Chicken Curry and Beyond - The CurryFocus Blog

One of the more regular questions that we get asked is whether a chilli is less hot if the seeds are removed.

The main heat of a chilli is in the membrane - the white pithy substance that joins the seeds to the flesh of the chiili. Capsaican is produced in the membrane and it’s the capsaican that gives the heat. The capsaican in the membrane does get into the seeds and the flesh but the main heat is in the membrane.

If you cut open a chilli and then cut away the membrane and seeds then the chilli will not be as hot. If you cut away just the seeds then you’ll reduce the heat a little but not by much.

There’s a blog on the Curry Focus website that explains a little more about why a chilli is hot.

If you try out a new variety of chilli and are a bit wary of how hot it is, then cut away the membrane and seeds before trying - if the resultant curry isn’t too hot for you, next time you could just use the whole chilli and see how that goes.

Over time, you tend to build up a resistance to the heat from chilli. So if you’re making a curry with 2 or 3 chillies, at some stage you’re going to want to make it hotter and the easiest way is just to add another chilli.

A time to be careful of is when making a curry for a few people. You need to know how hot they like their curries. If you’re not sure then you can make a guess and then have a side dish of raita for people to “cool down” their curry (raita is easy to make - check out the easy raita recipes). There’s another good Curry Focus article on how to cool down a curry that’s too hot that is worth reading.

Latest Articles

Review of the Vegetable Biryani Recipe
Finally I Have A Spice Grinder
Review of the Quick Beef Curry Recipe
Improve Your Eyesight With Saffron
Meat Biryanis for the Indian Army
Review of the Lamb Vindaloo Recipe
Prostate Cancer and Kennedys Disease Under Attack By Curry Ingredients

Top 5 Recipes for last month

1 Naan Bread
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Poppadoms
4 Chicken Curry
5 Lamb Xacutti

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Another Internet article has been brought to our attention about some Chinese research into the health benefits of some of the common ingredients in curries.

One item of research has uncovered the fact that eating pungent foods (such as curries) could reduce the risk of getting prostate cancer, a disease that only affects men.

And once again, curcumin has been highlighted as possibly being effective in treating Kennedy’s disease, also known as spinal and bulbar muscular atrophy, that is another disease that only affects men.

Curcumin has often been attributed with being able to combat a wide range of diseases. You can read more about curcumin’s powers by reading the “Claim that Curcumin Kills Cancer” and “An Update on Curcumin, Turmeric and Your Health” blog articles.

You can see the full Chinese research article here.

Hi, Ray here again.

My girlfriend was away this weekend so this lets me try out a really hot curry. And one of my favorite hot curries is a vindaloo. The Lamb Vindaloo Curry recipe was amongst the hot vindaloo curry recipes and I decided to make this curry.

I purchased the lamb on Saturday and created the marinade on Sunday morning with a side trip to my local supermarket because I had run out of malt vinegar (I know, I should have checked the ingredients on Saturday but I didn’t – not the end of the world though).

I left the lamb to marinate for about 8 hours before the time came to start the cooking.

The rest of the preparation was really simple because all I had to do was peel and chop up the onion.

I got the cooking underway and all was fine until I added the hot water. The original recipe called for 3 cups (1 1/4 pints) of hot water to be added and this is a lot of water. If I had been thinking then I would have noticed the problem before adding the water. But I wasn’t thinking and saw that there was far too much water once I had mixed the contents of the saucepan. I decided to press on with the recipe, leaving off the saucepan lid in the hope that the liquid would reduce.

The curry was ready for the diners on schedule but there was still far too much liquid. I used a slotted spoon to serve up the Lamb Vindaloo so that there wouldn’t be excessive liquid for the dinner guests.

The vindaloo itself was pretty good. The lamb was well cooked and tender and there was the familiar vinegar and spice tang in the vindaloo. As expected, the spice/heat level was “hot” and the curry received a taste score of 7 out of 10. I’m sure the curry would have scored higher if there had been a better sauce.

I’ve changed the published recipe so that it calls for less water and made the cooking happen without a saucepan lid so that the liquid reduces as the curry is cooking. It’s a lot easier to add a bit more hot water if the curry becomes too thick than to try and get rid of excess liquid. I’d be interested in your comments on the revised recipe.

The Indian army sometimes has to operate at high altitudes and the Indian Defence Food Research Laboratory has created mutton and chicken biryanis for the defence personnel who have to eat at high altitude.

The army asked for non-vegetarian meals to be created for eating at high altitude, where both the oxygen level and temperature can be very low.

The Laboratory answered the call and developed mutton and chicken biryanis that stay fresh and are nutritious for up to a year. As a bonus, the biryanis taste good.

Here at Curry Focus, we think that this is a brilliant development. The biryanis are sure to be welcomed at meal times high in the mountains where it would not be possible to make fresh biryanis, such as the great Biryani Recipes on the Curry Focus website.

You can read more about this on the Food and Beverage website.

The Internet news feeds are alive with a potential new health use for one of the spices used in Indian cooking. The spice in question is saffron, which is often added to rice to give it a slightly bitter taste and a golden yellow color.

Australian and Italian scientists say that saffron improves eyesight and may prevent blindness.

A recent Curry Focus article described the saffron spice but, at the time, there was no indication that saffron could improve your vision.

There are a lot of Internet articles about this new research with a good one being on the Hindustan Times website.

We are all getting older so maybe this latest research will be of increasing interest to us all.

Hi, Ray here again.

I had some good friends coming over for dinner this weekend and I hadn’t seen them for a few months. So I needed a curry recipe that would not keep me in the kitchen when too much when they arrived.

I quickly scanned the wide range of Curry Focus recipes and found a recipe for a Quick Beef Curry. Beef usually takes some time to cook and become tender and this recipe was no different. The quick part was the initial preparation and cooking. The final cooking phase hardly needed any attention at all. I would be able to socialize with my friends while the curry was cooking without needing to go into the kitchen very often.

I bought a very lean, beef, steak when I was at the store and that was as much as I needed to buy (except for some beers).

A couple of hours before the scheduled eating time, I cut up the beef into cubes and prepared the onion and garlic. Then I got the cooking underway and was soon at the final cooking phase that needed almost no involvement from me. I placed a bowl of basmati in the microwave all ready to go.

My friends arrived an hour before eating time and we quickly drank a few beers and caught up on the missing months since we had last seen each other. All had to do during this time was go into the kitchen every 10 or 15 minutes and stir the curry.

I started to microwave the rice 15 minutes before the curry would be ready and it wasn’t too long before I served up the Quick Beef Curry to the expectant dinner guests.

I had told my friends that this was a new recipe for me and not to set their hopes too high seeing that this was described as a “Quick Beef Curry” – I have seen recipes for other similarly described curries where the recipes looked very rough and ready.

But this warning was not needed at all because this was a great curry. The beef was nice and tender and the thick sauce was delicious. The curry got a lot of good comments from everyone and received a taste rating of 7/10 with a heat/spice rating of “medium”.

This is one of the easiest curries that I’ve made in a long time and had a great flavor.

I can certainly recommend that you try out this recipe.

Some of you will remember that I’ve often said that I need to buy a spice grinder because I sometimes encounter a recipe that requires the spices to be freshly roasted and ground before being added to a curry.

I’ve used a mortar and pestle for a while now and it sometimes takes a long time to grind the spices and the grinding is not always successful. I find that grinding a cinnamon stick and dried chillies often leaves big pieces that will not turn into a powder, no matter how long I crush them.

Sometimes it takes over 30 minutes to grind a range of spices.

So I finally left the house to search for a spice grinder. I thought that this would be an easy task but the search took longer than expected.

In all, I visited the kitchen appliances section of 5 department stores and found that only 2 of these stores stocked a spice grinder. And both of the stores had the same model of grinder. One store had the grinder prices 30% lower than the other so it won’t surprise you to learn that I went after the bargain.

I took my new possession home, took it out of its wrapping, gave it a quick wash and put it into a cupboard to await the first usage.

I immediately scanned through the range of Curry Focus recipes, found one that needed the spices to be ground (the great Lamb Xacutti recipe) and then went out to buy the ingredients that I needed.

I was soon roasting the spices for the recipe and enjoying the lovely aromas that enveloped the kitchen during the roasting process. I let the spices cool down and then put them into the spice grinder, breaking the cinnamon stick into two pieces, and then turned the spice grinder on.

In less than a minute I had a pile of smoothly ground spices that gave off the most amazing aroma.

I put the ground spices into a bowl for later use and wiped the spice grinder clean with a damp cloth and then put it away in the cupboard again – this is all the regular maintenance that is needed.

I find it hard to believe that I hadn’t purchased a spice grinder ages ago. It takes all of the effort out of a fairly boring task. And I know that I’ll be using the spice grinder regularly from now onwards.