Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Curcumin, a natural chemical in turmeric, has again been reported as having cancer killing abilities.

An Irish research center team has made the claim that appears on the BBC News website.

The team has discovered that curcumin kills gullet, or oesophageal, cancer which is instrumental in 5% of UK cancer deaths.

Research is continuing in the hope that new cancer treatments will be developed from the natural curcumin chemical.

The full story can be read here.

Hi, Ray here again.

It has been a while since I last reviewed a recipe from the range of yummy curry recipes on the Curry Focus website. I’ve been preparing and painting a couple of rooms with a very tight schedule and have been eating “convenience food” rather than cooking, over the few weeks (I’ve finished now and it looks great).

Now back to the curries.

I don’t really know much about what a bhoona (or bhuna) dish is and don’t recall ever eating one (although I could be wrong). I spotted the recipe for the Balti Lamb Bhoona in amongst the yummy Curry Focus recipes and decided I should get to know something about the dish.

I already had most of the ingredients only had to buy the lamb and the fresh cilantro.

This looked like a simple recipe and I started with preparing the meat, onions and spices.

I started cooking and all was going well until I added the water. After about 10 minutes I could see that there would still be a lot of liquid in the curry when the final bhoona stage was reached. So I removed the frying pan lid and turned the heat up a little to reduce the liquid more quickly. There was still way too much liquid by the end of the 20 minutes and so I continued cooking for another 5 minutes to remove more of the water.

At last the bhoona was pretty dry and I did the bhooning (is there such a word?) before mixing in the last ingredients and serving up the meal to the ever-hungry dinner guests.

The recipe has 275g (10oz) of lamb, which isn’t a lot for 4 people (at least in my house). Consequently the servings were a bit smaller than normal (I’ve changed the recipe description so that it now says that it serves from 2 to 4 people). But it’s quality that counts, not quantity.

And what did the diners think?

The general comments were “very nice” and “yummy”.

The curry has a lot of onion, which gave the curry sauce a good base. The lamb was lovely and tender. And there was a delightful gentle taste of ginger and cilantro. The Balti Lamb Bhoona received a taste score of 7.5 out of 10 with a heat/spice rating of mild.

I’ve changed the recipe on the website a little in regard to adding the water so that not all of the water is added in one go. It’s easier to add more water when the curry gets dry than to get rid of water when it’s too runny. It’s hard to judge how quickly the liquid will reduce because it all depends on the cooking temperature.

This was a lovely curry and one that I will definitely be making again.

We’ve already received a couple of emails following on from the “Curry Calorie Count” series of articles.

There’s general agreement that the main problem with counting calories is that it is very hard to find out how many calories are in the ingredients that are used in a curry.

So another article is currently being written that will help you to work out how many calories are in a curry (I know that kilojoules is the more modern way of measuring food energy, and that kilocalories is the real measure of calories, but most people talk about calories when referring to food energy measurement, so who am I to argue? - read the “Curry Calorie Count” articles if you don’t understand this).

Once you know the calories in the ingredients, you can work out the total calories for a meal and then see whether the calories are going to wreck your diet and make you put on weight. Mind you, if you’re used to eating restaurant-made curries then making your own at home will lead to you losing weight, all other things being equal (once again, this is explained in the “Curry Calorie Count” articles).

So keep checking the Curry Focus website to see the article once it has been published.

Latest Articles

Diwali Festival of Lights
Curry Calorie Count. Part Two
Curry Calorie Count. Part Three
Thanksgiving Day Leftover Turkey Curry

Top 5 Recipes for last month

1 Naan Bread
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Chicken Phal
4 Chicken Curry
5 Beef Curry

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Thanksgiving is a harvest festival - this means that it is a festival that gives thanks for the harvest.

There are lots of harvest thanksgiving festivals around the world with the most famous one being Thanksgiving Day in the USA, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November each year, which means that Thanksgiving Day is on November 26th in 2009.

One of the most well known annual parades in the world is the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade with the 83rd annual parade taking place in 2009.

Thanksgiving Day is a public holiday and a lot of people also have Friday off work so the Thanksgiving holiday weekend stretches over four days when families and friends gather all around the USA for the celebrations, the centerpoint of which is usually the traditional turkey meal served with potatoes, vegetables and cranberry sauce.

Now turkeys are big birds and people tend to buy big ones for Thanksgiving, meaning that there is often leftover turkey meat that has to be eaten over the long weekend.

A great way of eating leftover turkey is to make a delicious turkey curry and there are some great turkey curry recipes on the Curry Focus website. Leftover turkey curry really is tasty and easy to make - the turkey has already been fully cooked for the main meal so the leftover turkey curry can be made in less than 30 minutes.

Instead of picking at the leftover turkey and making turkey sandwiches, why not make a yummy curry this year?

Part two of this article showed the energy counts of some homemade and readymade curries and also described how I calculated the kilocalories in a homemade curry.

Before we examine the kilocalories in popular curry extras, let’s look at the energy content in some of the more common frozen (single serve) meals that can be bought from large supermarkets.

* 1 kilocalorie (kcal) equals 4.184 kilojoules (kJ)

I found these details by searching through supermarket freezer cabinets. I didn’t buy any of the products so I can’t vouch for their taste.

Let’s look once again at the homemade curry table that we saw in part two of this article.

* 1 kilocalorie (kcal) equals 4.184 kilojoules (kJ)

As you can see, the readymade, frozen, meals have higher kilocalorie counts than the curries. And, in my opinion, they are nowhere as tasty as the curries. You’re also likely to make yourself some vegetables with the readymade, frozen, meals so that is going to add a few more kilocalories.

Now let’s look at some of the more popular extras that people eat when they’re dining out at a curry restaurant.

* 1 kilocalorie (kcal) equals 4.184 kilojoules (kJ)

I’ve said previously that it’s almost impossible to know the energy content in a restaurant curry, but the above table shows the kilocalories that you expect to get if you add some of the standard extras. The same problem arises with kilocalories for the extras as for the curries when getting them from a restaurant – there’s no way of knowing the true kilocalorie count of food made in restaurants. The above details are for the products when bought from a supermarket.

So a couple of poppadoms, two samosas, a plain naan and a couple of pints of Carlsberg will add (at least) a huge 1,098 kilocalories (kcal), or 4,594 kilojoules (kJ), to your meal. There are sometimes more kilocalories in the extras than are in the actual curry that you eat and this one reason why eating curries can increase your weight. It’s not necessarily the kilocalories in a curry that are a threat to your body weight; it’s the kilocalories in all those extras that you eat and drink along with the curry.

So what conclusions can we make from the details contained in this article?

First, it’s almost impossible to know the energy content of restaurant made curries (either dine in or takeaway).

Next, you can find out the energy content of curries if you make them yourself or if you buy readymade, frozen, ones from a supermarket.

Next, there’s no need for home made curries to make you put on weight because they have usually the same energy content as readymade, frozen, supermarket curries and a lower energy content than alternative readymade, frozen, meals.

There’s no real reason why you can’t have a curry as part of your diet. But don’t forget to include fresh fruit and vegetables in a balanced diet.

Finally, the extras that you eat with curries can contain more kilocalories (or kilojoules) than the actual curry itself.

There’s no way that I’ll ever stop eating curries because they simply taste too good.

And I won’t fixate about the kilocalories (or kilojoules) in curries because I’m not greatly overweight.

But if you are trying to lose weight, at least you now know how to work out how the energy content of homemade curries. I’m not a dietician, or nutrition expert, but I can see no reason why you can’t eat a curry as part of a diet, as long as you hold back on the breads, beers and deep fried extras.

Curry Calorie Count. Part One
Curry Calorie Count. Part Two
Curry Calorie Count. Part Three

Part one of this article described how food energy is measured in kilocalories and kilojoules and some of the challenges in finding out the energy content of food.

So how exactly does this relate to curries? After all, it’s only curries in which we’re really interested.

We’ve already found out that we can’t find out the true energy content of restaurant and takeaway curries.

So we shall concentrate on readymade, frozen, curries bought from supermarkets as well as homemade curries.

Now it won’t surprise you to learn that I prefer homemade curries. I can control the ingredients that go into a homemade curry and I don’t add any preservatives, artificial colorings or antioxidants. And I really think that they taste better than supermarket readymade curries with a better texture as well as flavor. And I can add more of my favorite ingredient into my homemade curry to make it my own unique curry (I quite often add one or two extra fresh chillies when I’m making a curry to make it a bit hotter).

I need to say here that I don’t think there is anything wrong in buying a readymade, frozen, curry from a supermarket - I’ve eaten a lot of them in my time. Sometimes you really don’t have time to make a curry yourself or maybe you’re just not a very good cook. Or maybe a curry takes your fancy when you’re shopping in a supermarket. You may not even like cooking. Or maybe you’re just too lazy.

That’s enough of the general talk. What about some numbers?

The following table shows the energy content of some single serving, frozen, curries that can be bought in most large supermarkets (I did my research delving in the freezer cabinets of a couple of supermarkets).

* 1 kilocalorie (kcal) equals 4.184 kilojoules (kJ)

You may have noticed that some of the above readymade curries include rice and some don’t. If you eat your curry with rice and have to make the rice yourself then you need to add the energy value of the rice to the energy value of the curry to find out the total energy content of what you’re eating.

Different brands of the same curry have different energy contents. Notice how the Chicken Korma with Rice has less kilocalories than the Chicken korma without any rice.

How do some of the Curry Focus curries measure up to the readymade, frozen, curries that can be bought? Check out the following table (these are some of the curries that I have made from the Curry Focus recipes).

* 1 kilocalorie (kcal) equals 4.184 kilojoules (kJ)

Generally speaking, the number of calories in homemade curries is roughly the same as for the readymade, frozen, curries (although you can’t take this for granted – you should always check the labels to see what is in the bought curry).

As I said earlier, one of the main advantages of making a curry yourself is that you have total control over the ingredients that go into the curry. And, generally speaking, a homemade curry is cheaper than buying a readymade, frozen, supermarket curry.

Just how did I arrive at the energy content of my curries? Let’s look at the Balti Chicken Curry with Rice recipe.

The following table shows the ingredients of the curry, along with the kilocalorie value for each ingredient.

Note 1 – most skinless and boneless chicken breasts in my local supermarket weigh in the region of 300g (around 10.5 oz).

I searched the Internet to find out the energy content for the ingredients. It was easy to find the values for some of the ingredients but some were hard to uncover and I just guessed at a couple of the numbers (I always guessed on the high side).

It took quite a while to find out all the energy numbers, especially for the spices.

The next part of this article will compare the energy content of curries with some alternative frozen meals that can be bought and also describes the energy content of some of the more popular extras that people (including me) eat and drink with their curries.

Curry Calorie Count. Part One
Curry Calorie Count. Part Two
Curry Calorie Count. Part Three

The annual Diwali festival, also known as the Festival of Lights, will be celebrated this year on Saturday, October 17th.

Last year we published an article about the Diwali festival that tells about the festival.

Family and friends meet to celebrate and exchange gifts and there’s usually a great party atmosphere with dancing, singing and fireworks.

A lot of tasty food is eaten during the festival and there are some Curry Focus festival recipes for you to enjoy.

Nowadays, Diwali is celebrated all over the world and, if you live near a big town or city, there is almost certain to be a Diwali event nearby.

So why not find out the location of your nearest festival and join in the fun?