Ray here again.

A Mushroom Biryani recipe recently arrived on the Curry Focus website and so I chose to try it out because there were 3 great reasons for making it. First, it was a curry. Second, it was a vegetarian curry and therefore healthy. Third it was a biryani curry and I just love a good biryani.

All of the biryanis that I had made in the past involved cooking the onions, spices and other ingredients and then adding the rice to the curry at the end. But this recipe got you to cook the rice first, and then add all the other ingredients afterwards. Very different. I thought that this was an odd way to cook a biryani but I’m just the cook - my weekly task is to follow a recipe to see if it works - and get a yummu meal at the end of the cooking.

As per usual, I prepared all of the ingredients before starting to do any cooking and I had a series of saucers with the ingredients ready to go (each saucer had the ingredients that were to be added at the same time). This is my regular was of preparing curry ingredients because I want to make sure that I follow the recipe correctly which means that everything has to be timed as per the recipe - no allowance for taking too long to chop up onions (I can’t chop them up like the chefs do on TV - I’m much slower so that I end up with the same number of fingers that I start with).

I started to cook the rice and I heated up the oil before the 10 minute mark arrived. Once the 10 minute cooking was over, I removed the rice from the heat and started frying the onions. I did this bit of overlapping to try and make sure that the rice was still hot when the final stages of cooking were reached.

With the onions cooked, it was simply a few steps to add the remaining ingredients, making sure that they were well mixed into the curry. I already has some water boiling before it was needed and all of the cooking steps were easily followed.

The Mushroom Biryani curry was served up to the waiting dinner guests and they eagerly sampled their meals. But something was wrong. The curry had way too few mushrooms (only 3 1/2 oz isn’t very many - this was only 6 button mushrooms). The main comments that were thrown around was that the curry was spicy and that is was bland - difficult to do both, but that was the verdict. The curry received a poor taste score of 5 out of 10 and a spice/heat rating of “medium to hot”.

What went wrong?

Firstly, I think that there should be more mushrooms. The 3 1/2 oz of mushrooms was totally lost amongst the rice. A pound of mushrooms would have been better.

Secondly, were the ingredients cooked? The chillies were definitely raw which suits me fine but not everybody wants to eat raw chillies. The spices didn’t taste crunchy but there was no way that they had blended into the curry in the way that spices do in a more regular biryani.

Or it could have been me. I may have just messed it up, although I personally don’t think so (I usually know when I’ve messed up the cooking).

I found it was a disappointing curry and will follow the more regular biryani recipes from now onwards (I won’t stop eating biryanis - they are usually delicious).

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

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

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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

The weekend is here again so it’s time to try out another of those delicious Curry Focus recipes.

The past few weeks have seen me making meat dishes and that led me to look at the vegetarian recipes for a new recipe to try. I simply adore biryani recipes and found a Vegetarian Biryani recipe that was posted on the website only last month. The recipe uses a lot of vegetables so the curry must be healthy, right?

I made a note of the ingredients to buy and went to my favorite local vegetable store to get the fresh vegetables.

I had a closer look at the recipe when I got home and saw that there was an obvious error in the recipe. All up, the recipe had 1 1/2 lbs of vegetables, some large potatoes, 2 cups of rice and 1/2 cup of lentils. The recipe said that this was a curry for 4-6 people but this amount of food would easily feed double that number. And with all those ingredients, do you really need potatoes? I like potatoes as much as the next person but 6 large potatoes is way too much. So I changed the recipe to make it only 3 potatoes and made the potatoes totally optional.

As usual, I prepared all the ingredients before starting to cook and found that this is, like most of the Curry Focus recipes, a really easy recipe to follow. About the only difficult thing to do was fit all of the ingredients into my favorite large frying pan - I cook most curries in this great frying pan that I’ve had for years (it cost a lot of money when I bought it but has lasted well and still looks like it will outlast me).

It’s really important to make sure you use a large frying pan, or saucepan to make this curry otherwise it will not fit.

One major success for me was that the rice was perfectly cooked after 25 minutes in the final phase of cooking – I often end up with under cooked rice with the absorbtion method and it’s a delightful surprise when the rice turns out well.

I served the Vegetable Biryani to the assembled diners and there was a large serving for all with lots of healthy vegetables. All of the ingredients were cooked just right and the curry tasted wonderful – you could even taste the lentils. All of the diners enjoyed the biryani and it got a taste score of 8 out of 10 with a spice/heat score of “medium to hot” (I must admit, I only found the curry to be medium but one person said that it was hot and I record the real scores to try and let everyone know what to expect – after all, my medium could be somebody else’s mild).

It occurred to me that this would be a great dish to make if you’re making a large family meal, or supplying one dish in a family meal, where people can help themselves to a selection of food and everyone gets some great biryani. I ended up freezing 4 servings of curry to save for work lunches. Wicked.

Most of us, when we eat a curry, combine it with a few lagers… however, although beer can help to quell a “tongue on fire”, fizzy drinks are not always the best idea for drinking with a curry. We are going to look at exploring this further in articles to come.

Latest Articles

Curry Goat
Review of the Fish Curry with Lemon Grass Recipe
Visitors to Curry Focus in 2009
Review of the Dry Chicken Curry Recipe

Top 5 Recipes for last month

1 Naan Bread
2 Easy Chicken Curry
3 Left over Ham and Rice Curry
4 Leftover Turkey Curry (version 1)
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