Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Hi, Ray here again.

Recently I made Chicken Xacutti curry and wrote a review for the website.

I had read that a Xacutti is hotter than a vindaloo but the Chicken Xacutti was nowhere near as hot as a vindaloo.

The Chicken Xacutti was delicious and so I looked at the Lamb Xacutti recipe of the Curry Focus website. I could see one major ingredient in the Lamb Xacutti that was not in the Chicken Xacutti – 6 fresh chillies. The Lamb Xacutti curry was definitely going to be hotter than the Chicken Xacutti and so I decided to try it out this weekend.

I bought some lean lamb and fresh cilantro from my local stores, which was all I needed because I had everything else already in the house.

The lamb recipe starts off much the same as the chicken one in that I had to dry roast lots of spices and then grind them into a powder – I used my recently acquired mortar and pestle and soon had a good blend of spices with a great aroma.

I mixed the spices with the other ingredients and made the paste in a food processor, having to add an extra half a cup of water to make the paste.

I cooked the garlic, onion and lamb in the resultant paste whilst the oven was heating.

Very shortly I was putting the lamb and the sauce into a large casserole and putting it into the oven.

Everything was very simple from here with the Xacutti cooking in the casserole with breaks for stirring and adding the cilantro, mint leaves and garam masala.

After over an hour of cooking, the Lamb Xacutti was served on a bed of basmati to the hungry diners.

I have to say straight away that this curry lived up to its billing of being hotter than a vindaloo. The meat was tender, the sauce was delicious and the spice heat was hot. There was a great afterburn I the mouth following each mouthful – this is a curry with attitude.

The Xacutti went down well with the diners who had been warned beforehand that it could be hot. Comments ranged from “tasty” and “yummy” to “a chilli too far”. This is definitely the hottest curry that I’ve eaten for a while and it was delicious.

I should have made a raita to help cool down the curry and next time I will.

The curry got a rating of 8.5 out of 10 with a spice/heat level of “hot”.

If you like hot curries then you must try this Xacutti. It a bit more preparation than a regular curry but the extra effort is definitely worth it.

You may have noticed that the search results page has changed recently.

The search process now checks blog articles and the glossaries as well as recipe titles and ingredients. There are a large number of blog articles on the website and it was becoming hard to find out curry related information using the old version of the search process.

And now the search results are ranked according to importance.

Let’s look at an example.

If you enter vindaloo into the search box and then click on the Search button, you’ll see a new style results page.

All of the results with a ranking of 1 are shown first, followed by the results with a ranking of 2 (1 means the word was found in the title and 2 means the word was found in the content).

Within the ranking, recipes are shown first, followed by blog articles and then followed by glossary matches.

As you would expect, clicking on the hyperlink shows you the page from the website.

This is only phase 1 of the search changes and we are working on moving from a ranking system to a relevance system, as well as expanding the search to look through more of the website.

The new search process finds a lot more information than before - we hope you find what you need.

Latest Articles

Review of the Gujarati Toor Dal Recipe
Prevent Alzheimers and Dementia by Eating Curry
Review of the Chick-Pea Curry Recipe
The Worlds Most Expensive Curry
Review of the Chicken Xacutti Curry Recipe

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1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
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Hi, Ray here again.

I’ve had a lot of recent success with the great range of Curry Focus recipes.

I’d seen the recipe for Chicken Xacutti a few months ago and thought that now was as good a time as any to make the dish for myself..

I think that Xacutti is a terrific name for a curry. There isn’t a lot of information about Xacutti on the internet except that it is a hot curry that was originally created in Goa (where the very hot vindaloo came from).

One thing that was obvious from the recipe was that there were lots of different spices in a Xacutti – far more than in a regular curry. And the recipe called for dry roasting and grinding the spices yourself (instead of using ready-ground spices). This was a lot of work and took me a full 25 minutes. I had problems with grinding the dry chillies and ended up discarding some pieces of skin because I couldn’t grind them fully.

The recipe called for the chilli seeds to be discarded but I couldn’t easily do this so left them in the mortar and pestle and ground them up.

I was soon roasting the dessicated coconut and from there the recipe was pretty much like a regular curry recipe.

I added the spice mixture to the frying pan once the onions were cooked and the mixture immediately became very dry. I continuously stirred the curry so that it wouldn’t burn and there was soon plenty of liquid once the chicken and hot water were added.

After that it was simply simmering and stirring the curry and cooking the basmati rice.

The dinner guests were eagerly waiting to try out the Xacutti as nobody in the room had ever tried one.

There was an initial silence while the first tasting took place and then there was a stream of compliments from around the table.

The Xacutti is a great curry with a delightful blend of spices. The chicken has a lovely texture and the sauce was very tasty. Surprisingly enough the spice level was only medium when I was expecting it to be really hot (the descriptions on the internet had said that a Xacutti was hotter than a vindaloo – but it wasn’t).

Everybody loved the Xacutti and it received a great score of 8 out of 10.

With 2 1/2 lbs of chicken breasts, this is a large curry that is more than enough for 8 people. We got two dinners out of the curry and there was enough left over for me to take apportion to work for lunch.

This is a great chicken curry that I you should try for yourself, if you love a tasty chicken curry. I’ll definitely be making this one again.

If you’re feeling hungry in London and have a couple of thousand pounds (a little over 3,000 US dollars) of spare cash in your pocket, you can drop by the Bombay Brasserie (in Kensington) and sample their new curry dish, the “Samundari Khazana”.

That’s right, this special curry sells for two thousand pounds!!!

It’s a seafood type curry and the ingredients include crab, white truffle, Beluga caviar, quails’ eggs, sea snails, abalone and lobster coated in edible gold leaf (yes, gold leaf!!). The seafood and fish are marinated in chilli and tamarind paste and the curry is presented on a bed of saffron rice. You even get a glass of fine champagne with the curry. There’s no mention of poppadoms or roti but you can probably get some if you ask.

This really expensive curry has been created to celebrate the launch of the DVD of Slumdog Millionaire. But it’s doubtful whether any of the slum dwellers from Mumbai will be stopping by to ask for this extraordinarily expensive dish.

Hi, Ray here again.

Last week’s Gujarati Toor Dal recipe was such a success that I chose another vegetarian curry for this week’s recipe review. I love chickpea curries almost as much as dahl and so I went for the Chick-Pea Curry recipe from the great range of recipes on the Curry Focus website.

Like most good recipes, this one was really east to follow.

The one thing to remember with chickpeas is that they need to be soaked in water for some hours. As long as you check out the recipe correctly, you’ll soak the chickpeas in plenty of time before the cooking begins.

As happens so often, the regular ingredients of onion, ginger root, garlic and chilli were in the curry as well as the most widely used spices of turmeric and garam masala.

The recipe asks for black mustard seeds, fresh cilantro leaves and a pinch of hing (asafoetida) and this makes me think that the curry originates from Gujarati in India.

I just followed the recipe and there wasn’t a single problem to report.

The curry and basmati rice were ready right on time and served up to the waiting dinner guests.

And the curry disappeared pretty quickly.

The chick-pea curry was delicious, with a dahl like flavour and the superb garnish of fresh cilantro leaves.

The curry received an excellent score of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat/spice rating of “Mild to Medium”.

It’s not hard to see why chickpea curries are so highly rated by curry lovers. So do try this recipe and enjoy.

Not long after the latest excitement about being able to lose weight by eating a curry (see Try To Lose Weight By Eating Curry), along comes a new theory that you can prevent Alzheimer’s and Dementia by eating curry.

Professor Doraiswamy presented this theory at the Annual Meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Some experts are sceptical about the claim that puts forward another health application for curcumin, which is in turmeric (an often used ingredient in curries).

Professor Doraiswamy has speculated that a curry pill might be developed from this research.

The idea Alzheimer’s and Dementia can be prevented by eating curry may be a bit hard to swallow, if only because you would need to eat a very large amount of curry in order take the amount of curcumin that was used in the research.

Even so, I think that I would prefer to eat great curries than to pop a pill.

You can see this amazing story on the BBC news website.

Hi, Ray here again.

There wasn’t a recipe review last week. My girlfriend had seen what I’d written in my review of the Chicken and Mushroom Pulao Curry and she “thought” that I should make it again so that she could see if it was good as I said it was. And so I made the pulao again and, thankfully, it was a success.

This week I scanned the great Curry Focus recipes for a dal recipe to try. The website has some great dal recipes and the Gujarati Toor Dal looked easy and tasty.

I soaked the dal for the required two hours before adding water and simmering for around 25 minutes. I’d previously been told that toor dal should not be soaked for more than two hours because it tends to soften if it’s soaked for too long. The cooking time for the first part of the recipe depends on how gently the dal is simmered.

I then added the tomatoes and spices before adding a small amount of hot water to thin the dal a little.

I coked the mustard seeds and then added the cumin seeds, asafoetida (hing) and curry leaves before covering the pan and moving on to a spectacular part of the cooking, which was where I poured a cup of dal from the main saucepan to the saucepan with the mustard seeds. There was a great hissing noise, a large cloud of steam erupted from the saucepan before I put the lid back onto the saucepan. Very spectacular. I had heeded the warning to be extra careful and had no burns from the experience. I added a second cup of dal to the smaller saucepan but there wasn’t any steam this time.

Then the contents of the smaller saucepan was poured back into the large saucepan and I added the tamarind paste, cilantro and cumin powders and the raw sugar.

I finally gently boiled the dal for 15 minutes until it got to the consistency that I liked.

I timed the basmati to be ready at the same time as the dal and I served up the meal to the waiting diners garnished with the chopped fresh cilantro and with a side plate of roti (which I had bought from a store and all I had to do was quickly microwave them while the dal was finishing its cooking).

And what was the verdict? Just great! This is a truly wonderful dal with a lovely taste. The only thing that the diners had to do was pick out the many curry leaves as they were eating the dal – not too hard a task.

Everyone really enjoyed the dal and it received a rating of 8 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of medium.

So if you like dal (and I’ve yet to find any curry lover who doesn’t like dal) then you really should try this recipe. You’ll have a delicious meal.