BBQ Balti Chicken

This is a bit of a spur of the moment thing, having to get rid of a large amount of JB’s Bacon Rub I put together some pork ribs based on a recipe I found online, then having a huge amount of marinade left over I thought I may as well try to combine it with a balti masala that I had remaining. The result is a dry and thick curry that looks and smells very much the real deal. The flavour is fantastic to eat with naan. Really this one — which for reference used the Toombs balti masala, but following the Chapman method — reminded me of a really notable curry that I had once at a buffet meal at a university canteen, many years ago. For a long time I’ve been searching for that same scent, or at least wondering about it, not because it was the most amazing curry but because they had such a vast amount of it.

The BBQ marinade was done separately, the chicken done in the oven at high heat in the tandoori style. Then we mixed the chicken pieces into the curry very near to the end of cooking, to minimize the amount of flavour transference away from the pieces. I think that the fact that this ended up so characteristic is down to several factors: a lack of tomatoes (which are not used by Chapman), the relatively small amount of water (just half a mug), and a large amount of veg oil used during cooking, so much that I had to skim it off.

The marinade used BBQ sauce, bacon rub, porter ale, Mexican chile sauce, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, dark rum, mustard. Honestly the resulting flavour works very well, giving a strongly balti outer layer that’s counterpointed by a warm sweetness once you bite into the chicken. It’s quite a lot of effort for just a single dish, though, so I might save this one for a summer barbecue season. Once you make the marinade you can probably get a solid 3kg of meat out of it, provided you use it cannily.

This is one that, to me, clearly needs to be eaten with naan rather than rice. (This is something that I’m still just starting to develop intuitions about.)

Sabzi Korma

This is based on an adapted recipe from Julie Sahni. It’s a traditional vegetarian korma that works on a basis that she seems to adopt throughout the book — cooking vegetables in remarkably small amounts of liquid. I increased the amount of liquid provided, because it just seemed too little to even cook the vegetables, though if I’d been more daring I might have tried it. Is it possible to cook vegetables purely in a covered pan with little heat? I suppose that would be steaming, really. Anyway, you can imagine that these vegetables are partially steamed, in this sense at least. Really the korma-ish aspect is the blanched almonds, which should really be blended to a powdery paste. I didn’t have the wherewithal to approach this for the time, so I just smashed them up with a strong chef’s knife, using the patented grip of the chef’s knife.

“That was good… Very good when eaten drunk. Probably also sober.” — Lisa T.

Tasting notes: Good, mild, doesn’t taste alarmingly special or really have the character of the korma, though. I’m not quite sure what to eat this with. (Probably good to examine Sahni.) Rice seems to rob it of some character, and it’s almost better with less salt to enhance the mild effect.

Vegetable Tikka Masala

This curry is formed with oven-made marinated vegetables: cauliflower, courgette, and mushrooms. Rather non-traditional vegetables for Indian cuisine, but they marinate well. It was made for my vegetarian housemates as a snack on BBQ day, but I ended up with a lot of leftovers; I thought I’d put them into a classic tikka masala, using the Edwards sauce.

Here you can see the tandoori marinade, with Turkish yoghurt. This was tandoori masala from a packet, unlike the previous lamb tikka. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get any shots of the finished tikka pieces, before they went into the sauce… Anyway, we simply mix it up with a fairly standard Edwards base and hot mix.

After adding some cream, we get the much-loved silken texture of the tikka masala.

This arrived near perfect. Perhaps not quite as perfect as if it had animal carcasses in it, and perhaps the vegetables can use slightly less time to sear in the oven — possibly 10 minutes? But it definitely *tastes* like tikka masala. It strikes me that the warming feeling of this curry means it’s rather better suited as a winter dish, for cold weather.

Hybrid Tamil Lamb Shoulder Madras

Inspired by my recent trip to Sri Lanka, I decided to try for a more “authentic” flavour, as opposed to the classic BIR flavour, while keeping the convenience of the BIR base [in this case an Edwards base]. We don’t pre-cook for this case: we use lamb shoulder and stew for a long time. This ends up as a rather wet curry, due to the addition of water. As a result it goes well with rice.

The end flavour is remarkably different to the traditional BIR style indulged here before: the lamb fat blends beautifully with the mellow coconut to produce a lovely counterbalance to the heat from the spices. It’s a comforting dish that somehow reminds me of childhood.

Summary and pictures:

First, construct the spice paste, smash it with a hand blender, and fry it up with the base sauce.

Roughly dice the lamb shoulder. Add to the pot and stew, covered, for 60-90 minutes.

Full recipe:

This is a blend of a Dhillon recipe with a Panjabi recipe from Tamil Nadu. It serves 6 so is rather large. Bear in mind that the Dhillon base ends up far more ‘wet’ and watery than other bases can be. I essentially ceiling’d it at 400 for this recipe because that’s a very large amount of curry base. A lot of water is used during the cooking so the result should still be very stewy.

As the classic garam masala contains cinnamon, cloves and black pepper, we allow the garam masala to do the ‘hot’ spicing for this version, simplifying the spice and coconut mix. We don’t use the traditional Edwards or Dhillon spicings, as the aim is to create something different while preserving the basic BIR method. As the Edwards base is roughly twice as concentrated as the Dhillon base, we just use the equivalent for one ‘portion’ from Edwards and double it. The meat doesn’t get pre-cooked in this case, it’s stewed in the pot.

* 5tbsp vegetable oil
* 400ml curry base (Edwards)
* 1 tsp salt
* 2tsp ginger paste
* 2tsp garlic paste
* 400ml coconut milk
* 60g creamed coconut
* 1lb stewing lamb (diced shoulder or leg)
* 3 fresh tomatoes, chopped
* 1 tsp garam masala
* 1 tsp tomato puree

Extra spices:
* Pinch of turmeric
* 3tsp paprika
* 2tsp coriander powder
* 1tsp poppy seeds (optional)
* 1/2tsp fennel seeds
* 2 bay leaves
* 2 tsp chilli powder [Dhillon]

Process creamed coconut in a blender with ginger and garlic pastes, plus the extra spices, to form a paste, adding water if necessary.

Heat oil.
Add half the curry base, stirring, heating it through.
Reduce the heat to a simmer.
Add spice paste and tomato puree and fry for a few minutes.
Add the remaining base. Fry for 15 minutes, adding a further 3tbsp of water over this period.

Add meat and saute for 5 minutes over a moderate heat. Add the tomatoes and saute for a further 5 minutes. Add salt to taste.

Add 800ml of warm water and cook, covered, until the meat is done (about 50-60 minutes). Then add the coconut milk, stir in the garam masala, and simmer for a few minutes before serving.

Glasgow South Indian Garlic Lamb Tikka

This is fatty and garlicky, as you might expect from the name. Because I ran out of chilli powder, I was unable to make it to its correct degree of heat. I replaced chilli powder with Edwards’ hot mix. The predominant flavour is really still given by the lamb tikka which is very strongly flavoured.

The flavour is rude, round and gamey, not very spicy but holding the characteristic long-lasting burn of the Naga. Garlicky, as you expect, and a touch sour, as if it’s just on the turn, having somewhat “matured” in the fridge. The leg of lamb is tender and flavoursome, despite being frozen for several months.

Adding a large amount of garlic butter to this scarily unhealthy curry, and stirring it into a consistency.

Adding a big fat block of green chilli to the mix.

Using the pre-cooked lamb tikka, add these to the mix.

Add red masala paste and stir until it becomes homogenous.

The final result.

Bombay Aloo w/Bunjarra

This bombay aloo recipe is from Dhillon. It was done with the previous Jones bunjarra, see an earlier post, because I was out of onions. This is really a simple curried potato dish, with a hint of sourness from lemon and fresh tomatoes. The result is delicious but, more to the point, visually stunning.

Boiling chopped potatoes in a salted turmeric infusion.

Activating the bunjarra, fry the onion and add the usual assortment of BIR ingredients. Notably we’re using half a lemon and chopped tomato for a tangy sourness. We put the drained potatoes in at the end, we can easily do this in parallel.

Cover with chopped coriander and serve immediately. But be careful, it’s hot! 🙂

Chicken Dopiaza

As we all know, the dopiaza means “double onions”. So there must be onions cooked in two ways. In truth, in this recipe there are onions cooked in 3 ways! Onion from the curry base, sliced softened onion, and premade bunjarra, for which see my previous post. It also contains a small amount of tomato for a hint of sourness.

One thing that I left out of this recipe is kashmiri chilli powder, which was a pure oversight as I do actually have these chillies in stock. It was done with chicken on a whim: I was just zipping through Sainsbury’s and couldn’t be bothered to think about cooking anything fancy. But pre-cooking is always needed for BIR recipes.

The chicken was an interesting case with this one, actually: often I have the problem when braising chicken that chilled, or worse, frozen chicken will reduce the temperature of the stock, meaning that it’s impossible to get any real idea of how long the chicken’s been at the correct temperature. I often ended up overcooking it as a result. This time, I resolved to take more risks, and speculated that even though it took a good ten minutes to bring to the boil after being dunked, that time could still be factored into the cooking time. The results were fine.

Pre frying the softened onion, and precooking the chicken, as you can tell I did rather badly with the quantities here and overflowed the pan frequently.

A familiar method: Activating the precooked sauce, this still using the Edwards base, my last remaining bit of that sauce, which has lastest the better part of 6 months. Draining the precooked chicken, and adding to the pot.

Adding the bunjarra and sliced onions: left, the finished curry, after the addition of coriander. The colours in this one look beautiful!

Served with rice on the side. The flavour of this one is strong and satisfying, but something was slightly off. I’m not quite sure but I get some rather raw spice flavours sometimes. Although, really my palate is not sophisticated enough to differentiate a raw, cooked, or overdone spicing. Regardless, this needs a lot of salt, otherwise the significant pungent flavours can unpleasantly overpower the others. Salt seems to help to keep the pungency in check.

LJ Bunjarra

Bunjarra is the ‘real’ name for a spiced onion paste that’s used as a prerequisite for the dopiaza. This heavily concentrated paste can also be plopped into other curries to give them that savoury tang. You’d use about a heaping dessert-spoon at a time; this’ll give you about 4 portions worth. The recipe itself uses 6 onions.

The ingredients for the bunjarra. Note that we deep fry the onions in a healthy amount of oil, until they begin to turn brown at the edges.

Frying up the deep-fried onions with the spices, notably a tandoori masala mix that’s also given by LJ and depicted earlier. Making this tandoori masala is itself rather an undertaking. I might consider buying it in the future. Rajah sell pre-made mixes that could be convenient.

After blending with a hand blender we have this final product. It packs a lot of flavour into a small space.

Glasgow Lamb Shoulder Tikka

The Wilkie marinade mixed with some pre-made Glasgow sauce. The marinade recipe provided by Wilkie is nowhere near large enough to fully cover the volume of meat here, which is 1kg. As such it’s more of a tikka-ish marinade with heavy onion flavouring.

Drain out the marinade as best we can after 1 day, but it clings to the meat. We do it for 90 minutes, which was probably slightly over, given the charred nature of the result. Turned the meat once. I think it could probably have done with about 1/2 that time, but I was only following the packet instructions for the joint, which called for (N*30)+30 mins at 180C. The smell of the cooking lamb tikka is absolutely mouthwatering, filling the entire house with a barely resistible scent.

Afterwards, I scraped out the remaining marinade, which was thick with lamb fat. I blended it into the remaining sauce, forming a tikka-ish curry base. I used this to make the Glasgow South Indian Lamb Tikka Masaladar (on which more soon). You can see the resulting dish here, which was also made with a naga chilli. The flavour is strong and gamey, and can easily flavour double the amount of rice. It goes well with some tarka dal on the side (made according to the Toombs recipe), which calms it down a bit.

King Prawn Balti

This is another of Toombs’ recipes, that was nonetheless made with the Edwards base. I need to get the flavour of Toombs’ balti masala before the flavour of the spices wilts. This was made with some shamelessly packaged supermarket king prawns. The amount’s doubled from Toombs’ online recipe; this dish also uses some ghee, which I prepared earlier. It’s always good to have a nice slab of ghee on hand.

The resulting dish was somewhat “non-BIR” tasting, having more of an East Asian feel to it. This may be only because of my personal associations, though; we never had seafood curries in my household as a child, nor did I ever order king prawn at the local takeaway, despite that exalted status of prawn dishes in the typical UK restaurant.

The flavour is sour, tomatoey and very saucy. Being aware of the tendency of Toombs’ Balti recipes to verge on the excessively sour, I drastically cut down the amount of vinegar and lemon present in this dish. It’s still plenty sour enough, even with halving those amounts. The peppers don’t get very cooked in this recipe, so they remain crunchy, as do the prawns, which contributes to the stir-fry feel. I like Dhillon’s method of a deep-fried scorched pepper, which I didn’t apply here.

Mixing up the balti masala into a vinegary paste.

Some beautiful looking ghee, and funky red peppers.

Proceeding from the concentrated base sauce to a spiced activated sauce.

Adding in the prawns to be quickly cooked. I probably ended up cooking them for a bit too long.

This is sometimes really nice but most of the time is just too sour. I get the strange idea that this could have been enhanced massively by adding paneer to the recipe, which would mitigate some of the sourness. Also, after reading Pat Chapman’s “Balti Bible” (on which more soon), I get the idea that Toombs’ instruction to ‘activate’ the balti masala using 125ml of vinegar is a large overexaggeration. Using Chapman’s balti masala, he instructs to use just enough to form a sludge that can drip off the spoon.