Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

On Poppa The World!

The Curry Lounge in Nottingham has set a new Poppadom Tower record with a whopping 1.51m tall skyscraper that amazed onlookers. As the tower became taller, the biggest issue was that the weight of the Poppadoms at the top started to crack the ones holding the weight at the bottom.

Curry cook off

Five hand-picked Curry Super Chefs have been selected to showcase their curry skills at the International British Fusion Food Festival in November. There were 12,000 entrants fighting for the five positions with many experts believing that UK Curry chefs have the skills to make the best curries in the world.

Creating a fusion between East and West, the Super Chefs must create a menu, under the heading of “British Fusion Food”, combining the contemporary as well as the traditional.

We will have more news and results from the festival in the months ahead.

Latest Articles

Review of the Chicken Phal Recipe
Review of the Ground Lamb with Peas Recipe
Glasgow Claims Chicken Tikka Masala For Itself
Eight For Curry Tonight
Review of the Kashmir Meatball Curry Recipe
Review of the Chicken Tikka Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

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

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Hi, Ray here again.

I haven’t eaten chicken tikka for over 10 years. Now that’s quite an admission for somebody from the UK where chicken tikka is such a popular dish.

I saw the Chicken Tikka recipe on the Curry Focus website and decided to rejoin the chicken tikka eaters.

Now this is an amazingly simple recipe to make. For the preparation, all you have to do is cut up the chicken, mix it up with the yogurt and the spices and then let it marinate in the fridge for two hours.

I put the chicken mixture into the fridge on Sunday morning, covered with lithcen film, and so it had plenty of time to marinate.

I heated up the broiler (grill) as the dinner guests arrived and started the cooking.

I started to microwave the rice about half way through cooking the chicken.

After 25 minutes everything was cooked and I served up the chicken tikka to the dinner guests.

The resultant meal was not very good. It was very bland with a taste of lemon, and not much else. The pieces of chicken were a lot smaller than I remember from my previous meals of chicken tikka.

The assembled diners only gave the chicken tikka an average taste rating of 5.5 out of 10 for taste with a spice/heat rating of very mild.

I will make chicken tikka again in the future but not from this recipe. Disappointing.

Hi, Ray here again.

It had been a long time since I’ve eaten good meatballs. I saw that there was a ground lamb recipe for a Kashmir Meatball Curry and chose the recipe for this week’s cooking and taste review.

The method looked long and complicated but a lot of the method explains how to divide the ground lamb mixture into sixteen equal portions. All you need to do is get the mixture into some kind of even shape (a block or a tube, it doesn’t matter which) and then split it into two. Then you repeat the process with the two portions by dividing them both into two so you end up with four equal portions. Then you simply repeat the whole process with each of the four portions that you have so that the result is sixteen equal portions. It’s all very easy really but it takes a bit of explaining.

Making the curry itself was very simple except that you have to do the initial cooking of the meatballs in batches. Luckily I’ve got a big frying pan and only needed to split the cooking of the meatballs into two batches but you might have to do the cooking in three or four batches if your frying pan is smaller. It really doesn’t matter how many batches you need to make and you just add all of the cooked meatballs back into the frying pan for the final cooking.

Cooking the meatballs in batches didn’t slow down the cooking too much and hardly created much of a delay.

The cooking liquids separated a bit while the curry was cooking but I just kept stirring everything together and all turned out well.

I served up the Kashmir Meatball Curry on a bed of basmati rice.

And the Kashmir Meatball Curry was delicious. The meatballs were well cooked and you could clearly taste the cloves – yummy. The meatballs were fairly spicy and received a spice/heat rating of “medium to hot”. The curry was delicious and got an average score of 8.5 out of 10.

This is a delicious curry that is simple to make so why not try it out yourself?

Hi Ray here again,

A couple of weekends ago I had a bigger group of friends over for a meal than usual. It was a birthday celebration and in total there was eight people to be fed.

Most recipes are designed to feed four people, so what did I do?

Did I trim the size of the servings? No, that just wouldn’t work.

Did I make two different dishes? Not this time, but I’ve done that in the past.

Well?

Simple. I just doubled up the ingredients. I used two onions instead of one. I used 4 chicken breasts instead of two. I used four cloves of garlic instead of two. You get the picture. It really is that easy. The cooking times stay the same. And you also cook double the amount of rice than normal. I made the yummy Massaman chicken curry.

And is there more work cooking for eight? Yes and no. The main meal was only a case of doubling the ingredients. But because this was a birthday treat, I also made side dishes of aloo gobi and dahl and made some kulfi for dessert. Really, the sole reason that there was extra effort was because of the side dishes and dessert that I made. I also heated up some poppadoms that I had got from my favorite Indian store.

The meal was a great success and really wasn’t a huge amount of effort.

Using double the ingredients means that you need large saucepans and/or frying pans that, thankfully, I have.

I use this doubling technique for making great lunches for work. I make a big curry and rice, divide the food into plastic containers and then put the containers into the freezer. On a workday I take a curry from the freezer, defrost it when I arrive at work and then just microwave it for two minutes at lunchtime for a delicious lunch (I work at a polytechnic and the main staff room has two microwaves and lots of cutlery for anybody to use). I had purchased a batch of microwaveable containers and lids) from a local packaging store and they are just the job for freezing and then microwaving. All I have to do is remember to label the container with the contents so that I know what’s in them. I can have a delicious curry for lunch every day that costs less than a boring sandwich.

Wicked.

Not long after Birmingham City Council decided to find out if it could trademark the curry name of Balti, a Glasgow family restaurant has claimed that it invented the Chciken Tikka Masala dish.

The Ali family, owners of the Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow, claim that they invented the dish in the 1970s and have lodged a claim, via the Labour MP for Glasgow Central, to the European Union that Glasgow is declared the rotected Designation of Origin” for the extremely popular curry (Chicken Tikka Masala is easily the most popular curry dish in the UK).

The Ali family say that they simply want Glasgow to be recognised as the birthplace of the popular dish.

If Chicken Tikka Masala receives the protected designation, the curry won’t be able to be made outside Glasgow in much the same way that only the Champagne region in France can make champagne.

It probably take two years for the claim to go through the legal processes and it’s hard to know whether the claim will be accepted or not – there will certainly be fierce opposition from a host of curry makers in the United Kingdom.

If it looks like Glasgow does get the recognition that is being requested then perhaps you should move quickly and fill your freezer with the popular dish before you have to pay royalties and the price goes up.

Hi, Ray here again.

I’ve said before that I love peas in curries and I was a bit surprised to see that I’d overlooked the Ground Lamb with Peas recipe amongst the wide range of recipes on the Curry Focus website.

But now that I’d seen the recipe, I just had to try it out.

The recipe is very simple and there were only a handful of steps needed to get the curry ready.

I didn’t remember to buy naan bread from my favorite Indian store and did not have enough time to make some before the guests would arrive (I made some great naan bread from the Curry Focus recipes – check out the naan bread review to see how the bread turned out).

It took less than an hour to cook the curry, get the rice ready and serve up the curry to the waiting diner guests.

The ground lamb and peas curry was quietly eaten and didn’t really get much praise. The overwhelming comment was that it was a bit basic and, personally, I found the curry to be too fatty.

The curry had a spice/heat rating of hot and only got an average score of 5.5 out of 10.

In summary, I found this curry to be disappointing and won’t be making it again. But I will keep looking out for recipes with peas in them.