Sunday, July 28, 2013

The Almost Curry

Sounds like it could be a band name, eh?

Anyways, I've never been a huge fan of curry, but when I found a thread on reddit "How do you make an authentic curry?" I thought... hey... all my friends like curry... so why not try it?

Naturally, being a reddit thread, there were plenty of recipes for curry.  So I listed a bunch of ingredients and we took a trip to the Asian market and found them.  And started cooking.

Admittedly this happened so long ago that I don't actually remember much of the process or the recipe.  But inevitably we had to chop things up.

Onions, potatoes...
Chicken...

Two notes here - one, I was glad for how many cutting boards I had in my college kitchen.  It meant I could chop a bunch of things up at once.  Two, it's way easier to cut chicken with kitchen scissors than with a knife.  It is also way harder to wash the scissors than a knife, but probably worth it.
Here is probably where things started to be weird.  The recipes we had called for the same ingredients in different proportions.  So... I think we guessed.

Or something.

Anyways, we probably should have used the entire packet of curry paste.

Also those cinnamon sticks were cool.
Everything gets dumped in a pot and cooked for a while.  Which admittedly seems strange to me because chicken, but the chicken in this picture is clearly not cooked yet.
At this point, we realized that we didn't have a can opener (I'd loaned it to my clinic team and it was on the other end of campus).  The old school poke a hole in the top of the can type opener worked fine for the coconut milk, but not so much for coconut cream...
This looks curry enough.  Doesn't it?

I actually ended up loving the curry - the spices were more diluted, and it was overwhelmingly coconutty.

Unfortunately, those people who actually like curry (or at least one of them) were far less impressed.  And I didn't like it quite enough to want the leftovers...
So I think next time we find a better recipe.

On the bright side, the bottle of wine we'd decided to drink with the occasion just happened to claim to go well with Indian food.

Total coincidence, I swear.  I don't have the slightest idea how to do wine pairings, but at least that part of the meal worked.  (And, well, the part where I liked it).

But otherwise, I think next time I make curry (if there is a next time), I'll be sticking to a single recipe.  Maybe if Alton Brown has one...

1 comment:

  1. I really love coconut flavor, so I've been making unauthentic coconut curry rice by cooking the rice in curried coconut milk instead of water. I've been meaning to post the recipe on my blog, maybe I will get around to it soon. :)

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