Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

A karahi is a the traditional Indian cooking utensil that is similar to a flat-bottomed wok.

A karahi used to be made only of cast iron but, nowadays, a karahi can be made out of stainless steel or or some other metal that is coated with non-stick material, such as tefal.

A karahi has relatively deep sides and is ideal for deep frying, or shallow frying, lots of different foods and dishes. A stew that is cooked in a karahi is sometimes called a karahi.

A karahi can be very large or small enough to hold a single serving of food. A single serving karahi can itself be used as a serving dish

To confuse matters a little, a karahi can be called a kadai and a dish cooked in a karahi can also be called a kadai.

Curry Focus has good karahi and kadai recipes. There’s a Karahi Chicken and Fenugreek main dish and a Kadai Paneer side dish.

A few good hardware stores stock kaharis but, if you’re having difficulty finding stockists, you can buy online on sites such as Amazon. Just go here to see a small selection.

Hi there, Ray here again.

My girlfriend wasn’t coming around for my weekly curry tasting and this gave me a chance to use the great Pork Vindaloo recipe that had been supplied by my flatmate’s mother. A vindaloo is a very hot curry (hotter than a madras but not as hot as a phal).

I had to buy the pork and also some ground cloves and nutmeg. I went to my favorite Indian supermarket and located the spices amongst the rows of bins full of flours, lentils and spices. I always enjoy shopping, and browsing, at this supermarket where the spice smells are almost intoxicating. I had dried chillies at home but found a huge bin of dried Kashmiri chillies and so I bought a few for the vindaloo. I also went into the freezer section and grabbed a packet of frozen aloo paratha to accompany the curry.

Making the vindaloo was surprisingly easy.

I made up the marinade, cut up the pork and then put it all into a bowl that I covered with kitchen film and put into the fridge. Then I went out for the day whilst the pork was marinating.

I started the cooking a couple of hours before the planned eating time.

I peeled, and chopped, the onions and fried them to perfection.

Then I fried the pork. I was a bit concerned that there was no oil left in the frying pan once the onions had been taken out but there was enough marinade inside the pork to make sure that the pork didn’t stick whilst frying.

After 10 minutes I turned down the heat, added the cooked onions and marinade, covered the frying pan and left the vindaloo to simmer for 90 minutes.

I checked, and stirred, the vindaloo about every 15 minutes.

After 75 minutes I started the rice cooked the aloo paratha in my second frying pan (the paratha are cooked in the frying pan without any oil – they just take about 2 minutes to cook on each side).

Everything was ready on schedule and I served up the meal to the waiting diner (my flatmate).

And the vindaloo was simply stunning. It is a spicy hot curry – be warned – and does taste of vinegar (all vindaloos taste of vinegar). The pork was very tender and had a good texture as well as heat. I thought that it was one of the best vindaloo curries that I’ve ever eaten. Even my flatmate enjoyed it and he doesn’t eat vindaloos.

We gave the vindaloo a high rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a heat rating of hot.

If you like vindaloo then I definitely recommend that you try out this recipe.

And we had a double bonus because the recipe makes enough curry for 4 people and there was only 2 of us – so we have pork vindaloo for dinner tomorrow night – a great result!!

Hi, Ray here again.

I made a great eggplant curry a few weeks ago (here is the review of the eggplant curry). At the time, I also made some naan bread.

I discovered that making the bread is easy but you do need to experiment with the baking process to make the results good. A lot of recipes are forgiving if you cook the food a little too long by a few minutes, but baking bread does not have a large margin of error.

I couldn’t buy fresh yeast anywhere, even in my local Indian store that usually has everything that I need. So I bought a jar of dried yeast as a substitute. But the label did not have any guide as to how much dried yeast equals fresh yeast. I searched the net and eventually found out that 4 teaspoons of dried yeast equals an ounce of fresh yeast. I also learnt that yeast is sold in units called envelopes (I won’t bore you with the details – do some searching on the net if you want to find out more). I’ve updated the website recipe with this important piece of information.

Now to the recipe.

I mixed up the ingredients and added the water to make the dough. The dough was a bit dry so I added a two extra teaspoons of water and it did the trick. My measures might have been slightly off and you need to be able to improvise a little in the kitchen.

I put the dough into a plastic bag and left it for 3 hours to rise. I could not work out how to oil the bag without making a big mess so I rubbed some oil over the dough and popped it into the plastic bag.

The dough rose good.

I put the oven on to heat up.

Whilst the oven was heating up, I divided up the dough and rolled out the first naan. I only rolled out one because I had been warned not to roll the dough too thin or too thick. If the naan is too thin then it will be crisp and burnt but if the naan is too thick, the inside won’t be cooked properly. I needed to experiment a little to see what worked.

The first naan was a bit thinner than the 1/4 inch that the recipe stated.

In went the first naan and I hovered around the oven wondering what was going on inside. I sneaked a peek after 5 minutes and the naan had puffed up and looked good. After 9 minutes the outside was all brown and it looked burnt in a couple of places so I took it out of the oven. It was awful. Burnt, dry and crisp, with no dough inside the crust at all. I tried a small piece and it was tasted awful. The naan went outside for the birds.

The second naan that I made was the same thickness because I wanted to see if it was the cooking time that was the problem, rather than the thickness. After 6 minutes I pulled out the naan from the oven. It was better than the first one – a better flavor – but still nothing inside the crust and too crunchy. Another naan for the birds.

I had learnt my first lesson. It was the thickness that was the problem.

The third naan was thicker, being the 1/4 inch that the recipe called for. I pulled the naan out after 6 minutes. This time the dough in the middle wasn’t cooked properly but the flavor was better. Third time lucky for the birds again.

The fourth naan was the same 1/4 inch thick and this time I baked it for 8 minutes. It was perfect, with a good browned outside, a well cooked inside and a great taste.

The fifth naan was again 1/4 inch thick and this time I cooked it for 10 minutes. It was pretty good but the crust was a bit too crunchy. It wasn’t nearly as good as the 8 minute naan.

I had learnt my second lesson. Ovens cook at different temperatures – one person’s 245C is another person’s 250C.

Now I had found the correct thickness and cooking time for naan in my oven.

Ovens do not have a uniform temperature so you will probably need to experiment a little with your first batch of naans to find what works in your house.

The finished naans are smaller than the ones made in Indian restaurants – about half the size. But I don’t think that this is a problem because I always find that I either end up leaving some naan when I dine out or, even worse for my waistline, I keep eating the naan when I’m full just because I’ve bought it. If you do want bigger naans for yourself then just use more dough – but keep to the same thickness.

If you like naan bread then I definitely urge you to try out this recipe. The dinner guests gave an impressive rating of 9.5 out of 10 for their naans (I didn’t make them eat the first attempts).

But do find out the recipe that works in your oven before inviting dinner guests to eat your delicious naan bread.

April has been a productive month for the CurryFocus.com website with a major upgrade to the recipe search feature of the site.

We’ve changed the way that the recipe search works so that now you’ve got more chance of finding a recipe that you’re looking for.

The search now looks for alternative spellings and alternative words for the main recipe names and ingredients.

For example, if you look for saag, then the search looks for saag, saagwalla, sag, sagwala, sagwalla, spinach and spinage. All of the words, except for spinage, mean the same and spinage is a commonly used bad spelling of spinach.

You still only see a recipe once in the results list, no matter how many times words are found in the recipe.

We hope that this change to the search helps you find a great recipe for you to try.

More changes to the web site are in the pipeline. We hope you like them.

And chicken recipes are top of the charts yet again, along with Naan Bread.

Top 5 Recipes for April

1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
3 Chicken Curry
4 Chicken Curry (Kodi Kura)
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.

Time for another curry from the Curry Focus recipe pages. This time I was attracted by the word “Easy” in the Easy Chicken Curry Recipe. It looked an easy dish to prepare.

Out of the freezer came a couple of chicken breasts to defrost and I picked up some tomato paste and a bottle of cream when I was in the supermarket the next day.

There was little to do after cutting up the chicken, garlic and ginger.

I stir-fried the chicken for 5 minutes until it was well sealed.

Then I stir-fried the garlic, ginger and spices. I kept everything moving around the frying pan so that it wouldn’t stick.

Then in went the tomato paste, cream, chilli powder and salt.

A gentle simmer for 5 minutes before adding the chicken and simmering for 20 minutes.

The rice went into the microwave after the chicken started simmering and I chopped up the fresh cilantro.

When it was all ready, the easy chicken curry was served on the rice with a garnish of fresh cilantro.

The dinner guests quickly devoured the curry. The overall opinion was that it was creamy and that the sauce was a bit runny. The curry had a great taste and there was a bit of a bite from the spices. Half of the dinner guests didn’t really like creamy curries but half did. Overall the curry rated 6 out of 10 and the heat rating was “medium to hot”.

The curry really lived up its title. It was a very easy curry to make.

If you like a creamy curry then why not try out the recipe? You won’t regret it.