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.