Hi! New here, with a question about curry

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Fuzzy

Assistant Cook
Joined
Feb 9, 2011
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32
Location
The US of A
Hello, everybody!

I've got a friend who loaned me a great middle-eastern cookbook, but it doesn't have anything about making your own curry.

I've been looking around at recipes for yellow curry (that's my favorite) and have come up with something different every time, but not quite what I'm looking for, so I want to mix my own. I wrote down what seem to be integral ingredients of yellow curry, but I found none that have the ingredient that I really want to try out.........chocolate! Yes, chocolate. Could you help me narrow down my ingredients to ones that would taste good with chocolate and still make a pretty spicy curry? Have any suggestions for adding ingredients?

Garlic
Lemongrass
Turmeric
Ginger
Cumin
Coriander
Red Chili Powder
Coconut Milk
Cloves
Nutmeg
Cinnamon
 
I never make curries so, obviously, I've never tried using chocolate in them but I frequently use unsweetened chocolate in Mexican dishes and find that it adds an earthiness to them which I like. You don't taste the chocolate but it seems to bring out the flavor of the chilis and other seasonings.
 
I don't usually equate curries with Middle Eastern cooking.

There isn't one standard recipe for a curry. Every cook makes it differently. Find a recipe and make it. Then use that as a baseline for modifications, changing amounts of ingredients, eliminating some and adding others.
 
Hello, everybody!



Garlic
Lemongrass
Turmeric
Ginger
Cumin
Coriander
Red Chili Powder
Coconut Milk
Cloves
Nutmeg
Cinnamon

For a basic curry pantry, I would add fenugreek, mustard, cardamom, black pepper and cilantro. That said, if I were going to try to devise a curry that used chocolate, I would buy a commercial paste or powder, so that I could get a uniform taste while experimenting over time. I would use about half as much unsweetened chocolate as I did paste as a starting point. That seems to be about the tipping point for the Hispanic use of chocolate in savory dishes. Play with the flavors a while.

Once you have the basic curry/chocolate ratio to your liking, deconstruct the commercial product you have been using and acquire only the necessary spices for that.
 
Those are some others that came up in most of them--fenugreek, cardamom and black pepper.

That's a good idea for starters! I take it you make curry? Have you ever tried one with chocolate? I got the idea from an anime I recently finished--Black Butler--and I decided I had to try it since curry is one of my favorite Asian/Middle Eastern dishes.
 
I also don't associate curry at all with middle eastern food.

But if it's southeast asian style curry you are after, you might want to follow Nora's suggestion and buy some curry paste and add cocoa powder to it and see where it gets you.


MaePloyYelCurry.jpg


Mae Ploy yellow curry paste contains garlic, lemongrass, shallot, dried red chile, salt, galanga, cumin, cinnamon, star anise, turmeric, kaffir lime peel, coriander seed.
 
I make curry all the time, usually starting with whole spices, roasting, grinding and frying them from scratch. That said, I always have a few pastes in the fridge or freezer for times that dinner needs to be ready in 20 minutes.

Chocolate is not an ingredient that I have tried. Some Japanese curries use it, but their curries are very much migration curries, riffs and fusions. I hadn't thought about it until you mentioned anime, but I think I have seen a Japanese curry paste cube that includes chocolate at the international market in Nashville. When I tried to google for it a minute ago, I got a ton of links commenting that the cubes "look like chocolate", which was not helpful to efforts to find the actual product.
 
Red curry and chocolate... Hm. I'm not terribly familiar with the taste of red curry (I can't think of how it tastes right offhand, like I can with yellow curry) but I'll try both.

@Jenny That looks like a great powder to start with. Where can I get it?
 
Fuzzy

That is a paste not powder and you can find it in any Asian market and some well stocked supermarkets. It also comes in smaller cans, like this.

images


Most Asian markets carry a wide variety of SE Asian curry pastes -- red, green, yellow, panang, masaman, choo chee, etc.
 
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Here are the ingredients in red curry paste: Ingredients: Dried red chili, garlic, lemon grass, salt, shallot, galanga, shrimp paste, kaffir lime peel, pepper.

Red curry paste is very versatile.
 
What is galanga? I've heard that used fairly interchangeably with ginger.

Sure, I'll post the results of the experiments when I get the chance to make it :D Right now, I just got the ingredients to make vegetarian miso ramen, so that's my next project.
 
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