Goan shrimp and vegetable curry

Suvir Saran, the author of the recipe I based this on wrote "I associate this dish's flavors with Goa" and "feel free to add whatever vegetables you want" so I'm guessing that this is not so very traditional. But it uses up three sprigs of the curry leaves, which is a lot for 4 servings, and "whatever vegetables you want" means a bunch of CSA vegetables I have so that's convenient.

Here's my version:

herb paste:
2 sprigs curry leaves, removed from stem
1 1/2-inch piece ginger, peeled and chopped
zest and pulp from 1/4 lime (substituting, poorly, for 1 Tablespoon lemongrass)
1/2 cup cilantro leaves and tender stems
1/2 hot pepper, chopped

1. Blend all that with a few Tablespoons of water into as smooth a paste as you can manage. Set aside.

Curry:
1 1/2 Tablespoons cooking oil
3/4 teaspoon whole cumin seed
1/2 teaspoon brown mustard seed
1 sprig curry leaves, removed from stem and roughly chopped
2 dried chile peppers
1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric
3/4 pound assorted vegetables, prepped (I used 1/2 pound green beans plus 1/4 pound baby bok choy)
1 can coconut milk
1/4 cup heavy cream
3/4 pound shrimp, peeled and deveined. Brined wouldn't be a bad idea either.
3 Tablespoons more cilantro, chopped
salt to taste

2. Put oil into a large pot over medium high heat. Add seeds. When they start popping, add curry leaves, peppers and turmeric. Stir and cook 1 minute.

3. Add the herb paste, reduce heat to medium low and cook 2-3 minutes more until fragrant.

4. Add the heartiest of the vegetables (green beans in my case) and some salt and cook until about half done, adding other, more delicate vegetables as appropriate.

5. Add coconut milk and cream plus some more salt. Turn heat up and bring to a boil. Return heat to medium low and simmer until vegetables are done to your liking.

6. Add shrimp and simmer 1-2 minutes until just cooked. Stir in cilantro, adjust seasoning and serve with rice.


And here it is:


All the sauce drained into the rice. Here it is still in the pot:


So, not bad. Not as intensely flavored as you'd expect given all those herbs and spices, but nicely fragrant of curry leaves. The coconut milk really takes on the cumin and mustard well and there's a little spice to it. My problem is just that the flavors are too distinct. The green beans taste like green beans and the shrimp tastes like shrimp. The sauce is nice but the rice soaked it all up. I think this is going to be one of those better the next day dishes. The flavors will blend with a good long soak.

Serving with some other starch instead of rice might be a good idea too. Chapatis maybe.

Assam pork curry

That's 'assam', the Malay word for tamarind, not the region of India. Although they have curries in Assam too. Particularly mild ones as Indian curries go, or so I read. Some of the recipes looked interesting so I'll probably be making one of those soon enough.

This is pretty much a bog standard Malaysian curry (found at the blog of a Malaysian woman sharing her recipes) so I'm not sure I ought to bother posting about it. But it uses lemongrass and curry leaves which I think tend to baffle folks when they show up in the CSA so it's probably worth putting another easy recipe out there. Also, I came up with a good trick with the coconut milk I want to share.

Ingredients:
2/3 pounds stew pork, cut into bite-sized pieces or strips

spice mix:
4 Tablespoons finely chopped shallot
2 stalks lemongrass, mashed (the lemongrass I had in the house was pretty old and dried out so I grated it on my microplane instead. That made the most of its faded flavor, but I still had to add the zest of a lime to bolster it.)
2-3 stalks curry leaves, destemmed and bruised
(the recipe also called for 1 Tablespoon of curry powder, but every curry powder is different. I have no clue what mix of spices they use in Malaysian, but I'm reasonably certain the Madras curry powder I've got isn't it. I know I'm losing some complexity of flavor, but safer to leave it out.)
3 Tablespoons chili paste (I used sriracha which is probably not quite right)

sauce mix:
1/2 cup thick coconut milk
1/4 cup water (even thinned down by a third like this, thick coconut milk is thicker than the standard canned coconut milk you can find in the supermarket so, although it's tempting to just use 3/4 cup of that, don't. Instead, put a can into the refrigerator for an hour or two. The thick cream will separate and you can spoon it out leaving thin coconut water behind. Hokan, my favorite brand, is thicker than most and yielded over 3/4 cup of coconut cream, but most brands should give you plenty for this recipe.)
3 Tablespoons tamarind paste dissolved in 1/4 cup water and strained (the original recipe calls for just 2 Tablespoons of the paste plus 3 pieces of dried tamarind in the spice mix. If you can find dried tamarind, you should probably do that instead. And as long as I'm on the topic, I've seen fresh tamarind in the supermarket and I've been curious how to use it. Any advice would be appreciated.)
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 Tablespoon sugar
1 Tablespoon soy sauce


0. Brine the pork. Otherwise you'll end up with dull bits of meat cluttering up a flavorful sauce.

1. Heat 2 Tablespoons of cooking oil over medium high heat in a medium saucepan until shimmery. Add spice mix and fry just a few seconds until fragrant. Add pork and stir to coat the meat with the spices.

2. Add the sauce mix and stir well. Bring to a boil then turn heat down to medium low. Cook down the sauce until it's a thick gravy and the pork is tender, 20-30 minutes.

(Alternately, you could use a large pan, giving you space to brown the meat and allowing the sauce to cook down faster. It's not an authentic technique, but it would add some nice flavor.)

Check the flavor balance and maybe bolster the tartness with a little lime juice or the heat with a little more chili sauce. Serve over rice, sprinkled with some cilantro or chopped curry leaves.


The flavor is a sweet-tart with a funky edge from the curry leaves which come through surprisingly well considering the strength of the other flavors. There's a background of heat from the sriracha and richness from the coconut milk, but they don't overwhelm the more delicate herbal and citrus notes. It's a pretty typical Malaysian combination of flavors. But then it's a pretty typical Malaysian combination of ingredients so that's only to be expected. If you like that sort of thing then that's the sort of thing you like. And if you don't, well, you should.

Mauritian beef curry and faratas

One last recipe with curry leaves for now and then I'll lay off, OK? I've managed to dry the rest of them by the simple expedient (recommended in a YouTube video on the subject) of leaving them spread on a plate in the refrigerator for a week. They're far less aromatic, but they do seem to have retained some flavor. I'll store the dried leaves for a few weeks before testing them out.

This recipe is from Mauritius which should make for a change of pace. I found it at the Recipes from Mauritius website by Madeleine Philippe.

Mauritian beef curry

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 Tablespoon crushed garlic
1/2 Tablespoon crushed ginger
1/2 Tablespoon chopped thyme leaves
1 sprig curry leaves
1/2 medium onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 Tablespoons curry powder (hot or mild depending on your preference)
8 ounces canned finely crushed tomatoes
1 pound beef, cut in 1 inch cubes
1 cup or so hot water
2 Tablespoons coarsely chopped cilantro

1. Heat oil in a deep medium saucepan over medium high heat. Add garlic, ginger, thyme, curry leaves and onion and cook, stirring frequently, until onion becomes translucent.

2. Add tomatoes and half the cilantro. Turn heat down to medium low and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes until tomato looks and smells cooked. Add a little hot water if the tomatoes start to stick to the bottom of the pan.

3. Add curry powder. Cook for five minutes more.

4. Add beef along with 1/2 to 1 cup of hot water depending on how thick you like your curries. Simmer until the beef if tender. How long this will take depends on the cut of beef you chose. I used the generic stew beef from Whole Foods so it took around an hour and a half. If the sauce is the thickness you want, cover the pot. If it's too thin, leave the cover off until it gets where you want it.

5. Garnish with cilantro and serve with rice or faratas.



Faratas are the Mauritian versian of parathas are they're pretty simple to make.

Start with a soft, but not sticky dough: about 1 cup flour to 1/2 cup water (plus half a teaspoon salt) although I had to add a good bit of extra flour to get the right texture. Knead it up well and then divide into three for traditional 12-14 inch faratas or four (70-some grams each) if you're cooking them in an 8" pan like I am. Melt a few Tablespoons of butter (or ghee if you've got it).

Roll them out thin and brush or drizzle with butter generously on the top side.




Fold in half and butter again.




Fold in thirds and butter again.




Roll it up and stand it up.




Squish it flat and roll it out again. You can still kind of see the spiral there in the middle.

Butter generously once again and lay butter-side-down in your hot pan. Cook for a minute or two until the bottom is getting golden brown and the layers are starting to puff up.

Butter the top and flip it over. Let it cook for another minute or two.

Take it out and let it cool just slightly before serving it with your curry. Got any butter left? You know what to do with it.


The curry, to start off is beef in tomato sauce. Nothing wrong with that. The flavors of the herbs and spices are subtle, but always there adding an aromatic layer above those two. I should have crushed the garlic and ginger to bring them out more. A bit more (or a bit fresher) curry powder would hurt either. You're not going to mistake this for an Italian dish, but the tomato does dominate. Not the best curry I've ever made, but not bad and an interesting departure from the usual cuisines. You know, this is just the sort of dish that gets better in the refrigerator; I should withhold judgment until I try the leftovers.


The faratas are crisp and flaky in the middle and a bit chewy at the edges. Not loaded with flavor, but nothing a little whole wheat wouldn't cure. A very nice accompaniment to the curry and hard at all hard to make.

I had no idea flaky dough was so easy. I may be ready to try making croissants now.

Chicken 65

Back to the curry leaves one more time. This is a recipe from Hyderabad in southeast India. The name is, you might have noticed, kind of weird. There are a bunch of different stories about how it got the name--it originally had 65 ingredients; it was popular in 1965; truckers on Route 65 liked it--all implausibly reasonable. It's a general rule of thumb in etymology that if a word origin story makes any sort of sense, it's not true. Name aside, there's a good bit of variation in recipes and the one I picked was on the more complicated side but is still pretty easy. This version was posted to recipezaar by one Sarah Kamal who says she got it from a Hyderbadi neighbor. She posted it in hard-to-parse texting shorthand so I've reworded things (and made a few changes) for your convenience.

Chicken 65

50 min | 5 min prep

SERVES 4

1-2 cups oil, for deep frying
4 chicken breasts or thighs, sliced into strips

MARINADE FOR CHICKEN
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chile powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 Tablespoon soy sauce

BATTER FOR CHICKEN
1 egg, beaten
3 Tablespoons corn flour [I used plain-old wheat flour. I should buy some masa if corn flour is going to keep popping up in recipes I'm making.]

YOGURT MIX
500 grams yogurt, beaten
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon red chile powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon ginger, finely chopped
1 teaspoon garlic, finely chopped

FOR TEMPERING
3 Tablespoons oil
5-6 small hot green chiles
2 sprigs curry leaves


1. Mix the marinade ingredients, grinding the ginger and garlic into paste with a pestle. Add the chicken, mix well, and let marinate for at least an hour.


2. Mix the batter and add to the marinating chicken. Mix the yogurt mix ingredients. Heat oil and fry chicken until golden brown. When removing chicken pieces, drop them right into the yogurt.


3. In a small pan heat tempering oil over medium high heat until shimmery. Add chiles and curry leaves and they start to shrivel and color.


4. Pour oil, chiles and curry leaves into a large pan or pot over medium low heat. Add chicken and yogurt mix. Cook until the yogurt reduces, dries and forms a coating to the chicken. [Theoretically, anyway. I got worried when the yogurt started to stick to the bottom of the pan and threatening to burn so I stopped cooking it a little early.]


This manages to look even worse than the mango curry, but it's not half bad. The flavors are brightly spicy, tangy and tart. Some recipes specify sour yogurt in the ingredients so I have some confidence that that's intentional this time around. On the other hand, it's seriously lacking in bottom notes so it's not an entirely balanced dish. But you're supposed to eat it with naan and booze which probably would help with that.

The chicken is tender and moist, the yogurt coating creamy in a curdled sort of way. If you do a Google Image search you'll find a lot of pictures of much better looking Chicken 65, but if you click through you'll that those recipes use a Tablespoon or two of yogurt in the marinade, deep fry the chicken and serve. The ones with a cup or two of yogurt generally look just as unpleasant (although they usually add red food coloring which I left out). I really have no good reason for thinking that this sloppier version is any more authentic or any tastier. It was just more interesting to try making. The simpler ones do have a ring of simplification about them though, so I'm happy with my choice despite the unaesthetic results.

Mussels steamed with white wine and curry leaves

After my last post I started searching around for recipes using more than a single sprig of curry leaves. I didn't find many; curry leaves are pretty powerful and you generally don't need a whole lot at a time. This recipe, though, called for a full quarter cup. Also, I've been looking for an excuse to have mussels again. They're pretty expensive here in Miami so I'm not buying them on a regular basis like I was back in New York.

This recipe is an Indian-fusion variation on how I, and everybody else, prepare mussels. Fry up some aromatics, add white wine (or beer you're Belgian) and mussels and steam until they're done. I usually used French herbs, Italian if I was adding tomatoes. Really, the only change this recipe makes is to switch the flavors to south Indian.

Mussels Steamed With White Wine And Curry Leaves
Adapted from Raji Jallepalli, Restaurant Raji, Memphis

TOTAL TIME: 30 minutes

Ingredients:
* 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
* 1/2 cup finely chopped onion
* 1 cup finely chopped, seeded plum tomatoes
* 1/4 cup fresh curry leaves (sold in some Indian markets) or cilantro leaves [despite my desire to use a whole bunch of curry leaves, I used three sprigs of each for a little extra complexity.]
* 1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds, crushed in a mortar
* Salt to taste
* 2 pounds scrubbed, debearded mussels
* 3/4 cup dry white wine

Preparation:
1. Heat the oil in a large lidded saucepan. Add the onion, tomatoes and curry leaves or cilantro, and cook, stirring, over medium heat until the vegetables soften.

2. Stir in the cumin, and cook a few minutes longer, until the onion starts to brown. Season with salt.

3. Add the mussels and wine, cover and cook over medium heat until the mussels open, about 8 minutes. Serve at once.

YIELD: 2 servings

* Originally published with American Palates Awaken To the Bold Tastes of India; As the latest fusion star, creative Indian cuisine vies with its Asian rivals.
* By FLORENCE FABRICANT, New York Times, March 25, 1998



I recall the European version of this dish as hearty and rustic, but I think I used a lot more chunky vegetables and went heavy on the basil, hot pepper and oregano. Here, the broth is light and the curry leaf, cumin and cilantro float aromatically above. I neglected to pick up naan so I served it over rice which may have been a mistake as it holds on to a lot of the broth making it hard to get a spoonful of it with a bit of mussel. I had a second riceless bowl and found that the flavors do match well. Specifically, there's a slightly challenging funky edge to both curry leaves and mussels that blend nicely together. If you've had both separately, you know what I mean.

I don't think you could make a satisfying main dish out of this no matter low large the serving or how much rice or bread you served with it. The flavors are too delicate and it leaves you wanting something a bit more substantial. Still, this is a lovely elegant appetizer.

CSA - South Indian Shrimp Curry

I checked my curry leaves today and while they were much faded from their prime, there was a still a little life left in them. That means one more South Indian curry before they get the toss. I do wish ? Farms would supply their more esoteric herbs in smaller batches; I can't imagine I'm the only one having trouble using them all up.

I didn't change the recipe from how I found it on Epicurious (from the latest issue of Gourmet it says there) other than compensating for the weak curry leaves so I'll ask you to click over for the specifics. Here I'll just illustrate the process and discuss the results. To do that I'm trying a new format: a picture post.



The recipe starts with frying up the aromatics: curry leaves, chilies (and plenty of 'em), garlic and ginger.











Then go in the spices: coriander, cumin, turmeric, mustard seeds, salt and pepper. The recipe said to turn the heat down and wait for the seeds to pop, but mustard seeds don't pop at medium heat so leave the heat up.








Next the onion, cooked until it's softened and soaked up the spices.











Then goes in tomato and coconut. My tomato was not very juicy and my coconut was dried so I ended up adding water now and again to keep the sauce saucy. I probably added a full cup by the time it was done.





Maybe that was a mistake as the flavors are not nearly as intense as I expected. (In the picture at Epicurious it looks like they didn't add water. But they don't seem to have peeled the shrimp either so it's designed for a beauty shot not for flavor and if you've read my review of Abokado you know how I feel about that.) There's a bit of heat and the warmth of the spices, but the main flavors are the tomato, the coconut, shrimp and, if you get a good bite of one, curry leaf each individual and not really tied together into a synergistic whole. After taking the pot off the heat, I added a second stem of curry leaves, crushed and lightly fried in oil to release their flavors; I'm glad that effort paid off, but all of those great aromas from the first couple steps of the cooking process are just background players, not strong enough to successfully unify the dish. Still and all, it's tasty if not fabulous. And, if you've got some peeling and chopping help in the kitchen, a cinch to make.

CSA - Garlicky tomato curry

I've still got plenty of curry leaves left and since they don't dry terribly well I've got to keep using them up. Today's recipe is a garlicky tomato curry, South Indian style I think, that I found here.

It's pretty straightforward and the author, Amma, calls it a basic recipe you can use to experiment with, adjusting spices and herbs to get different flavors. That makes sense to me, but until I make a trip out to an Indian grocery (probably Indo American on south 84th) I'm can't stray too far. So I'm going to post the original recipe with some annotations for what I did differently.


Garlicky Tomato Curry Recipe

Source: Amma
Prep & Cooking: 25 mts
Serves: 4-5
Cuisine: Andhra (southeast Indian)

Ingredients:

1/2 kg fresh tomatoes, finely chopped
2 large onions, finely chopped (I neglected to restock during my last shopping trip and only had one large onion and some scraps. Still it seemed like plenty.)
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
10-12 fresh curry leaves (plus some extra for the garnish. For those I picked the softer, smaller leaves from the tips of the stems.
10-12 garlic cloves, slightly crushed (you read that right)
pinch of turmeric pwd
1 tsp red chilli pwd (I used extra as my cayenne is old and weak)
1/2 tsp coriander pwd
salt to taste (a couple teaspoons of kosher salt worked well for me)
1 tbsp grated jaggery (jaggery is a big block of unrefined cane sugar. Turbinado is a fine substitution.)
2 tbsp coriander leaves (that's cilantro, of course. I used a bit more to boost the herbal flavors.)
1 tbsp oil

1 Heat oil in a vessel. (A medium pot will hold everything, but the onions will fry up better with the larger surface area of a dutch oven.) Add the mustard seeds and let them pop. Add the crushed garlic and curry leaves and toss them for 8-10 seconds.
2 Add the onions and fry till translucent. Add the chilli pwd, turmeric pwd, coriander pwd and salt. Combine well.
3 Add the chopped tomatoes and cook on medium heat uncovered for 4-5 mts. Reduce heat and cook covered for another 5 mts.
4 Add a glass of water (a cup?), jaggery, adjust salt and cook covered till you get the desired gravy consistency. (I did five minutes covered and then another five minutes uncovered.)
5 Garnish with fresh coriander leaves and serve with hot chapatis, rice, pongal, khichidi or dosas.

Note: Boil eggs, make slits and add to the cooked tomato-onion mixture before adding the water. (This is a great way to overcook some eggs so instead I poached eggs in the sauce for the last five minutes of cooking. That's a little longer than you usually want to poach an egg, but I didn't want a loose yolk running all over the place. I got an equivalent of a mollet boiled egg which is just about right.) You can even add drumsticks for added flavor. (I thought drumsticks were vegetables, but upon researching I've found that they're fruit. There's a good picture and some information here.)


I stopped cooking after the tomatoes fell apart but the onions were still firm. I tried some and while the flavor was great--tomato and warm spices up front followed by a big hit of garlic and herbs--the chunky texture really didn't seem right. I could have kept cooking until the onions collapsed, but you'd think the author would mention if you were supposed to do that. Instead I removed the eggs and tossed it into the blender. The results are a smooth sauce that you'd swear has a cream enrichment and I think it improved the flavors too by distributing the garlic and herbs so it all melds together. I returned the eggs, a good many vegetable bits that stuck to the eggs while they poached and a bit more garnish and I had a pretty presentable, hearty and very tasty dish. Really easy and pretty quick, too.

Attempting improvements

As I mentioned in my last post, at the end of last May when I first got ahold some curry leaves I made two Malaysian dishes with them. One, stir fried shrimp with curry leaves turned out very nicely. The other, fried chicken with curry leaves, less so. A month later I kept the distinctive cooking technique but changed quite a bit else to create a wonderfully successful Thai-spiced fried chicken with basil leaves. Since then my original post has risen to #4 in the Google rankings for "curry leaf recipes" so I've been wanting to fix up fried-chicken-with-curry-leaves to match the quality of the basil version so I can give my visitors what they've come for. Today I tried. And failed.

I'll tell you what I did and what I think went wrong. Maybe you can figure out a better way.

Ingredients:
oil for deep frying
2 chicken thighs, boned, skinned and cut into largish bite-sized pieces OR 1 chicken thigh and an equal amount of tofu (I wrote in the original post that tofu might work well in the dish so I tested that, too)
2 large stems curry leaves
1 small onion, chopped into largish bite-sized pieces
1 small green pepper, chopped into largish bite-sized pieces
1 bird's eye or similar hot pepper, sliced (and seeded if you're a wimp)

Marinade:
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 Tablespoon corn starch

Glaze:
1/2 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon sugar
80 ml chicken broth
20 ml rice wine
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
juice of 1/4 lemon

Directions:
1. Combine marinade ingredients, add chicken and tofu, marinate in refrigerator for one hour.
2. Heat oil for deep frying in a wok. Add chicken and tofu in batches without draining marinade. Deep fry until golden brown. Don't worry about under-cooking as they'll be going back into the pan for a significant amount of time.
3. Drain all but 2 Tablespoons of oil (or heat 2 Tablespoons of oil in a wok at high heat if you used an actual deep fryer).
4. Add onion, peppers and small handful of curry leaves. Stir fry until onion and pepper begin to soften and become translucent.
5. Add chicken and glaze. Stir fry until almost, but not quite dry.
6. Add remaining curry leaves, toss and immediately remove from pan and serve over rice.

To tell the truth, I forgot the hot pepper until the dish was just about ready so I ended up chopping up a jalapeno real quick, removing the dish from the wok, quickly stir frying the pepper, returning the rest of the ingredients and cooking a bit longer to blend the flavors. I ended up cooking a bit too long and the sauce dried up entirely with the soy sauce caramelizing onto the solid bits. Which doesn't taste so good.

But even before that, I gave it a try when it was at the proper level of doneness and looked like this:


At that point the strong lemon-soy flavor predominated, the curry leaf was completely lost, and the tofu was just blah. In the Thai-flavor version the aromatic fish sauce, basil and lime all worked together to make a wonderfully fragrant dish. This is OK, but OK isn't what I was aiming at. I should definitely leave out the lemon, but then it's just soy vs. curry leaves and the curry leaves will lose. I'll have to give this some more thought. Or give up. One or the other.

CSA - Kerala Pork Curry

Next up from the CSA line-up is curry leaves.

A couple months ago, my first search for Indian recipes using curry leaves that didn't also use a whole bunch of Indian ingredients I don't know how to find in Miami didn't turn anything up so I ended up making Malaysian dishes instead. I don't recall exactly how I searched, but I may have limited myself to recipes using the proteins I had on hand: shrimp and chicken.

This time around I had a pound of pork butt taking up room in my freezer. Searching on pork dishes with curry leaves was rather more fruitful. Three looked particularly promising. This is the one that looked doable on a weeknight and had a couple pages of positive reviews.

Ingredients

1 pound Pork butt, cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes
1 Tablespoon cayenne powder
1/2 Tablespoon ground black pepper
1 1/2 Tablespoon coriander powder
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon clove powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon cardamom powder
1/2 teaspoon cumin powder
1 inch cube ginger, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic pods, finely chopped
1 large onion, chopped
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 stem (10 -15) curry leaves
1 teaspoon white vinegar
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/2 cup chicken broth
salt to taste
2 Tablespoons oil for frying


1. Toss pork with a couple dashes of turmeric (not the 1/2 teaspoon listed above) and a generous pinch of salt. Heat 1 Tablespoon of oil in a dutch oven over high temperature. Brown pork in batches for five to six minutes each (with a turn in the middle). Remove pork from the pot and set aside.

(The original recipe called for cooking the pork in a pressure cooker. Not only is that not something everyone has around in American kitchens, it's also one more item to wash and it squandered all of the extra flavor browning gives the meat and leaves in the pot for the vegetables to pick up. So browning's the way to go even if you do have a pressure cooker.)

2. Mix cayenne, black pepper, coriander, turmeric, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and cumin. If you have any of those in whole form and you've got a spice grinder and you feel like bothering, that's probably a better way to go. See the original recipe (which I cut in half) for whole spice amounts.

3. Add or subtract fat from the dutch oven to get 2 Tablespoons. Set it over high heat until the oil starts to shimmer and add ginger, garlic and onions. Sauté until onion is a medium golden brown. (There's a bit of turmeric left in the pot so the onions will turn light gold almost immediately.)

4. Turn heat to low and add spice mixture. Sauté for 3 to 4 minutes stirring occasionally and keeping a eye on the pot and a nose on the air for signs of burning.

5. Stir in tomatoes and a pinch of salt. Turn the heat up to medium and cook four to five more minutes until the tomatoes break down and, so the original author claims, the spices start to express oil. I didn't see that myself.

6. Return pork to pot and add vinegar, soy sauce and chicken stock. Stir to coat pork, put on the lid and cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

7. Check your curry leaves for aroma. If they aren't fragrent rough them up a bit. Remove lid and stir into pot.

8. Cook for 5 to 10 more minutes until the sauce thickens into a thick gravy.

9. Garnish with cilantro or some more curry leaves and serve with basmati rice, roti or, in a pinch, tortillas.


With the ochre color from the tomatoes and spices the dish isn't much to look at, but it's got a lot of great flavor. What exactly that flavor is I'm having a hard time describing. All of those spices, the tomato and the onion have blended together into a whole that you can't break back down into it individual components. The dish is surprisingly not very aromatic unless you put a forkful right up to your nose. That's probably because I used a lot of aging prepared powders instead of grinding my own spices to order. Or possibly because I've been smelling it for the last hour as I cooked. I should go for a walk and come back in ten minutes. Each bite starts with a bright hit of tomato and sweet spice. That fades into mellower clove and coriander along with pork or starch if that was in the mix. There's a lingering warmth from the pepper and breathing in through your nose brings the herbal scent of curry leaves up from the back of your tongue. Huh, guess I could break it down after all.

One minor nitpick in an otherwise very pleasant (and not terribly hard or time consuming) dish is that the pork kind of gets in the way of the other flavors in the dish. I'm sure it's an important component but it's a shame to be savoring the sauce and have it fade away leaving a mouthful of relatively dull pork to chew. I suppose you could slow cook the pork in the sauce to better meld the flavors, but that would be a different recipe and not, I think, a south Indian technique.

CSA - Two Malaysian recipes using curry leaves

Note: I've made a bunch more using curry leaves; some Malaysian, some Indian, one Mauritian; since I made this post. Click here to see the lot.

The CSA's first summer a la carte week was today and amongst other things I picked up some fresh curry leaves. Curry leaves are common in Indian cooking and in cuisines it's affected such as Malaysian. I haven't invested in a full Indian pantry, but the other seasonings in Malay cooking come from Chinese and Thai (and some Arab) which I do have so I was able to find some interesting recipes that highlighted the curry leaves, but otherwise used ingredients I already had in the house.

I made Fried Chicken with Curry Leaves and Stir Fry Shrimp with Curry Leaves both of which I found on grouprecipes.com.

I didn't mess with the fried chicken recipe much, but to save you a clickthrough, here it is:

Fried Chicken with Curry Leaves

Ingredients
oil for deep frying
3 chicken thighs, cut into 2" pieces (whenever you're using bite-sized pieces of chicken, thighs are a better choice than breasts or whatever "chicken tenders" actually are. Dark meat both has more flavor and stays moist better)
2 Tablespoons curry leaves, about 2 stems' worth
Marinade:
1 teaspoon soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil
1 Tablespoon corn starch
Glaze:
1/2 Tablespoon oyster sauce
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
1 Tablespoon sugar
100 ml chicken stock (that's about halfway between 1/3 and 1/2 cup), low sodium preferably

1. Combine chicken with marinade and marinate for 1 hour.
2. Deep fry in oil until golden brown and crispy and drain on paper towels (the recipe author, ponikuta, suggests 5 minutes, but I found mine done in half that time.)
3. Heat 2 Tablespoons oil in wok on high heat, add curry leaves and sauté until fragrant
4. Add chicken and glaze and stir fry until dry
5. Serve immediately with rice

The author suggests adding a dash or two of rice wine to mellow the flavors. Definitely a good idea to cut the saltiness of the concentrated soy and oyster sauces.


The shrimp recipe you'll have notice if you've looked is rather vague. It doesn't mention the size of shrimp to use, the amounts of most of the ingredients and, I think, leaves out an important step with the tamarind. Here's what I did:

Stir Fry Shrimp with Curry Leaves

Ingredients
12 extra large shell-on shrimp
curry leaves stripped from 3 stems
2 teaspoons tamarind paste dissolved in 3 Tablespoons water
2 teaspoons turmeric
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 medium yellow onion, halved and thickly sliced
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar

1. toss shrimp with turmeric.
2. Heat 3 Tablespoons oil in wok on high heat. Add garlic, onions and curry leaves. Stir fry until onions are soft and everything is aromatic, 1 - 2 minutes
3. Add shrimp. Stir fry 1 minute
4. Add tamarind liquid (straining out solid bits), salt and sugar. Stir fry 1 minute
5. Add 1-2 Tablespoons water, turn heat to low, cover and simmer for 2 minutes
6. Serve immediately with rice

Both dishes came out very nicely. The intense oyster/soy glaze on the chicken does over power the curry leaf most of the time, but if you have a piece with a couple of the fried leaves they add an herbal note that rides on top of the sweet and saltiness adding a balancing accent. The shrimp, I think, is the better dish. The tamarind/curry leaf combination is beautifully light and aromatic and a fine compliment for the shrimp. And both dishes were really easy so, if you've got some curry leaves, you could do a lot worse.