curry chronicles

I found a south asian supermarket today that had a ton of stuff, just bags and bags of spices, garam masala ground up and also pre-bagged ready to be ground, way cool, I want to make all the curries now

yeah it is pretty helpful to have one around, it would be too expensive or bland otherwise! i gotta get another coffee grinder, i keep saying. mortar and pestle is such a pain sometimes. i also have a curry chicken salad experiment to report on but i'm tired now. later.

I also couldn't find saffron and asked the cashier if he had saffron and he said yeah, how many grams and I said uh, a teaspoon, and he went and got some saffron from behind the counter, it comes in 1/2 a gram and 1 gram capsules, possibly larger idk. felt like I was buying drugs

haha maybe too many indian grandmas were pilfering saffron from his store

yeah they sell them in capsules at the store I go to as well...well, more like vials but yeah, def druglike

how much did it cost dayo

it was $5 for one gram, $3 for 1/2 a gram

oh man my mom has a sweet saffron connect. she smuggled a million pounds of it from kashmir when she first moved here. (don't tell anyone!) she could prob hook y'all up.

I have a vision of your mom on a plane wearing a really heavy coat

tbh i think her mom replenished her supply circa 1989

$5 / g seems pretty reasonable

€7/g the only place i've found it in munich. i bought 0.125g.

my best friend in high school returned every year from visiting fam in iran w/ a huge jar of saffron which they wld hurl carefree into p much everything. if cumin was that expensive ppl wld think it was The Most Incredible Substance Of All Time

just made the chicken korma a la horseshoe - can't wait to try!

man that was really good. I don't even need the chicken I don't think - just mixing the sauce with rice is delicious by itself

yay!

i picked up cardamom pods last week, with this recipe in mind. i just need soy yoghurt and cinnamon sticks and i'm good to go!

cardamom pods are so pungent, it's great! and it's cool to hear them pop on the skillet

Oooh I love cardamom. On a less savory note, I like grinding up the seeds with mortar & pestle and using them in an orange cake. SO GOOD.

I'm wondering if I'll ever invest in a spice grinder. bought ground coriander and already have ground cumin, but they go 'off' or 'flat' eventually!

I think you can use a cheap coffee grinder if you want? I like using whole cumin seeds in curries.

yeah we use an old Krups coffee grinder for our spices, works perfectly.

i got a second coffee grinder for that purpose a few weeks ago but it's better than my old one so i want to switch them out. how do i get old coffee taste out of the old one?

I remember WmC saying something about using (uncooked) rice? I never really understood what he meant by that, but maybe chopping up some rice in there will clean it out?!

clean w/ white vinegar? bleach in the sun?

I have a blade grinder I guess I was just being silly and worrying about mixing up flavors of spices and letting residual flavors get into new batches of spice, I should stop being so silly and go find it and use it!

our garage (where we do all of our stir-frying) still smells like the chicken and the spices, the fried cinnamon stick smell is really nice and pleasant!

Yeah, if I'm switching between coffee and spices I'll grind a 1/4 cup of cheap rice to powder and discard it, then wipe the inside of the grinder thoroughly with a tissue. That seems to get residual stuff out pretty well.

i am making the horseshoe korma right now

not sure this veganized vers is gonna be all that successful

p.s. i think maybe i don't like saffron ? :/

the smell of the saffron in the cream while i was prepping everything else was making me real queasy. i forgot the same thing happened the one and only other time i cooked with saffron.

I dunno if I could taste the saffron in the final product

I think it'll probably be fine! imo the yogurt/cream was just there to thicken up the final sauce, really. the flavor lifting is done by all the spices

and goddamn i am grateful i at least halved the cayenne - it's really spicy to me!!

i had to keep adding more and more coconut milk (probably half a can in the end) bc there wasn't enough sauce (no pan juices)

i also added cauliflower

also i accidentally got decorticated cardamom instead of pods, so i subbed 2 tsp of the seeds for the 12 pods

dayo! if you couldn't taste the saffron you didn't put enough saffron in! nb i might overdo it a little on the saffron. one time i served this dish to an indian lady and she was like, whoa, saffron much?

seeds instead of pods should be fine, i would think.

haha I think I was just thinking of the price of it as I was measuring it. I 'fluffed' it up so that less would fill more of the teaspoon measure! I should probably do it by weight to keep me honest.

i think this is missing a lot without the chicken pan juices/fat. it tastes ok, but not to my liking. pretty sure ytth will like it though, which is good bc i made a HUGE pan of it!!!

i'm going out for dinner

do vegans use MSG?

probably! but i haven't

i did a wine tasting course for work years ago and they made us drink water+msg

it was truly revolting

haha - well MSG can do a lot to make up for missing protein juices, ime

wondering if a bit of miso paste might not do something as well

fwiw ytth DID really like the korma - he's eating the leftovers for dinner tonight. so clearly it was just my taste buds.

2 months off this thread! but it was hot and i wasn't cooking much complicated stuff.

made a really easy madhur jaffrey recipe for ground lamb curry last night. i can't find the blog it was on that had copied the recipe but it was just:
hunk of ginger, small red onion, 5 garlic cloves in food processor and browned in frying pan
add 1 t cumin seeds, 1 t coriander seeds, (actually i fried those in the hot oil before cooking the other stuff so they went in first) 1/2 t turmeric, 1/2 t cayenne
add 1 chopped tomato, 1/2 cup plain yogurt
let that all cook for a minute
add 1 lb ground lamb
while that's cooking a couple diced green chiles and garam masala
then like a cup of frozen peas
when it's all cooked through it's done

i think that's what the recipe said!
i had also boiled some potatoes so instead of rice i mashed them a little and put the curry on top

Whoah, spooky revive: I just loaded this entire thread and re-read it this morning while craving curry (bit gang-over).

i have a daal related question, i hope it is okay to use this thread for daal related questions

that question is 'what is the deal with oily toor daal'

Oily Toor Dal
Here the dal has been treated with edible oil . This is done to increase the shelf life of dal. By not using a chemical preservative, the natural goodness of dal is secured.

what's not to get?

wouldn't the shelf life of dal be like a year or two to begin with? i'd be leary of increasing a shelf life like that