Massaman Curry – Potato Curry for St. Patrick’s Day

I’ve been tinkering with this recipe for awhile. Sarah originally concocted a massaman curry one night with a little assistance from me and some taste testing by Ted and Roger. (You can read her blog, and find her recipe, here: http://arwz.com/ssblog/2012/01/15/the-great-no-paste-thai-curry-experiment) The idea was to develop no-paste curry recipes, curries one could just throw together the night-of without having to worry about making an elaborate paste beforehand. Following up on this project was crucial to me because, as I’ve mentioned before, I love curry, and am increasingly becoming too poor to go out to eat as often as I’d like to to eat it.

I liked Sarah’s massaman curry – if you look at her recipe, you’ll see that our versions aren’t too terribly dissimilar – but it just wasn’t … right to me. So I took her recipe and began to tinker. Luckily, massaman curry is Ted’s favorite Thai dish, so he didn’t mind me making it over and over again. Besides my overall urge to get the recipe just to my liking, I also wanted to get another recipe together to share on my friend Mark’s excellent cooking blog, http://cookinwluv.blogspot.com/ – he has a feature there, called Made with Love Mondays, that asks for recipes made from scratch. And this week seemed particularly appropriate: he had asked for Irish recipes, in honor of St. Patrick’s day, and I thought, “Hell, potato curry – what’s more Irish than that?” Ahem.

So without further ado, here is my final No-Paste Thai Massaman Curry recipe. I particularly like this recipe because it requires no fresh ingredients other than what I put into the curry sauce. By this I mean, if I stop at the store to pick up potatoes, a bell pepper, and some chicken thighs on the way home, everything else is something that’s almost guaranteed to be in my house already as a staple.

You’ll need:
Onion, garlic, ginger, dried red peppers, cooking oil, ground galangal, ground cloves, ground cinnamon, ground cardamom, ground nutmeg, whole coconut milk, fish sauce, brown sugar, tamarind paste, ground peanuts (NOT peanut butter), filtered water or broth (chicken or vegetable), potatoes, protein, vegetables, and basmati rice. (I would also advise fresh cilantro, for garnish.)

Step One: In a food processer, process together the following ingredients. (I don’t have an immersion blender, and the transferring of a hot liquid from pot to food processer and back again is too perilous for me, so therefore I do the food processing in advance. But if you don’t even have a food processer, that’s OK, too – just mince the onion and ginger and garlic really finely.)

1 onion
3-4 garlic cloves
2 tbl fresh ginger (If you don’t have fresh ginger around, use 1 tbl of ground ginger in Step Three)
Dried red chilies (I use sanaam chilies, which are small and hot – I use three of them, but this is a matter of taste and pepper quality, so adjust according to your preferences)

The pureed onion, ginger, garlic, and peppers.

Step Two: Sauté this puree in 1-2 tbl of neutral-tasting oil (like canola) until the liquid cooks off.

Step Three: Add to the pan the following spices.

1 tsp dried galangal (A must for at-home Thai cooks – they have it at Penzey’s)
½ tsp ground cloves
½ tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp ground cardamom
Pinch of nutmeg

I always use generous measurements, so more like, “heaping ½ tsp”, etc. Saute for about 30 seconds, until fragrant.

Spices!

Step Four: Add the following to your spicy paste.

1 can of whole coconut milk
6-10 dashes of fish sauce
2 tbl brown sugar
1 tbl tamarind paste
2 tbl ground peanuts (NOT peanut butter – I mean the ground nut paste you can get out of the machine at Whole Foods. If you can’t get this, just crush up some roasted, unsalted peanuts as finely as you can, about 3 tbl worth, and add those.)
1-2 cups filtered water or broth (I use veggie broth, personally)

… plus bite-sized potato chunks and protein. Two things about the potatoes: one, definitely cut them small – for whatever reason, cooking them in this mixture takes forever, MUCH longer than just simmering a potato. If you use large chunks, be prepared to wait upwards of an hour and a half before they’re tender. Two, though I usually leave the peel on my potatoes for the nutrients and fiber it provides, you really should peel your potatoes for this recipe, so that they can absorb as much of the delicious curry sauce as possible; potato flavor sponges, that’s what they are. Also, as to protein, I favor chicken thighs, but that’s your call.

NOT PEANUT BUTTER.

Step Five: Simmer 30-45 minutes, until the potatoes are tender.

Step Six: Add veggies. I like to use chunks of red, yellow, and/or orange bell pepper, but I also think cauliflower would work well in this dish – you’d be better off with a vegetable on the neutral-to-sweet side, I think. Simmer 10-15 minutes.

Step Six: Serve over basmati rice. Garnish with fresh cilantro, if you’ve got it.

Sabrina's Massaman Curry

ETA: thanks to @javelinwarrior for posting this recipe on his blog!
JWsMadeWLuvMondays

Butter Chicken Adventures

Apparently, it’s White Girls Making Indian Meals Day here on the blog. Hurrah!

A while ago I tweeted that I’d like to take a look at 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi, as it was recommended by Francis Lam, who’s writing I’ve enjoyed on Salon.com and who is also very nice on Twitter. Turned out Sarah owned this book, and she lent it to me.

I have tried in the past to make curries, both Indian and Thai, from recipes gleaned from the Internet; all of them my husband has hated. This is an impediment, surely, since, y’know, that’s half of my cooking audience, generally. One of the problems with cooking for myself and my fuzzier half is that we have very different taste buds, or so it seems. He has a very sensitive palate, and is laid low by what I consider to be very mild levels of spiciness. On the other hand, I prefer very strong flavors and very spicy dishes. He thinks that my taste buds are in some way lacking in efficacy, and he may well be right, but I think this has its advantages: I genuinely like the taste of those bitter, dark green vegetables that one is always being told to consume for health, I can appreciate a good peaty Scotch, and I never look like one of those Middle American, Golden Corral patron-types when I go out to dinner to an “ethnic” restaurant. (A related aside: Nick and I went to lunch at Taste of India last week. There, we overhead one of said Middle Americans lecturing the Indian waiter, “Well, y’know, we Americans like middle-of-the-road stuff – nothing too spicy.” Sigh!)

Anyway. Trying to appease Ted’s delicate taste buds, and trying to make things easy on myself by picking a recipe I already had almost everything for, from Camellia’s cook book I chose Butter Chicken. Here is the recipe as I found it:

2 lb. chicken, skinned quarters, smaller pieces on the bone or boneless pieces (tikkas)
4-5 tablespoons oil

For the marinade:
2 cups plain yogurt
6 cloves garlic
1/2-in square of fresh ginger
2/3 teaspoon red chile powder or paprika
1/4 teaspoon coriander powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon garam masala powder
a tiny pinch of tandoori coloring (optional)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons lime juice

For the makhani sauce:
1&1/2 lb tomatoes
1/2 teaspoon kasuri methi (dried fenugreek leaves)
[Sarah gave me a bag of these – yes, it appeared as though I had a huge bag of weed in my purse.]
3 oz. chilled butter [This amounts to 5 tablespoons, FYI.]
1/2 teaspoon paprika
few drops of vinegar
1/4 teaspoon garam masala
salt
1&1/2 fl oz of light cream
[About 2 tablespoons.]

My kitchen as I made my chicken curry, rice, and veggies.

Butter Chicken in process

I didn’t follow the recipe completely exactly. For one, Camellia wanted me to drain my yogurt in cheese cloth, which I don’t have, and didn’t feel like trying to track down. For two, she has very specific instructions for like, adding spices – “Add such and such, wait 30 seconds, add such and such, stir for a minute, add such and such …” – there’s something about this that just … I don’t know, I’m impatient: the spices went in all at the same time. Finally, instead of fresh tomatoes I used canned crushed tomatoes, since there aren’t any good tomatoes available this time of year anyway, and it saved me the effort of scalding and peeling and smooshing the substandard supermarket tomatoes. Oh, and I omitted the oil from the chicken, because it just didn’t seem necessary.

 

Basically, you put everything in the marinade, mix it well, insert the chicken (I used some free-range, vegetarian-fed, air-chilled, boneless, skinless thighs) and let it sit over night. Then you cook the chicken in the marinade, and make the tomato sauce at the last minute, pouring it in with the marinade-y chicken right before you serve the dish. I also made basmati rice and a mess of vegetables to go with the curry. Ted and friend Roger were my guinea pigs.

A pot full of simmering chicken in yogurt sauce.

The chicken as it cooked in its yogurt marinade.

Some trouble arose. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t drain the yogurt through cheese cloth, but the marinade became VERY watery as the chicken was cooking, such that, though Camellia said to cook the chicken low and covered, I ended up uncovering it and boiling off quite a bit of liquid. Also, I think in the future I would use a leaner cut of meat, as the thighs gave off quite a bit of fat that I had to skim off – actually, I think in the future I’d just make this with chickpeas, but that’s a different point.

 

So how was it received? Well, Ted loved it. Seriously. Roger also seemed to be very much in favor of it. I found it … bland, frankly. I knew that it wasn’t going to be spicy, of course, as I’d specifically picked a recipe that wouldn’t be spicy for Ted’s sake. But mild is not necessarily unflavorful. I felt as though all of the spice measurements should have been doubled. But perhaps that’s just my disabled taste buds talking. It was also a bit too tomato-y, perhaps because I’d used canned tomatoes instead of fresh – fair enough, in the future I suppose I’d try to track down a decent green house tomato or several.

I wish I had a picture of the final dish for you: I took one, but my phone’s camera decided not to save it, in a fit of pique. The dish comes out a creamy, orangey pink, and it presented well: had I had some fresh cilantro, that would have been a welcome vegetal note to add as a garnish.

So, judge for yourself: two yeas and a meh. I’m going to take a run at another curry, I think, before returning to this one, perhaps one that involves a little less dairy. And upon returning to this recipe, which I think Ted will insist upon, I think I’ll try increasing the spice measurements by 50% – perhaps Ted and I can find a happy medium.