Nice effort there CH. I had my own curry fest yesterday, but slightly different approach to before. Instead of pre cooking my chicken and making base gravy to freeze into portions, I batch cooked a whole load of curries from scatch and portioned them up for the freezer. So that means 4kg of chicken breast was cooked to the IFFU method, then about 7 litres of base gravy, then straight into cooking double portions of curry eight times. I was juggling two curry pans, each 26" with double portions on the go and I did this until I used up all my chicken and nearly all the base gravy - 16 curries in all.
All served up straight into takeaway tubs and into the fridge overnight and today they're into the freezer. The mess created around the cooker was biblical in proportions but I'm thinking I now have 2 months supply of curries I can microwave straight from the freezer (based on my current fairly conservative rate of consumption) and I only have to do the washing up once, and clean the kitchen once as opposed to 16 times. Downside is I spent about 7 hours yesterday cooking, but I'm thinking there are economies of scale at play here.
Sadly no photos or video. I did try to rig a camera but couldn't get a decent angle on the cooker and given the ridiculous amount of spluttering going on I would've been ashamed to post a video of such a dirty cooker anyway. For the record I cooked 4 Roshneys (Zaal of course), 6 Ceylon (my own), 2 dopiaza (C2Go from YouTube) and 4 Jafflongs (Manzil via YouTube Leviteish) (ex hot). Chunky onions and peppers to be added to the Jafflongs and Roshneys will be fried off fresh each time while the curries defrost in the microwave.
I've always avoided freezing complete curries because I was sure defrosting and reheating them destroyed the texture of the veggies, but have recently experimented based on good advice received elsewhere and found that as long as the bigger chunks of onion and pepper are fried fresh each time and added to the reheated curry, it works well. Furthermore the curries seem to improve from resting before consumption - maybe the oil infuses the spice flavours better, or simply your senses are clearer having not cooked from scratch on the day.
Adding up the totals of ingredient costs and cooking time and dividing by 16 I reckon I came in at around
Topic: Welcoming in the New Year (Read 7090 times)
