Topic: "Thinking back ..."

[Peripatetic Phil]

"Thinking back", as we older members of CR0 tend to do, to the good old days of the late 60's and early 70's, when curries were as distinctive and individual as the chefs who created them, I suddenly remembered something else about those times -- chicken curries came, /by default/, on the bone and leg; if you wanted off the bone or breast, you paid more (double, sometimes, if you wanted both).  And suddenly I realised that therein may lay the key to these long-lost but never-forgotten flavours -- curries were not "hot-assembled" dishes, as Ken Lo would have put it, adding pre-cooked chicken to an already assembled sauce, but were instead almost certainly cooked from scratch, with (quite possibly) a whole bird being cooked in the sauce from scratch, or at the very least, four quarters being cooked while the meat remained on the bone.  So now I am inclined to try that for myself -- not a whole bird, obviously, since that could lead to considerable waste, but perhaps a half-chicken, cooked from scratch as an integral part of the curry.  I shall be interested to see what effect, if any, it has on the flavour of the final dish.

And on that note, I bid you a "Very Merry Christmas, one and all", as Tiny Tim would have said, and "see you in the New Year". [1]

** Phil.
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[1] D.v. and Insha'Allah.

[Edwin Catflap]

Staff curry is the closest I suppose

[Peripatetic Phil]

Staff curry is the closest I suppose

That was exactly my feeling, Edwin.  Funnily enough, I bought a poussin today (something I would normally never buy, on principle) as it was being remaindered, and my first thought was indeed to try to re-create the full-bird, bone-in, chicken curry of yore, but now I am concerned that if I mess it up then that little bird died for no reason at all, so I now think I will play safe and roast it ...

** Phil.

[CurryCAM]

So how did you get on with cooking a curry on the bone Phil ?

[976bar]

Cooking any curry where you use the "whole" meat rather than parts of the animal, i.e. Breast will always produce a fuller flavoured and more rich dish, due to the gelatinous marrow which will dissolve from the bones.

If you're going to make a chicken breast or lamb cube curry, cook the whole meat first with all the bones in and cook it slow. Then remove the meat from the bones, pass the liquid through a Chinous, and use that liquid as part of the sauce. You won't regret it

[Peripatetic Phil]

So how did you get on with cooking a curry on the bone Phil ?

I don't think I ever got around to it   Not been particularly well for the last few weeks, so been putting very little effort into cooking, but I did have another stab at tom yam hed today which I may as well document here as anywhere :

I used dried galangal (maybe four pieces) and one stem of lemon grass cut longitudinally into four and then diagonally into three, together with half a dozen frozen Thai chillies (mixed red and green) and a few torn Kaffir lime leaves, all simmered together until the dried galangal started to soften.  Tasted the soup and something (quite a lot, really !) missing, so added one Knorr chicken stock pot.  This last made all the difference.  Continued to simmer for another hour or so (very gently) then added some chopped field mushrooms (I would use straw mushrooms by choice, but had none) and finally a little fish sauce and even less lime juice -- I find that  unless the lime juice is used /very/ sparingly it tends to overpower the whole dish.  Left the mushrooms to soften for maybe 10 to 15 minutes and served -- delicious, and no pastes of any sort used or needed.

** Phil.