Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Naan (or Nan) is a flatbread that can be eaten with most curries. It is a leavened bread, which means that it rises using yeast.

The Moguls brought naan bread to India hundreds of years ago (the Moguls came from Persia, now called Iran, and naan is the Persian word for bread).

Naan is almost a compulsory component of an Indian meal. Naan is usually eaten with the main curry dish and can be used to scoop up the curry (instead of using knives and forks).

The main ingredients in naan are flour, water, yogurt and yeast (a substitute such as baking powder is sometimes used instead of yeast).

You make naan by first making a dough with the flour, water and yeast. Then you add any other ingredients that you want. Then you roll out the naan and, finally, you bake the naan in an oven (traditionally, tandoor ovens are used but western style ovens make naan just as well as tandoor ovens).

Making naan is a relatively lengthy process because you have wait while the yeast makes the dough rise. This isn’t hard to do because you just mix the ingredients together and then put them in a warm place for a few hours to let the yeast make the dough rise. You can batch up making naans and freeze the excess naan so you can warm them up and eat them at a later date (all you need to do is make sure that the naans are individually wrapped with clear film, or greaeproof paper, so you can easily separate the naans that you want without having to pull them apart from a pile of naans that have frozen together).

There are lots of different types of naan that you can make and the most popular ones are plain, garlic, keema (naan with minced lamb) and peshwari (naan with nuts and raisins).

There are some recipes for making naan on the Curry Focus website. There’s one for plain naan here, one for garlic naan here and one for peshwari naan here. As yet, we don’t have one for keema naan – so if you have one then we’d be delighted to add it to the website – just give us the details on this simple form and we’ll share the recipe with the world.

Why not have a naan with the next curry that you have? They really are simple to make and are delicious.

Anise is a plant that originated in the Middle East and is now widely grown in North America, Europe and Asia. Anise is also known as aniseed.

Both the seeds and leaves are used in cooking and have the taste and aroma of sweet liquorice. Indian anise has a slightly bitter taste.

In India, anise is used mainly with breads and savoury dishes - the seeds are dry roasted and added to vegetarian and fish dishes.

Anise is also used to flavor alcoholic drinks such as French pastis, Greek ouzo and Turkish raki.

Anise has some medicinal applications and is used to aid digestion as well as being used as an antiseptic.

The sweet taste of aniseed has led to it being used in breath fresheners and to flavor cough medicines and lozenges.

Dill is an herb that grows to about 2 ft in height.

The feather-like leaves grow to a length of about 6 in.

Both the seeds and leaves are used in cooking.

The fresh dill leaves are sometimes called dill weed.

In Indian cuisine, dill is often used to make masalas, curry powders and to flavor spinach and other leafy green vegetables. The dill seeds have a flavor that is similar to that of caraway seeds.

Elsewhere, dill is probably best known for being used in pickling, such as in making dill pickles and sauerkraut.

Dill is a versatile herb and appears in recipes for a wide variety of dishes, especially fish and seafood.

Like a lot of herbs, dill is sometimes used for medicinal purposes. Dill tea is used as a treatment for insomnia and dill is reputedly a remedy for stomach problems.

You can grow dill in most types of soil but it does need a sunny location to thrive.

Hi, it’s Ray here again.

If you haven’t tried mango lassi then you’re really missing out on a taste sensation. Mango lassi is a refreshing drink and the Curry Focus website has a very easy mango lassi recipe for you to try.

My local Indian store sold large cans of mango pulp. The cans were pretty large which was good because then I can make several batches to drink.

The smallest mango that I could find was about 10 ½ oz which was only slightly larger than what the recipe needed. If you stick to recipes by the letter then you can just eat the extra but I chose to use it all in the mango lassi.

The original recipe submitted by a J Campbell stated ¼ teaspoon of crushed cardamom pods. I found this to be an unusual measurement for cardamom pods so have changed the recipe to use 4 crushed cardamom pods If you find the cardamom taste to be too strong, you can reduce the number of pods down to 3 (or even 2).

The recipe is really simple. All of the ingredients go into a food processor and get processed, for 2 minutes, into a smooth drink.

I made 2 batches of the mango lassi, changing the method slightly for the second time. On the second time, I processed the cardamom pods until they had more or less disintegrated. I did this because I ended up chewing a piece of cardamom pod from the first batch – maybe the pods didn’t get close enough to the processor’s blades because of the other ingredients.

The hardest part of the recipe is waiting for 2 hours while the drink cools in the fridge.

I had a small group of friends try out the mango lassi and received very positive comments.

The drink is very smooth and tastes just great.

Overall, the mango lassi rated an excellent 8 out of 10.

Personally, I found the lassi a bit sweet. So I’m going to make a few batches with less sugar. Maybe one without any sugar will be good. After all, mango by itself is quite sweet.

Why not try out this recipe for yourself? It’s easy, quick and the result is really delicious.

Nigella is a spice that is primarily used when making Indian flat breads, such as naan, and vegetarian dishes.

The spice has a strong, oregano-like aroma.

The Nigella spice seeds come from the Nigella Sativa plant that is widely grown in India. The seeds are very small and are black in color. The seeds themselves don’t have much of an aroma but the oregano-like aroma is released when the seeds are crushed or fried. The taste is bitter and a bit like cracked pepper.

Indian flat breads often have Nigella sprinkled onto them before being cooked and Nigella is also added to vegetarian dishes during their cooking.

There are lots of different names for Nigella and the main ones are Black Cumin (Nigella is NOT a type of cumin), Kalonji and Wild Onion Seed.

Nigella is readily available in most Indian stores and supermarkets (it might be sold as Kala Jeera, Shahi Jeera or Black Cumin).

Like most spices, Nigella does have some medicinal applications, the main ones being to treat indigestion and bowel problems.

Hi, Ray here again.

Now that the holiday season is over, it’s time to return to my favorite hobby of cooking delicious curries. The Curry Focus website has a recipe for Sri Lanka Chicken Curry which looked easy enough, in spite of the long list of ingredients.

I thought that 3 lbs of chicken was just too much chicken for the meal so only bought 2 lbs of chicken.

Jointing a chicken looked a tricky for somebody with my limited food preparation abilities, so I bought a pack of chicken thighs from the supermarket.

I needed to get a couple of spices (and the curry leaves) and got them from my usual Indian store, along with a pack of frozen paratha to have as a side dish.

I peeled and prepared the onion, garlic and ginger root when preparation time arrived.

I set up some plates with most of the ingredients – one plate held the onion, garlic and ginger – a second plate had the turmeric, chilli powder, coriander, cumin, fennel, paprika and salt (an egg cup was set up beside this plate with the vinegar) – a third plate had the tomatoes, cardamom pods and lemon rind. All very organised.

When all of this was ready, I started the actual cooking.

I heated the oil and stir-fried the fennel and curry leaves.

When the curry leaves started to go brown, I added the onion, garlic and ginger and stir-fried for 5 minutes.

Then I added the ingredients from the plate with the turmeric along with the vinegar I mixed everything up really well and did another stir-fry for a minute.

Then I added the chicken and made sure the meat was well coated with the spice mixture.

Next I added the ingredients from the plate with the tomatoes and mixed them in well.

The mixture looked pretty dry so I added half a cup of boiling water to make sure that the curry didn’t stick to the pan.

After this, I reduced the heat, covered the frying pan and let the chicken cook.

After 30 minutes I started off the rice in the microwave.

After the 45 minutes of cooking the chicken, I added the coconut milk and lemon juice and cooked the curry for a further 5 minutes without the pan cover, to let the sauce reduce and thicken. During this time I quickly heated up the paratha.

When it was all ready, I served the curry on a bed of rice along with a plate of paratha for the dinner guests.

The curry was delicious. It wasn’t too spicy and had a wonderful blend of coconut and spices.

Overall, the curry scored an excellent rating of 8 out of 10.

I can recommend that you try this curry – it’s easy to cook and very easy to eat.

This is the December 2007 edition of the Curry Focus newsletter.

Well, hasn’t the year been a great one? Happy New Year to all our Newsletter subscribers. More articles and recipes have been added in December and we hope you enjoy them ….

The Health Benefits of Fenugreek
Fenugreek is a spice that is widely used in curries, being an essential spice in five-spice powder and in curry powders. But as well as adding flavour to curries, fenugreek also has medicinal applications….Read more.

What Is A Balti Curry?
The Balti curry was invented in Birmingham (in the West Midlands region of England) in the 1970s, by Pakistani and Kashmiri immigrants. Balti cafes opened in Birmingham, during this time, serving cheap food and they became very popular.…. Read more.

How To Make Your Own Curry Powder
Curry powder is a mixture of spices that have been ground into a powder. When cooking, you use curry powder instead of the individual spices.There’s an article describing curry powder here in the Curry Focus blog section and there is also a recipe for making curry powder here.…. Read more.

Blog Articles

We had a couple of comments to say that now there are so many website blogs, it is time-consuming to search through them. So we have grouped the blogs into subject areas to make it easier for you to navigate around the articles. You’ll sometimes see that some articles appear in the index more than once because they cover more than one subject. You can check out the new blog index by clicking on the Blogs menu link.

If you would like to see any new features in the website, or have suggestions as to how the existing pages can be improved, then just let us know - we promise that we’ll listen to your ideas.

Recipes

The recipes that were viewed most by our visitors in December were:-

1 Chicken Curry
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Chicken Curry (Kodi Kura)
4 Chicken Jalfrezi
5 Balti Chicken

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a recipe at http://www.curryfocus.com/newrecipe.php and a restaurant at http://www.curryfocus.com/add_restaurant.php.

Regards,

The Curry Focus Team

Jaggery and gur are similar types of unrefined sugar. The two names are often mixed up but they are both types of natural, unprocessed, sugar that you use in various types of cuisine.

Jaggery is made from cane sugar and gur is made from palm sugar (traditionally, the date palm is used but nowadays the sago and coconut palms are also used to produce gur – it’s the tree that supplies the sap, not the fruits).

Both jaggery and gur are made by simmering the sugar cane syrup (or palm sap) in large pots until the sugar hardens. The sugars are sold in blocks (that can be bought from your local Indian supply store) and the darker the color, the better.

The preparation process does not use any chemicals and the sugars retain a lot of natural mineral salts (which are lost when traditional sugar refining takes place).

Jaggery and gur are both used in Indian cooking, in both sweet and savoury dishes. The most obvious uses are to make candy or to add to dal in order to give the dish a good flavor balance.

Here’s a recipe for a delicious jaggery caramelized walnut.

Ingredients:
3 ½ oz jaggery
2 oz walnut halves (with the shell removed)

Method:
Gently heat the jaggery in a small pan, stirring often, until the jaggery has melted
Add the walnut halves to the pan and mix well so that the walnuts are well coated with the jaggery
Quickly pour the walnuts and jaggery onto baking paper and spread evenly with a knife
Let the jaggery cool
Break into bite-sized pieces
Store in an airtight container

Easy and delicious.

Hi, Ray here with another Curry Focus recipe review.

I chose the Chickpea and Spinach curry as being an easy and delicious recipe to try out.

I had everything in the house except for the can of chickpeas, spinach and the ginger root. I can’t believe how much ginger I get through nowadays – it goes into nearly every curry recipe that I try and it adds a stunning flavor. I actually had more than enough dried chickpeas for the recipe but had chosen the recipe too late to soak the chickpeas for the curry.

I did all of the peeling and chopping before starting to cook, as I usually do I find that this makes the cooking pretty straightforward and gives me time to make notes for the reviews.

I heated the oil in a large frying pan and then in went the onion, garlic and ginger.

When the onion was cooked, I added the potato and cumin seeds and stir-fried for 2 minutes.

Then the spinach, tomatoes, chickpeas and water went into the frying pan.

The original recipe that was submitted didn’t include any water. But I found that the curry became very dry and very quickly. I added the water to the recipe otherwise the potato would never have cooked (I don’t like eating raw potato). So I added the 2 cups of water pretty early on and it reduced out of the curry.

I had some basmati rice cooking whilst the main cooking phase was underway.

At the end, I added the garam masala and chopped cilantro and quickly heated up a couple of paratha (that I grabbed from my local Indian store) whilst this final 2 minutes of cooking was happening.

The curry was served on the basmati rice with the paratha served on the side.

This was a superb curry. All of the diners were full of praise for the flavors. And it wasn’t too (spicy) hot for anyone.

The curry scored an impressive rating of 8 out of 10.

And with all of those vegetables, and only a small amount of oil, it must be a pretty healthy curry, as well being very tasty. Why not try cooking it yourself?