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.

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 - 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.