You may consider this blog a follow-up to my last, “Butter Chicken Adventures.” Last night, I tried another recipe from Camellia Panjabi’s 50 Great Curries of India. It is the recipe that fronts the main recipe section of the book, and is on a page titled “Making a Simple Homestyle Curry.” Here is the recipe as I found it:
4 tablespoons oil
1 large onion, very finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/4-inch piece of fresh ginger, chopped
3/4 teaspoon coriander powder
a pinch of tumeric powder
1/4 teaspoon cumin powder
1/4 teaspoon garam masala powder
1 teaspoon paprika powder
2 tomatoes, chopped
salt
chopped cilantro leaves for garnish
1) Heat the oil in a heavy pan. Add the onion and saute over a medium heat for about 20-25 minutes or until deep brown. Add the garlic and ginger and fry for 1 minute. Add the coriander powder and stir for another full minute. Then add the turmeric, cumin, garam masala, and paprika, and saute for 30 seconds. Add 1 cup of water and cook for 10 minutes. Put in the tomatoes, stir well, and cook for a further 5 minutes.
2) Now the curry sauce is ready. Add salt to taste. Put in … chicken, lamb, fish or vegetables. Add 1 1/2 cups of water for chicken, 2 1/2 cups for lamb, 1 cup for fish, 2 cups for vegetables. Cook until done. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro leaves just before serving.
I followed this recipe more or less exactly, except instead of fresh tomatoes I used canned. I doubled the entire recipe, so there would be leftovers, except I did not double the water at the end; I used broccoli and chickpeas as my veggies. Two thoughts: one, as with my previous curry from this book, I found – and this time, Ted also found – this dish to be underflavored. It was a good spice mix, it just wasn’t potent enough. Because of my prior experience with Camellia’s curry, I used heaping spice measurements, but this proved insufficient to combat the problem – all of the flavoring ingredients seem to need doubled (or quadrupled in my case, since I had already doubled all of the ingredients to take the dish from one meant to serve two to one meant to serve four). Two, the sauce was much too watery, something Sarah warned me might happen with the recipes in this book. I cooked off as much of the water as I could before my broccoli began to get too soft, but still – if I were to make this again, I would just omit the last addition of water altogether: the liquid in the can of tomatoes would have more than sufficed, along with the liquid that naturally bleeds off vegetables when they cook. Oh, and be forewarned: getting the onions deep brown actually took more than 30 minutes (though this might have been from my use of two onions instead of one), and required a fair amount of stirring and vigilance to prevent them from burning.
Also … y’know, it just didn’t taste like a restaurant dish.
But it wasn’t bad, and it was certainly healthy, so I’m not saying I wouldn’t recommend it per se.
Yes, I would recommend adding water only as needed in any of her recipes. Feel free to double the spices, and I honestly don’t pay attention to all of those steps for waiting a certain number of minutes to add a new ingredient. I just saute any fresh stuff (i.e. onions, garlic) for a few minutes, then add the dry stuff (powdered spices), and then add any liquid stuff (canned tomatoes, coconut milk, etc). Sometimes I’ll process the dry stuff and the liquid stuff together together in the food processor if there are whole spices (cinnamon stick, whole cloves, etc) that need to be ground. It may not be authentic, but my American white girl palate can’t tell the difference.
Another strategy to try is making the curry a day ahead of time. Sometimes the flavor of the spices deepens if it melds overnight.
The browning of the onions makes a degree of sense to me – they do change in flavor as they caramelize heavily, so perhaps that makes a difference in the recipe. I think the problem is more that, in this heat, I hate having a burner running on my stove any longer than necessary. And yes, I realize how ironic that is, since this is Indian cuisine, and it’s as hot as the sun in India.
Yes, it does make a difference in taste, but does it make ENOUGH of a difference in taste to justify taking the extra time and heat?