Cooking with Jonny69: CURRY!!!

[Jonny69]

Cooking with Jonny69: CURRY!!!

Something for the weekend sir? Why yes Jonny. How about a curry recipe? Of course sir, I'll take you through how to cook this beautiful tiger prawn curry:

I have made this over and over and over again to perfect the recipe trying to mirror curries you get in Indian restaurants. The secret is to make a paste which acts as the base of the curry and then you add various ingredients to it for taste. This is by far the most adventurous of my cooking escapades so far but it's a lot simpler than you'd first think and the results are a satisfying rich curry sauce ready for meat, seafood, fish or vegetables and spices to taste. I'll go through what else to add further down.

Ingredients, makes 4 portions:

8-10 cloves of garlic
2 onions
chunk of ginger about the size of your thumb
1 red chilli
Bunch of fresh coriander
Tin of tomatoes
Vegetable oil
Salt

First we make the paste. Into the blender goes all the garlic cloves, half an onion, a piece of peeled ginger about the size of your thumb and a whole red chilli:

This sounds like a lot of garlic. It is! But the base of the curry is pretty much garlic and onion, very strong flavours to stand up to the heat of the chilli and other hefty spices you may add. You also only want to put in the one chilli at this point as you can bump the heat up later with chilli powder or more fresh chilli. Add to that a handful of washed fresh coriander, a good pinch of salt and about 3 tablespoons of vegetable oil:

Again that sounds like a lot of oil but without it the paste doesn't cook well. Blitz that up until it's quite smooth:

 

[Jonny69]

Get a wok quite hot and dump it all in and get it frying down until it starts to darken in colour slightly and the oil will just start to come out the paste:

Add in a whole chopped onion and cook that in until it softens:

Once the onion is soft add about half to 2/3 of a tin of tomatoes and continue to fry down until the colour of the tomatoes has darkened down with the paste:

 

[Jonny69]

See how the colour has changed, it now looks like curry and tastes like curry. It's too rough and thick to use as it is so add a small cup of boiling water and allow to simmer down for about 20 minutes. It'll reduce down a little from this:

To this:

And basically now it's ready to go. Check the taste at this point. It'll taste like curry, but you'll know how much more seasoning and chilli you need to add. This is your curry base. It's to this that you add meat, seafood, veg or fish and other spices. It's the other ingredients that you add that determine what curry it is you have just cooked.

So to make my prawn curry I have added the following to my pestle and mortar, 1/2tsp coriander seed, 1/2tsp cumin seeds, 1/2tsp turmeric, 1/2tsp garam masala. I ground that up and it goes straight in to the base. I also added 1/2tsp of chilli powder to bring the heat up a bit and about 5 whole cardamom pods.

I also added a sliced yellow pepper and the rest of the second onion, again that goes straight in as it is and cooks for about 10 minutes:

At which point the sauce should have taken a more rich colour, smooth texture and the vegetables you just put in are still slightly crunchy:

 

[Jonny69]

I got these raw peeled frozen tiger prawns from China town, undefrosted, they are going in as they are and the ice on the outside will help add to the taste:

Let that simmer down for about 10 minutes until the prawns are cooked through:

And now it's ready to serve on a bed of pilau rice with a hunk of nann bread in a large eating bowl:

Have a go at that, it tastes fantastic!

Some further ingredients to add to the base, depending on the curry: Coconut milk, yoghurt, tomatoes, spinach, almond, tamarind. No end, you just experiment and add it to your taste

 

[Jonny69]

Could you substitute the prawns with chicken or something?

Of course, fry the meat off first to get some colour on it and simmer in the curry sauce to cook it through

 

[Jonny69]

Might just go out now and buy a King Prawn Curry myself right now.

LAZY GIT!!!

 

[Jonny69]

ps - johny can you recommend any books for seafish, as I'm only just started to get into seafish and have no idea how to cook such things, time wise and best methods. Damn parents for hating any type of sea food other than fish.

No good with fish unfortunately, I'm very allergic to it!!!

I've watched Rick Stein do some great stuff with fish, wish I could eat it, looks delicious.

Thats awesome, im gunna cook this tonight. Its got me in the mood for a home made curry !

you won't regret it

 

[Jonny69]

yup nice one mate, gonna give this a go sunday in a slow cooker (thats a pan not me)

Andy

Make sure you fry the paste off, seems to be a critical bit of the method I've found but the rest can just cook down nice and slow

 

[Jonny69]

haven't you just made a fish curry?

Seafood. Different stuff according to my gut. Seafood=fine, fish=3 day vomit sesh

Noooooo



Good job I had a towl across me lap otherwise that lot would have gone all over the floor and more.

I don't even want to know why you're sitting there at your pc with only a towel round you

Note to Jonny.

We can now have 10 picturesd per post (lots of smileys)

CURSES

 

[Jonny69]

Jonny69, my goodness man you can actually cook, I always thought your solutions were just a beans on toast effort but that is quite superb.

Plenty more where this came from. The big guns are out

 

[Jonny69]

Lets see your Linguine recipe. I've been thinking about posting my Prawn & Salmon one for a while now, but my camera is so poor.

Sounds good apart from the toxic dose of salmon involved. Post it up

 

[Jonny69]

Yes, that's what I normally do.

 

[Jonny69]

Big ben?

 

[Jonny69]

Hey, there's loads of updates on this I missed! Great to see lots of you gave it a go, makes it really feel worthwhile posting my cooking threads!

 

[Jonny69]

Saag aloo recipe

Looks pretty good, you should have started a fresh thread for this but I'll be able to find it easily here

I've cooked saag aloo before without the mustard seeds and turmeric but with a little curry powder and it comes out pretty much how my local place does it. This looks better and I'll give it a go next time I do a feast from the east

 

[Jonny69]

Do you have to sign up to see the recipes on that site Slime?

 

[Jonny69]

IF anyones interested in curries at the moment , not to steal away from this fantastic looking dish but gordon ramsey is doing a show at the moment on channel 4 called Gordon's Great Escape, basically travelling india and going back to basics with curry and learning how to cook some damn yummy ones aswell

I'm quite enjoying that programme but they seem to be showing it every night rather than once a week at the same time. How annoying is that?

 

[Jonny69]

One question though...I would like to make it again, but add cream/ yoghurt etc to make a more creamy sauce - at which point in the recipe would I add this?

Cream and yoghurt has a habit of splitting if you heat it in a sauce like this for too long. I'd add it in at the end.

Sudden, what was the other recipe you tried? Always up for something new. Did you try Haircut's Goan curry too? That's pretty awesome if you can find it buried in the archives

Edit: here: http://91.151.218.11/showthread.php?t=17798492

 

[Jonny69]

Looks good - I'm going to give it a go

Fenugreek is a new spice in my cupboard and I'm getting to grips with it, so it'll be good to see how it comes out.