A curry is a dish cooked with a lot of spices, more like a stew with spices. In our recent study trip to Chiang Mai, I made a Thai curry paste by hand which took me a laborious 30-40 mins per curry mix because we had to roast the spices and pound them together with peppers until we achieved a nice paste (try doing that with a mortar and pestle and you’ll go crazy!).
Aside from India, Asian countries have their own types of curry. Most curries have a strong spice mix and are pretty spicy, but if you’re an enthusiast, you can easily tell one curry from another, because each country has it’s own distinct spice mix. I am thinking of a Filipino food that can pass for a curry…wiki says it’s kare-kare…but then it doesn’t exactly have a strong spice mix aside from the atsuete, nuts and rice…but the process is almost the same. In a curry, you extract flavors from the spice mix via roasting and pounding. Curry powder makes life easier because it contains a specific spice mix, but it for me, I like buying curries in paste form. Well, that’s my preference.
This Sunday dinners’ highlights were the 3 curries with different profiles, which were going to be eaten with a lot of buttered rice and condiments.
Read »
