So this evening I made CA's Chicken Vindaloo. I cut the breasts from a corn-fed free range chicken and they weighed 450gm (1 1/2 x CA's recommendation), so bearing in mind my report that I found his Madras to be underspiced, I increased the spicing two-fold (exceptions noted below). The end result was not as good as I had hoped : I felt that the dish was lacking "synergy" -- in other words, it was not more than the sum of its parts, it /was/ the sum of its parts, and some of those parts were a little too obvious in the final dish. In particular I found the tang of the vinegar unpleasant, and was not entirely happy with the detectable presence of the freshly ground black pepper. As with the Madras, adding chopped coriander stalks lifted the dish considerably. Will I repeat it ? Not as-is. I will replace the vinegar by lime- or lemon juice, and power-grind the black pepper rather than using a hand mill.
Deviations from recipe :
450gm chicken, 450ml base, all spices doubled except the ground chillies (they were increased by a factor of 1.5), salt doubled, sugar halved. 75ml oil left as-is (not scaled) and oil content of final dish was perfect.
** Phil.
Topic: CA's Chicken Vindaloo (Read 99919 times)
