Been cooking my last curry variant for awhile, and it’s good enough to consider another Milestone. So here’s the summary of my experiments – I wanted to remake it a few times, and after remaking it so often without tweaking it it was like “yeah, that’s pretty good!”
So here’s the full recipe!
- 4 tablespoons butter or spread – I use spread for low sodium/low fat
- 1/4 cup flour
- 2 tablespoons curry powder. (S&B Curry is ideal)
- 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1/8 tsp black pepper
- 1 tbsp maple syrup
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste.
- 1 tablespoons soy sauce
- 1 Tbsp crushed garlic
- 2 2/3 cups vegetable broth
- 1/3 cup red wine (shiraz and zinfandel are good, or a general red)
- 2 1/4 tsp cocoa powder (about 3/4 a Tablespoon)
- Melt the butter over low heat in a pot of your choice.
- When the butter is melted, add the flour, curry powder, tomato sauce, soy sauce, maple syrup, cocoa powder, red pepper and black pepper. Mix thoroughly; I mash, fold, and mix until the color is consistent. This is the roux.
- Turn the heat to medium-low.
- Now, you want to brown the roux, and there’s a bit of an art to it. What I do is let it cook like a pancake, about 20-45 second until one side browns, then mix it up, fold it into a “pancake” and let it cool again. You may have to play with the heat, but the goal is to basically brown it/fry it slowly. This is needed to develop the flavors.
- Eventually it will get crumbly and crack – and you’ll see it visibly brown when it’s let to sit. At that point, it’s time to add the vegetable broth.
- Add the vegetable broth and wine to the roux. Turn the heat up so the mixture boils mildly. Do this incrementally so you don’t overdo it or underdog it.
- While waiting for it to boil, and when it boils, with a whisk, mix the broth and roux. It also helps to use a spatula to crush chunks of roux against the side of the pan. This can take a bit of effort. In general while mixing, I moderate the heat to get the mild boil.
- Stir regularly so it doesn’t adhere/burn.
- I wait until the sauce thickens. The key I use is when it’s not “boiling” but has the bubbly “bloops” of a thicker sauce. This can take awhile – I find it needs a minimum of 15 minutes, though between heat, time, size of pan, etc. it can vary. Taking time is good as it also boils away the alcohol – and if you scale it up it’s longer.
- Serve or put in freezer containers. If it cools it gets a skin on it, so you’ll want to give it a good stir or two. I also use glass containers.
So the major findings that I mentioned last time hold true – don’t overdo the wine, but most importantly, don’t use a broth substitute.
In the end, I just had to use the real thing because you can’t simulate it with herbs very well, it just lacks the “character” of real vegetable broth. When I used it, the richness was, well, better.
So what I did for a bit was use a store-bought low-sodium broth, but when the local store stopped carrying it, I realized that I should have been making my own all along. Which I did – grabbed some online advice, threw veggies and herbs in a pot, and boiled it for about an hour. It was easy actually, and the result was pretty nice – in fact, I now make some regularly to use in other recipes.
Just two warnings. First as you can do this with no salt (as I do) and then you might need a bit more salt in recipes that do use vegetable broth as they might count on the saltiness of the broth. Secondly, there’s a lot of ways to do it so you may want to experiment to find what works for you – as of this time I’m still experimenting.
Now I haven’t experimented with the other spices for the last few months because this has been pretty decent. Is this the end of my adventure? Probably not, as I feel I can take it farther, so let’s see what comes next . . .
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.