Currying Flavor

Oh, punning on the word "curry".

I've decided, given there are a few Indian coworkers, that I'm going to give a hand at making some curry dishes. I've tried cooking Indian food in the past, but usually, to mixed success. Many years ago, when I first tried cooking Indian food, I had no idea what the result should taste like.

I did get some practice because I had a Muslim Indian friend (more Indian, than Muslim, but that is belaboring a point) who often would cook dinner for me and another friend, provided we'd help him cook. This usually meant dicing onions very finely. He was pretty fond of beef, but Indians, at least the meat-eating variety, prefer the meat gets infused with spices. They're very sensitive to "raw" meat taste (or presumably, even cooked meat taste) which Americans, I would guess, are fond of, as they tend to only minimally spice their meats (salt and pepper being this minimal set).

Alas, despite the many times I assisted, I never quite remembered what went in the dishes. Onions, ginger, tomatoes were as much I vaguely recalled, and that it took quite sometime for the meat to take on the flavor of the spices.

Today, I tried a recipe from America's Test Kitchen, which is a PBS show hosted by Christopher Kimball. He's also the editor of Cooks Illustrated, a magazine that looks like other fancy cooking magazines like Saveur, but is really far more pragmatic, and engineering-oriented in its approach.

In particular, these guys don't just give you recipes. They tell you how they arrived at the recipe, having experimented with 10-20 recipes before finally settling on the one they illustrate. Do these always provide the best recipes? Hard to say. But the innovation of this magazine is to make you realize that experimentation is worth the effort when it comes to finding the right recipes.

My brother gave me Season 6 and 7 DVDs of America's Test Kitchen (I suggested it to him that I wanted this series since we've mostly given up on surprising the other person and merely get something they would like). In one of the episodes, they did two curries: Indian and Thai.

You'd think the Indian curry might be more challenging, but the Thai curry was quite complex.

Oh, I suppose I should explain something I've known for a while. There's no such spice as "curry". Curry is an amalgamation of different spices. Indians typically refer to such spices as masala, the most famous being garam masala.

Masalas can be made from up to a dozen different spices. They can be selected from: cumin, coriander, fenugreek, cardamom (two kinds, green and black), cloves, cinnamon (which is mostly for savory dishes, not sweet), turmeric (which gives curry its distinctive yellow color), asafoetida (also known as hing), nutmeg, fennel, mustard seeds. This isn't even hitting chilis and salt! Or "wet" ingredients like ginger and garlic (which they share in common with Chinese cooking).

Most Indian recipes can be rather daunting. The spice list itself can be 8 or more of the ingredients.

I try to find simpler recipes that require maybe 10 ingredients total, and can be cooked in under an hour.

I tried the rudiments of a shrimp curry recipe, but replaced the shrimp with chicken.

Here's the basic outline of the recipe. Take an onion, cut it into slivers (but not diced). Heat oil, and brown the onions, about five minutes. Add tumeric (1t), cumin (2t), coriander (2t), salt (1/2 t), then add 1/2 cup of yogurt, and a garlic/ginger paste (4 cloves, 1.5 inch ginger, food processed with about 1/4 cup water or less). Once this cooks, add cilantro (coriander leaves) and water (a fair bit) and a jalapeno. Sit for 20 minutes. Add shrimp.

I asked Isha for her opinion. She suggested that I mince the onions because slivers wouldn't create a thick consistency (chopped onions can create a thicker consistency). She suggested frying the chiles at the same time as the onions so the spiciness would be sure to be in there. She didn't care for the garlic-ginger puree, preferring to mince them. She also noted that yogurt and tomatoes typically serve interchangeable purposes, in particular, adding a tang to the dish.

I tried part of her advice. I added two jalapenos instead of one, and fried them with the onions. I did the puree only because I was lazy, and for the most part, that was pretty quick.

The problem I ran into? First, the dish wasn't particularly hot. Even with two jalapenos, I found it to be pretty mild. Second, I added a half cup of water, and that made the result pretty watery.

I might try using the food processor to create an onion paste, and give that a try, instead of chopping and mincing. Furthermore, I might try a hotter chili like a Thai chili.

It tasted all right, but still, something was missing.