The Curry Secret

After reading Jonathan Davies blog urging his readers to support their local butchers, I was inspired to take a short walk into the small town centre. Pocklington is a small town that has two butchers, a fishmongers, an arts centre, two delicatessens, an award-winning tea shop, a coffee shop, Chinese and Italian restaurants, an old-fashioned sweet shop, numerous bakeries and cake shops, and a recently-opened ice-cream parlour to name a few of the options that draw local shoppers and food-lovers. It also has plenty of pubs to choose from!

We visited the local hardware store and got some crumpet rings and a blowtorch (more on that later!), then took a slow walk round before ending up at the butchers, WF Burtons. Burtons always has a long queue snaking outside the shop, and enjoys an excellent local reputation. I bought half a kilo of Lamb neck, the same weights again of diced venison and minced beef, four chicken, lemon and pepper burgers, a pheasant, a jar of Mango Chutney (the best I have ever tasted!), and a bottle of locally-produced Wolds apple juice (the Wolds always gets overlooked in favour of the Dales; the Wolds label on the juice certainly attracted me!). The total cost: about £19. The lamb on its own came to £1.74 – a bargain considering around 300g in Sainsburys is over £3.00. The last shop I visited was Atkinson’s Deli, a real Aladdin’s cave style food emporium selling everything from vegetables and eggs to cake decorating kit, a good selection of cheese and meats, tea (sold by weight), a very large selection of herbs and spices and all manor of tasty treats. I was surprised to see ‘make-your-own’ selection packs from Rafi’s Spice Box, a fantastic curry shop in York that sells every Indian ingredient that you could think of. All these are at fantastic prices.

Having said how good these stores are, not all in Pocklington are necessarily so good. Most of the shops in the town have a poster campaigning for the local shops. I think this is a good cause, but equally, shops aren’t necessarily superb just because they are local! Give the shops the benefit of the doubt but, just as anywhere else, if they don’t offer quality and value for money there is no real reason to go back.

I love a good curry, but this is something that I can’t get locally. There is a local Indian restaurant and takeaway but every time I’ve been, the food has been over-priced and bland. There is another not far down the road, but the food is hit-and-miss and the staff not very welcoming, so I decided to make my own authentic takeaway!

‘The Curry Secret’, by Kris Dhillon, was first published in 1989, and promises to share the closely-guarded secret recipes of the British Indian restaurant – not the authentic recipes that real Indian’s eat, but a good British curry. I first heard of the book from another forum I use often, and have had it for a while without using it. The Curry Secret is presented similarly to ‘The Curry Book’ – both old fashioned paperbacks without pictures, but TCB is a collection of slightly more authentic recipes than the TCS, whose aim is to reproduce the curry house experience.

The secret is simple – cook a base sauce, add the meat and adapt the recipe slightly for each different curry. The meats are all cooked in the same style as well – this is described at the beginning of the book. The idea is then to cook a massive batch of the sauce in advance and freeze it. I was making a one off Lamb Dopiaza, and it seemed like I was slaving over the sauce for ages. I didn’t feel good about it either – it was only at the last minute the curry visually came together, but when it did, it looked good and recognisable. The dopiaza is a basic mild curry with onions, something that both Mrs Chef and I could enjoy. The main ingredient of the base sauce is onions, with ginger, garlic and water, with tomatoes, oil and salt added later, along with chilli powder. I was very weepy by the time I had finished peeling the onions! The other spices you will need include Garam Masala, Cumin, Turmeric, Paprika and Fenugreek leaves. Once these have been bought they will last a long time when used like this. The lamb was cooked in a small amount of the base sauce, oil and cumin.

We served the Curry with a Garlic and Nutmeg rice from Jamie Oliver’s ‘Ministry of Food’ book, which Mrs. Chef handled. I really like this book – everything I have made from it has been good so far. To cook the rice, you par boil, then steam, then fry in butter, garlic, nutmeg and lemon, one of the four flavoured options. I think doing something with the rice made a big difference to the meal, rather than having plain boiled rice over and over again. We finished off with a Keema Naan from Sainsbury’s – there is really no point in making your own naan. Unless you have a tandoori oven, it will never be authentic.

So, how was it? The curry was good, but not excellent. It wasn’t as rich as a takeaway curry, which is alarming considering the amount of oil that I used when cooking. It was more like a takeaway curry than anything I had made before but still wasn’t quite there – but then the Dopiaza is quite a basic curry anyway. You can get The Curry Secret for 1p plus postage on amazon marketplace, so its got to be worth a go! The rice was great, a bit of a change that really added to the curry. The nutmeg was different and really went well.

One of the things I bought from the hardware store was a blowtorch, which was used to make Baked Alaska for desert. It was inspired by the Hairy Bikers ‘Mum Knows Best’ book but I made two individual Alaskas, using the only ice-cream we had – Praline Haagen-Daaz! I need more practise on the blowtorch though – the meringue burnt very quickly without cooking underneath.

Using the blowtorch was cool though – I had a Limp Bizkit song roaring in my mind as I was using it!

The Curry Secret @ Amazon

Jamie’s Ministry of Food @ Amazon

Hairy Biker’s @ Amazon

The Curry Book @ Amazon