I’ve gone a bit curry mad lately. A recent rerun of Floyd’s Indiadidn’t help, and Gordon Ramsay’s latest seriesisn’t going to quash it either. So tonight I really fancied yet another home-brewed curry.
A quick aside: I can’t find a gospel on how Indian food should be named. Sometimes it’s named by method (balti), sometimes by ingredient (dhansak = double onion). I don’t know what the formula is. So I’ve decided to make my own rules too, smashing the Indian terms for coriander and cauliflower together, to reach dhania gobi. I could’ve gone with vegetable masala, or courgette bargar, or carrot jeera. So pardon me for slapping almost any old name on it, but I like the exotic sound. (If anybody knows the real ‘rules’, let me know).
I had courgette, cauliflower and carrot on hand, so they were a lock. Then it was a case of picking and choosing my spices. Coriander ended up going in twice and was the main flavour, so it packed quite a citrussy punch. A little yoghurt at the end helped both thicken and sour the dish, and was pretty pleased with the result. This won’t be the last curry I cook this season, I’m sure!
Dhania gobi:
1 tablespoon coriander seeds, cracked
1 teaspoon cumin seeds, cracked
2 inch cassia bark
1 onion, sliced
1 tablespoon garlic and ginger paste
½ teaspoon turmeric
½ teaspoon garam masala
1 teaspoon tomato puree
2 carrots, diced
2 courgettes, diced
½ head cauliflower, diced
1 litre vegetable stock
2 tablespoons plain yoghurt
1 tablespoon ground almonds
Chopped coriander leaves
Fry the coriander seeds, cumin and cassia in a little oil for a minute. Add the onion and soften.
Add the paste, turmeric, garam masala, puree and a pinch of salt and stir for another minute. Add the vegetables and coat well with the onion masala.
Add the stock and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer and continue to cook for 15 minutes or until the veg is tender.
Take off the heat and stir in the yoghurt and almonds. Serve topped with coriander leaves.
Every couple of months I get the urge to make another curry, and I’ve made plenty in the last year. It was a Saturday dish, so I had to time to put a little effort in. After a little research I settled on Jamie Oliver’s chicken tikka masala from Jamie’s Dinners. I still had some garam masala left over from a Heston-inspired blend some months ago so that was going to be my main spice base. Also with recent experiments in brining being met with a great deal of success I had to stick some brining in as the first stage. You could skip this bit if you wanted to, but I love the moistness and depth of flavour this imparts.
I wanted a vegetable side-dish and love the way cauliflower absorbs curry flavours. The key for me is to almost overcook it – a soft, squishy floret bursting with spice is the way to go here.
Plain rice is always sniffed at in my house so I have to be creative with it. I remembered a delicious rice dish by the cuddly Nigel Slater, from my most favourite of his books Appetite. I’ve eaten it before just on it’s own, but gently pared down it makes a tasty – yet interesting – bowl of rice.
The curry itself was time-consuming (aren’t they all?) but thankfully very, very tasty. In fact about the most ‘authentic’ (yes, of course I mean authentic to that you find in a takeaway) tikka masala recipe I’ve eaten. Creamy, nutty and boasting spice from within. The cauliflower was a tasty foil for the curry, with aromatic rice to back it up. (On a side note, both Jamie’s and Nigel’s recipe called for at least 1 chilli in each – we’re not so crazy about super-hot things in our house, so I’ve omitted them to let the spices speak for themselves. By all means chuck some in if they’re your thing).
A dead tasty nottakeaway.
Chicken tikka masala (serves 3):
For the brine:
1 litre water
2 tablespoons sea salt
5 tablespoons honey
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 cardamom pods, cracked
3 cloves
2 chicken breasts, diced
For the tikka marinade:
6 cloves garlic, grated
3 inches fresh ginger, grated
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 tablespoons garam masala
200g natural yoghurt
For the masala sauce:
2 onions, sliced
2 tablespoons garam masala
2 tablespoons tomato puree
2 tablespoons ground almonds
120ml double cream
Handful parsley, chopped
Mix the brine ingredients together and soak the chicken in the water for at least 2 hours, anywhere up to 8 hours.
Drain and rinse the chicken well. Discard the liquid.
Heat the mustard seeds in a splash of oil until they start to pop (about 2 minutes). Remove the seeds from the pan and stir into the other ingredients. Coat the chicken with the yoghurt mix and leave to marinate for half an hour.
In the same pan the mustard seeds were warmed in, add some butter and fry the onions gently with the garam masala. Leave to sweat and soften for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, grill the chicken pieces on both sides until cooked through.
Back at the onions, ad the tomato puree, almonds, 1 litre water and a good sprinkle of salt. Allow to bubble and reduce until thick.
Add the cream and check the seasoning. Add the chicken into the sauce and stir well to coat the meat and let the flavours mingle.
Stir in the parsley and serve.
Gobi masala:
1 head of cauliflower, cut into small florets to cook evenly
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon garam masala
200ml vegetable stock
Heat the butter in a small saucepan until foaming. Add the spice and cook for a minute.
Add the florets and toss well to coat in the spice butter. Cook for another minute.
Add the stock and boil fairly fast until the cauliflower is knife-tender.
Turn off the heat and put a lid on it for about ten minutes. The cauliflower will soak up some of the excess fluid.
Aromatic rice:
1 onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, peeled and bashed
1 cinnamon stick
3 cloves
4 cardamom pods
1 cupful rice per person
Fry the onion gently until softened, then add the garlic.
Add the spices and stir, allowing them to warm.
Add the rice and a generous sprinkle of salt, stir will to coat the rice in the spiced oil. Top up the pan with three times the amount of water to rice. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer.
Cover the pan and allow to simmer for ten minutes – do not lift the lid.
Turn off the heat and leave for a further ten minutes, leaving the lid on.
Stir through with a fork and grind over plenty of black pepper. If you have any left over from the curry, throw in some parsley too.
Jamie Oliver’s title, not mine. Yes it’s another recreation from Jamie’s America. I have a macaroni cheese recipe I’m pretty happy with so it would be interesting to see what this brought to it. You start with a roux, add sliced garlic, whisk in milk, add cheese and then add boiled pasta and tomatoes. For some reason tomatoes weren’t on the menu tonight so I bunged in broc and cauli instead. Breadcrumbs on top, then in the oven for half an hour.
The key differences to mine were to add sliced garlic to the roux. This did lend an interesting smoky note to it which I enjoyed, but I didn’t feel adding both cheddar and parmesan did much for it. If I was going to improve on it, some pancetta would be nice and chewy. This is still a work in progress.
I saw Oliver’s Twist the other day, a TV programme of Jamie Oliver’s created for syndication all over the world. It’s little seen in the UK until recently, when the Good Food Channel started running them. In this one, he was making food for his then-14 month old daughter Poppy. The minestrone soup he made really caught my eye, and my tongue!
I found his recipe for minestrone on his site. ‘Minestrone’ loosely means “the big soup” and has no set recipe; it’s an Italian staple designed to use whatever vegetables are in season and stretch them out for soup. I had some cauliflower and courgette leftover from yesterday’s curry so they were definitely going in, along with some tomatoes and asparagus tips I had.
I started by sweating down a diced onion and some crushed garlic, along with some finely chopped basil stalks. I find the stalks of basil plants infuse your soffritto with such perfume, it’s really delicious backnote. I wasn’t impressed with the quality of my tomatoes so I added a squirt of tomato puree here too. I then added the diced veg as above, spaghetti snapped into 2 inch pieces and vegetable stock. I let it simmer until the pasta was al dente, then scooped into deep bowls topped with shredded basil. The final genius touch by Jamie was a generous dollop of pesto; it sounds a bit odd but the powerful ingredients seep gently into the broth and infuse it with sunny flavours. Very tasty, and one that will stay with me all year depending on what’s in the cupboard!
