Archive for the 'Newsletters' Category

September 2009 Newsletter

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Latest Articles

Curry Calorie Count. Part One - Ray begins an investigation that will span three articles.

When the Oil is Ready for Cooking - So just how do you know when the cooking oil is hot enough to use?

Chickpeas and Rice Recipe Review - This would be an ideal curry if you like a really mild curry but we don’t think that we’ll be trying it again!

Top 5 Recipes for last month

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

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

Browse Categories

Balti Recipes Pickle, Chutney and Salsa Recipes
Beef Recipes Pork Recipes
Bread Recipes Raita Recipes
Chicken Recipes Rice Dishes
Dessert and Candy Recipes Side Dish Recipes
Dhal Recipes Starter, Soup and Snack Recipes
Drink Recipes Turkey Recipes
Fish Recipes Vegetarian Recipes
Jalfrezi Recipes Vegetarian Side Dish Recipes
Lamb Recipes Vindaloo Recipes

August 2009 Newsletter

Saturday, August 29th, 2009


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.

Poppadom Tower

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)

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

Browse Categories

Balti Recipes Pickle, Chutney, Spice, Paste and Salsa Recipes
Beef Recipes Pork Recipes
Bread Recipes Raita Recipes
Chicken Recipes Rice Dishes
Dessert and Candy Recipes Side Dish Recipes
Dhal Recipes Starter, Soup and Snack Recipes
Drink Recipes Turkey Recipes
Fish Recipes Vegetarian Recipes
Jalfrezi Recipes Vegetarian Side Dish Recipes
Lamb Recipes Vindaloo Recipes

July 2009 Newsletter

Monday, July 27th, 2009

When doing research for this month’s Newsletter, I decided to try and find out if there was a world record for the hottest curry ever made. It certainly makes for interesting reading and it appears that in July last year an Indian chef (from the UK) tried to land a place in the Guinness Book of World Records with his creation the “Bollywood Burner”.

Unfortunately, the officials that judge this kind of feat decided that as there was a physical limit to how hot a curry could be and, as it could become unbreakable, it did not meet the requirements for a Guinness world record.

Anyone attempting to eat this curry is asked to sign a waiver confirming that they have been made aware of the risks involved before eating it!

The lamb-based dish, was created by Vivek Singh, a chef at The Cinnamon Club restaurant.

The mouth burning creation contains:

  • A series of hot Deccan chillies
  • Dorset Naga (the hottest Naga pepper) seeds (over 855,000 on the Scoville scale)
  • Kashmiri chilli powder
  • Sesame tamarind sauce
  • Naga peppers
  • Scotch Bonnet peppers (around 300,000 on the Scoville scale).

Worlds Hottest Curry

Latest Articles

Review of the Gujarati Toor Dal Recipe
Prevent Alzheimers and Dementia by Eating Curry
Review of the Chick-Pea Curry Recipe
The Worlds Most Expensive Curry
Review of the Chicken Xacutti Curry Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

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

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

Browse Categories

Beef Dishes

Pickles, Chutneys, Spices and Salsas
Breads Pork Dishes
Chicken and Turkey Dishes Raita Dishes
Daal/Dal/Dhal/Dahl Dishes Rice Dishes
Desserts and Candies Side Dishes
Drinks Starters, Soups and Snacks
Fish Dishes Vegetarian Dishes
Jalfrezi Dishes Vegetarian Side Dishes
Lamb Dishes Vindaloo Dishes

June 2009 Newsletter

Friday, June 26th, 2009

You may have noticed that the search results page has changed recently.

The search process now checks blog articles and the glossaries as well as recipe titles and ingredients. There are a large number of blog articles on the website and it was becoming hard to find out curry related information using the old version of the search process.

And now the search results are ranked according to importance.

Let’s look at an example.

If you enter vindaloo into the search box and then click on the Search button, you’ll see a new style results page.

All of the results with a ranking of 1 are shown first, followed by the results with a ranking of 2 (1 means the word was found in the title and 2 means the word was found in the content).

Within the ranking, recipes are shown first, followed by blog articles and then followed by glossary matches.

As you would expect, clicking on the hyperlink shows you the page from the website.

This is only phase 1 of the search changes and we are working on moving from a ranking system to a relevance system, as well as expanding the search to look through more of the website.

The new search process finds a lot more information than before - we hope you find what you need.

Latest Articles

Review of the Gujarati Toor Dal Recipe
Prevent Alzheimers and Dementia by Eating Curry
Review of the Chick-Pea Curry Recipe
The Worlds Most Expensive Curry
Review of the Chicken Xacutti Curry Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

1 Easy Chicken Curry
2 Naan Bread
3 Chicken Curry
4 Hot Lamb Curry
5 Chicken Jalfrezi

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

Browse Categories

Beef Dishes

Pickles, Chutneys, Spices and Salsas
Breads Pork Dishes
Chicken and Turkey Dishes Raita Dishes
Daal/Dal/Dhal/Dahl Dishes Rice Dishes
Desserts and Candies Side Dishes
Drinks Starters, Soups and Snacks
Fish Dishes Vegetarian Dishes
Jalfrezi Dishes Vegetarian Side Dishes
Lamb Dishes Vindaloo Dishes

May 2009 Newsletter

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

The other day, the Curry Focus team was talking about what searches were being made on the website. Luckily we keep a track of this information in the database. In the blink of an eye, a quick bit of SQL coding brought the answer.

In the past month, in descending number of searches, the following were the top searches.

01 – chicken curry

02 – masala paste

03 – chicken

04 – chicken saag

05 – potato

06 – xacutti

07 – chicken pasanda

08 – lamb

09 – masala

10 – chicken kasmiri

You can see that the top search was for chicken curry. That’s no real surprise considering that the chicken curries are nearly always the top recipes that are viewed by the website visitors.

Indeed, 5 out of the top 10 searches included the word “chicken”.

It’s interesting to see what the visitors were looking for from this list. Some were looking for a type of curry (chicken curry and lamb). Some were looking for a type of dish (xacutti) and some were looking for a specific dish (chicken pasanda and chicken kasmiri). And quite a few people were looking for a curry with potato in it.

We don’t have any chicken pasanda or chicken kashmiri recipes on the websites yet. If you have a good recipe for one of these, why not share it with us? A lot of people will be grateful.

Latest Articles

Lose Weight with Turmeric and Curcumin
Review of Chas Chicken Curry Recipe
Tiffin Time
Review of the Chicken and Mushroom Pulao Recipe
Try To Lose Weight By Eating Curry


Top 5 Recipes for last month

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

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

Browse Categories

Beef Dishes

Pickles, Chutneys, Spices and Salsas
Breads Pork Dishes
Chicken and Turkey Dishes Raita Dishes
Daal/Dal/Dhal/Dahl Dishes Rice Dishes
Desserts and Candies Side Dishes
Drinks Starters, Soups and Snacks
Fish Dishes Vegetarian Dishes
Jalfrezi Dishes Vegetarian Side Dishes
Lamb Dishes Vindaloo Dishes

April 2009 Newsletter

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

In the last newsletter we told you that we were changing the way the recipe categories work so that you could find the perfect recipe more quickly.

We have now done this and have started to update the categories in the Curry Focus recipe database.

If you click on the “Recipes” link, you’ll see the first results of this change. We’ve made the categories appear in 2 columns and in alphabetic sequence. And there are now more categories (and more to follow).

So if you want to see all of the Vindaloo recipes, you just click on the “Vindaloo Dishes” link.

And we’ve made a couple of small changes to two more pages. If you click on a recipe that has been reviewed, you now see the taste and heating ratings near the top of the page (just check out the Pork Vindaloo recipe to show this). And if you click on the Print button the recipe page, you’ll also be shown the taste and heat ratings.

We are now looking to add more options to the search function. At present, the search works on the recipe name and the recipe ingredients. We’re looking at changing this so you can also search on the website blogs - there is a lot of information in the blogs that is currently a bit hard to find.

We hope you enjoy the upgraded functions.

If you think of any changes to the website you would like to see then just let us know.

Latest Articles

Review of the Thai Green Chicken Curry Recipe
Adjusting the Heat in a Curry
Making Thai Chicken Curry With Vegetables Again


Top 5 Recipes for last month

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

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

March 2009 Newsletter

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

A little while ago we got an email asking if we could supply a list of the vindaloo recipes on the website. We replied with a list of the recipes and pointed out that they would get this by themselves if they used the recipe search feature of the website (just key the word “vindaloo” into the field and click on the Search button).

But this set us thinking about how to improve the recipe searching on the website. We decided to give a recipe the capability of belonging to more than one category. So “Pork Vindaloo” would be in the “Pork” category but also in a “Vindaloo” category.

We have now developed this feature in the website and have started to add the extra categories to the existing recipes. It will take us a while to work our way through all of the recipes.

The first new category is called “Vegetarian Side Dishes“, which has most of the “Side Dishes” recipes in it.

More categories will follow shortly, you can view all our categories here.

Let us know if you have an idea for a new feature on the website.

Latest Articles

Review of the Malay Beef Stew Recipe
Review of the Vegetable Pulao Recipe
Choosing A Cooking Oil
Review of the Spicy Fish Cakes Recipe


Top 5 Recipes for last month

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

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

February 2009 Newsletter

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

In last month’s newsletter, we mentioned that last year saw a big increase in visitors over the previous year.

We received a couple of emails asking where the visitors came from so we did a bit of investigating.

Some 79% of you were from the UK and just over 93% were from the main English speaking countries (UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Ireland).

Not surprisingly, most UK visitors were from London (with just under 30% of the UK visitors) with Birmingham coming second with just under 4% of visitors.

And just under 200 locations in the UK had a single visitor to the site from such diverse places as Morecambe, Kilwinning, Flint, Inverurie, Herne Bay and Bakewell.

The top 10 countries for visitors, in order, were UK, US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Ireland, France, Spain, India and Germany.

Altogether, we welcomed visitors from 164 different countries and territories – pretty much the whole of the world except for around 6 South American countries, 10 Asian countries and a belt of countries across the poorest part of Africa.

We had to do a bit of searching for some of the more less known parts of the world to find out where they are (at least, less known to us). Thank you Turks and Caicos Islands (in the West Indies) for visiting 3 times. And cheers Aruba (also in the Caribbean) for dropping by twice. Svalbard and Jan Mayen (territories of Norway) had a single quick look, as did the Aland Islands (a mixed up place that is administered by Finland but where the main language is Swedish).

We had a lot of fun searching these smaller parts of the world and learnt a bit about their history from the internet.

We are only a few weeks into 2009 and have already had visitors from 5 new countries!!! Who are they? We’ll let you know at the end of the year.

We hope you all keep dropping by to check out the latest recipes and news.

Tell your friends about us. Spread the word.

Latest Articles

Review of the Keema Mattar Recipe
Review of the Malaysian Chicken Curry Recipe
Searching For A New Frying Pan
Review of the Pumpkin Curry Recipe
Review of the Peshwari Naan Recipe


Top 5 Recipes for last month

Chicken rules the roost yet again.

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

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

January 2009 CurryFocus Newsletter

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

2008 was a brilliant year for the Curry Focus website.

The website has been up and running for exactly 2 years and the traffic is growing on an almost monthly basis – we now get more than double the visitors each month as we did at the end of 2007.

We have a lot more recipes on the website for you to enjoy. The number of recipe pages have doubled in the year and there is sure to be something that you like that you can make yourself. We are working on changing some of the recipe pages to make it easier for you to find a suitable recipe for every occasion.

We try and review at least one recipe each week to let you know how easy (or difficult) it is to make, what it tastes like and how spicy-hot the dish is.

People look at the chicken recipes on the website more than all of the other recipe types put together. About the only time that chicken is edged out the top 5 recipes in each month is in December when turkey recipes are much sought after. There are lots and lots of great recipes that don’t use chicken, or turkey, so why not try one out soon?

The Xmas turkey is as popular as ever. How do we know this? Because hundreds of you visited the Curry Focus website in the week after Xmas and checked out the article on what to do with left over turkey. And some of you must have had enormous turkeys because the article was still being avidly looked at in the New Year!!!

We enjoy all of the emails and suggestions that you send to us. They give us ideas and keep us on our toes so do keep sending them.

One of the things to remember about the Curry Focus website is that it is free to use. You don’t have to register, or pay anything, to use the website. And we will keep it that way.

We enjoy making and eating curries. We think that’s pretty obvious when you look through the website and check out the recipe reviews and other blogs and articles.

But we don’t know everything. In fact, we know only a small part of the curry world. If you have a good recipe, why not tell us? If you have an interesting article on anything to do with curries then why not tell us? We will publish them on the website.

If you have any friends, or relatives, that enjoy curries then tell them about us. Spread the word.

We have had a fantastic two years and look forward to many more.

Thank you.

Latest Articles

Review of the Dhal with Spinach Recipe
Review of the Vegetable Korma Recipe
How To Remove Chilli Skins
Review of the Lamb Rogan Josh Recipe #2
Review of Jims Beef Curry Recipe

Top Recipes

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

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

December Christmas 2008 CurryFocus Newsletter

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Merry Christmas to all our readers from the CurryFocus team!! What a fantastic year 2008 has been and we are looking forward to offering even more recipes, articles and features in 2009.

We hope you enjoy this months articles and recipe reviews!


Yeast Envelopes and Cakes. What Are They?
From time to time, I’ve come across a recipe that contains yeast (such as the great Curry Focus recipe for Naan Bread). And quite often, the recipe calls for fresh yeast..read more.

Beef and Onion Curry Recipe Review Ray reviews this curry and if you like a mild curry that is easy to cook then why not make this Beef and Onion Curry? You won’t regret it.. read more

Jeera (Cumin) Chicken Recipe Review This is a stunning curry. It was very tasty with a great cumin taste on well-cooked chicken thighs. I always think that chicken cooked on the bone is better than when it is cooked off the bone and this is particularly true with chicken thighs.. read more

Lamb Biryani Recipe Review The biryani had a lovely delicate flavour and was well received by the diners, with “tasty” being the most frequent comment. The biryani had a medium heat rating and scored a good 6.5 out of 10… read more


Have you used the recipe search feature of the Curry Focus website?

It is located in the left panel of nearly every page in the website (it is not on the recipe print page because the recipe print page has been reduced to the bare essentials so that you only print the recipe details that you need, saving on expensive printer toner).

All you need to do is key a word into the Recipe Search box and click on the Search button (or press ENTER/RETURN). The search takes place and you are shown a page of results that have hyperlinks so you can go directly to an identified recipe.

If nothing is found then you are shown a page that tells you this and also lets you try another word.

The search looks at the recipe name and the recipe ingredients for a match.

Let’s see the function in action.

If you key the word “Vindaloo” into the Recipe Search box and press enter then you are shown a list of vindaloo recipes in the website. At present there are 4 (chicken, lamb, beef and pork). If you want to see details of a recipe then just click on the recipe name hyperlink and you go to the page that shows the ingredients and how to make the dish.

It’s really that easy.

If you put in a word that doesn’t match any recipe, you get a page that says there are no matches – the page has a box so you can try another word. So if you key the word “burger”, you’ll find no results (this is a curry website, not a general food website).

Can you input more than one word? Yes. For example, if you key “Pork” and Vindaloo” then you’ll see all of the pork recipes AND all of the vindaloo recipes. You only see one entry on the results page if you match on more than one word (so in the previous example, you only see one result entry for Pork Vindaloo).

There’s an extra feature in the search whereby common alternative spellings of words are used to look for matches. For example, sometimes people search for the word “Madrass” when other people search for the word “Madras”. The word “Madrass” does not appear anywhere in the recipes but if you search for “Madrass”, you’ll receive a results list as if you had keyed the word “Madras”.

And the search ignores some of the more common words that are in nearly every recipe, such as “and”.

As well as looking for your favourite recipes, such as Pork Vindaloo, the search will let you know what recipes exist on the website for a specific ingredient. Imagine that you have a mango in the fridge and you want to use it up (maybe you bought it to go into a fruit salad and you forgot to use it, or it was surplus to requirements). Just key the word “mango” into the search and you’ll see recipes that contain mango. All you need to do then is check the recipes that you like and see if you’ve got the other ingredients.

Why not give the search a try? It’s on the top left corner of the website pages.

Tell us, from the Contact Us page, if you’ve got any ideas for new pages on the website and we’ll see what we can do..


Top 5 Recipes for November

Chicken rules the roost yet again.

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

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