Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our readers!

2009 has been a big year for the CurryFocus team, with the site growing considerably month by month. We have some great articles this month including one that will help you make the most of that leftover ham.

Below are the top ten articles for 2009!

1 Steamer and Rice Cookers - Tips and Tricks”
2 What Is Sambal?
3 How Many Calories In A Curry?
4 What Is A Karahi?
5 How to cook a Massaman Curry
6 Curry Calorie Count. Part One
7 How To Remove Curry Stains
8 Checking if the Oil is Ready for Cooking
9 How to Cool Down a Curry thats “Too Hot!”
10 Curried Eggs Around the World

Latest Articles

Review of the Beef Rendang Recipe
Saffron Spice
Review of the Beef Madras Curry (Gosht Madras) Recipe
Berliners Love Currywurst
Review of the Dry-Roasted Lamb (Sukka Lamb) Recipe
Leftover Ham Curry

Top 5 Recipes for last month

1 Naan Bread
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Balti Chicken
4 Chicken Tikka Masala
5 Beef Curry

Why not tell us the recipes that you like? You can submit a new recipe here and a restaurant here.

Browse Categories

Christmas is here once again and people look like they are buying enough food to keep them fed for weeks.

And at the top of a lot of people’s list is the traditional Christmas ham.

Usually a ham is big and there is often leftover ham that needs eating over the holidays.

A tasty way to use up some ham is to make a leftover ham curry. There’s a recipe for Leftover Ham and Rice Curry in the yummy Curry Focus recipes for you to make. And if you’ve got your own ham curry recipe, give us the details on the Add Recipe page and we’ll publish it on the Curry Focus website.

So if you get tired of eat ham sandwiches, why not try a ham curry instead? A curry is a really tasty meal.

Hi, Ray here again.

Time for a weekend curry again and I checked out the great Curry Focus recipes to see what I would make this week.

I saw the Dry-Roasted Lamb (Sukka Lamb) recipe and it looked like it would taste pretty good. I’m not sure why it is described as being “roasted” because the curry goes nowhere near an oven.

The longest stage of this recipe was grinding the spices because I still don’t have a grinder. I’ve got a mortar and pestle and it takes a long time to grind spices. I find the hardest part of using a mortar and pestle is grinding cinnamon stick – it simply doesn’t to the job very well. A spice grinder is now on my shopping list.

OK, back to the recipe.

This is an easy lamb curry recipe – once you’ve got the lamb cut up and cooking for the first 60-minute period, it’s simple to prepare the onion and the other ingredients (I ground the spices before starting the cooking because I knew that the grinding the spices would take a fair while – it took me about 30 minutes).

Once I had drained and set aside the lamb, I fried the onions (there are 2 onions in this recipe which is quite a lot of onions but this isn’t a problem for me because I love onions).

After cooking the onions, I fried the lamb, added the spices and then added the previously cooked onions so that everything was now cooking together. This is a very dry curry and you have to keep stirring the ingredients to make sure that the curry does not stick to the frying pan.

I timed the basmati rice to be ready when the curry was ready and I served the Sukka Lamb Curry on the basmati.

And what was the curry like? As I said before, there are a lot of onions and this is a very dry curry (you might need an extra beer or water to drink with the curry to help it down). The lamb was very tender and you could clearly taste the lime juice and coconut. This is a lovely curry and it got an average rating of 7 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of “mild to medium”.

If you like a dry curry then you really should make this recipe. I’m sure that you won’t be disappointed.

It may be a surprise to some of you to discover that curried sausages, otherwise known as currywurst, is one of the most popular snacks in Berlin, Germany.

Germany is well known for its love of sausages so adding a curry sauce to make a tasty snack seems to be a natural thing to do.

Berliners love the snack so much that they eat over 70 million servings in a year.

The snack was invented in 1949 by a German housewife called Herta Charlotte Heuwer. Herta’s invention is so well loved that a memorial plaque is at the corner of Kant and Kaiser Friedrich Streets (in Berlin) to commemorate the place where Herta first made the popular snack.

Today there are in excess of 200 currywurst stands and stores in Berlin where you can buy this hot and spicy sausage. Like all good fast foods, it is cheap, quick to make and tasty.

We don’t have a recipe for currywurst on the Curry Focus website yet – if you have a recipe then give us the details using the Add Recipe page and we’ll publish it for everyone to enjoy.

So next time you visit Berlin, or Germany, be sure to look out for currywurst and try it and see what all the fuss is about.

Hi, Ray here again.

It’s curry time at my house again. I just love the weekends.

The choice of curries to make was a bit forced on me because I had found some beef at the bottom of the freezer and it needed to be used fairly quickly. I checked out the beef curry recipes from the great range of Curry Focus recipes and chose to make the Beef Madras Curry.

This weekend I did not need to buy any of the ingredients for the Beef Madras Curry. I’ve collected a wide range of curry ingredients and spices over the last two years.

Like most of the Curry Focus recipes, this is an easy curry to make.

I followed the recipe steps and the end curry (and rice) were ready only about 10 minutes after scheduled (I’m getting pretty good at estimating preparation and cooking times). The curry-eating friends arrived just as the rice finished cooking in the microwave (they had called earlier to say they were running late).

I served the Beef Madras Curry on a bed of basmati rice (sounds professional, doesn’t it?).

Even if I say it myself, this is a superb curry. The other diners used the words “tasty”, “lovely” and “great”. The beef was really tender and well cooked and the curry had a typically dry Madras style sauce.

One of the diners said that it was the best curry that I had ever made and awarded it a taste score of 10 out of 10. On average, the Beef Madras Curry received a taste score of 9 out of 10 with a spice/heat rating of medium.

If you like a Madras style curry, then you simply should try out this recipe. I’m really glad that I discovered the beef at the bottom of the freezer and that this led me to make this yummy curry. I will definitely be making this curry again.

Saffron is a spice made from the stigmas and styles of the saffron crocus (Latin name crocus sativus). The stigma is part of the flower that receives pollen and the style attaches the stigma to the flower.

The countries that produce most saffron are Spain, Iran, India, Greece and Morocco.

The stigmas and styles of the crocus sativus are hand-picked. A single crocus has three stigmas that together weigh less than 0.02 oz. After being picked, the saffron is quickly dried and stored in airtight containers (to stop the saffron from losing pungency and flavor). The dried saffron stigmas are called threads.

It takes something between 50,000 and 75,000 flowers to produce a pound of dried saffron (that’s about the size of one football field full of flowers).

It takes about 20 hours of labor to pick the saffron so it’s pretty easy to understand why saffron is the most expensive spice. A pound of dried saffron can cost over US$5,000!!! Small containers of saffron can be bought at most good supermarkets.

With saffron costing so much, it’s hardly surprising that saffron powder is sometimes adulterated with other substances (such as turmeric powder) and sold as pure saffron by unscrupulous people. If you always buy saffron threads, instead of saffron powder, then you know that this is not happening.

Saffron is a bitter spice and only a little is needed in cooking. It only needs about 10 threads to be added to rice to give it the typical saffron yellow/orange color and taste (the saffron threads are lightly crushed between your fingers and then soaked in a small amount of hot water for about 10-15 minutes before being added to the cooking rice). There’s an easy Saffron Rice recipe on the Curry Focus website.

A “pinch of saffron” is 0.004 oz and that is a measure that is way too small to measure in the average kitchen. When you buy saffron threads, check the net weight on the container, count the number of threads in the container and then do the simple math to find out how many threads are in a pinch. My reckoning is that there are about 10 threads in a pinch.

As well as being used in cooking, saffron is also used in medicines (saffron has cancer suppressing and anti oxidant properties), perfumes and clothes dyes (Buddhist robes in India are saffron dyed).

Hi, Ray here again.

The weekend is here again and so it’s time to try another of the great yummy curries from the Curry Focus website. I really like a Rendang and the Beef Rendang recipe looked really simple to follow.

And this is really one of the simplest recipes ever. Basically all you have to do is mix all of the ingredients and simmer for 90 minutes. It can’t get much easier than that.

I served the Rendang on rice to the eager diners who just loved it. The beef was tender and the curry had a yummy coconut taste. The spice/heat rating was mild to medium and the diners awarded an excellent 8.5 out of 10 for taste.

This Beef Rendang recipe must be one of the easiest curry recipes that you can find.