heated up the frying oil and the oven and fried the fish cakes 4 at a time and kept them warm in the oven.

I served up the fish cakes with vegetables to the dinner group.

The fish cakes were quickly eaten by the diners and “tasty” was the main word that was used to describe them. They had a medium spice/heat flavour and received a good score of 7 out of 10.

One thing that could have made them taste even better was a sauce. Perhaps a tamarind sauce would have worked well with the cakes.

Overall, the fish cakes tasted great and I won’t leave it so long before I make them again.