Myers Dave - The Hairy Bikers Great Curries

The Hairy Bikers

Great Curries

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Whether its a take-away korma in your kitchen or a lamb biryani at your local Indian restaurant, a curry is most peoples favourite Friday night supper or weekend treat.

But theres so much more to curry than shop-bought or restaurant curries. A proper home-made curry can be an exquisitely fragrant dish, with delicate flavours that surprise and titillate your taste buds. We want to show you how to make the most delicious curries youve ever tasted and share our curry secrets.

This one-stop curry book will demystify curry cooking. It will inspire you to get out your spices and have a go. These recipes will be the best youve ever tasted fresh, fragrant and fantastic. These are curries for the 21st century.

Sadly, home-made curries can turn out bland and muddy or just mind-bendingly hot. Our recipes are the real deal, using great techniques and secrets weve discovered on our travels in Asia as well as years of cooking curries ourselves. First off, spicy doesnt have to mean hot. A curry can be lip-smackingly good without making you want to reach for the fire extinguisher. In our recipes we explain how to use ingredients to create layers of spicy flavours that will delight you, not burn your tongue off.

Weve come up with the best recipes for all your favourites as well as some you might not have come across and youll be amazed how easy they are to make. Try dishes such as our Keralan prawn curry it takes 10 minutes and tastes fantastic.

We know that those long ingredients lists in some curry recipes can be daunting, but dont worry. We will show you how to build your basic spice collection and learn what goes with what. Soon youll be using a range of spices as easily as you shake on the salt and pepper, and with great results. All our ingredients are available in the supermarket or online.

In this book weve assembled a wealth of brand-new, tried and tested recipes from around the world from simple dishes for a quick midweek taste treat to fantastic feasts for a weekend celebration.

Youll also find recipes for the yummy extras, with everything from starters to pickles and chutneys.

Weve come up with some fab ideas for refreshing and flavourful sweet dishes, too, that make an ideal final flourish after your curry. And weve included a section on basic techniques to help you prepare ingredients for the best results and explain how to tell your scotch bonnets from your birds-eyes.

Now, one more thing. As many of you will know, weve lost quite a bit of weight lately and were proud of ourselves. As you also know, we love our curries and weve found they can be the dieting cooks best friend as a good curry is built on flavour and fortunately there are no calories in flavour. So spice up your taste buds and your diet with the recipes in our Light Curries chapter. Theyre as tasty as the full-throttle versions, but help to keep you trim.

Cooking curry used to be a way of disguising less than perfect ingredients, but nowadays we use the best and enhance flavours, not camouflage them. Weve learned from the experts, who make brilliant curries daily, and we want to share our knowledge and passion with you.

A few little tips from us:

Weigh all the ingredients carefully and use proper teaspoons and tablespoons and a measuring jug. With spices, the difference between half a teaspoon and a teaspoon can really affect the taste and balance of the dish.

All onions, shallots and garlic to be peeled, unless otherwise specified.

We always use free-range eggs and plain natural live yoghurt full-fat unless otherwise specified.

We specify sunflower oil in most of our recipes, but you can use vegetable oil if you prefer.

Bunches of fresh herbs vary in size. Weve mostly used large bunches (50g or so) or small bunches (1520g).

Weve judged the amount of fresh chillies as exactly as we can but their hotness does vary depending on where they come from, so keep tasting. Remember you can always add more heat but you cant take it out! Long and plump chillies are interchangeable use whichever you have.

Weve made cooking times and temperatures as accurate as we can, but always check that your food is properly cooked.

MASALA POPPADUMS

Crispy, crunchy poppadums make a great start to your meal. You can make your own, but the simplest thing is to buy ready-made uncooked poppadums, fry them up yourself and serve them warm with some home-made dips and chutneys. Fantastic. Some people microwave or grill poppadums, but we think the fried ones taste best. Makes 12

600800ml sunflower oil

12 uncooked poppadums, look out for the flavoured ones

fresh onion and tomato relish, natural yoghurt and fresh coriander, for serving

Pour the oil into a large wide-based saucepan or saut pan and place it over a medium heat. Put a cooking thermometer in the oil to check the temperature, then heat the oil to 190C. DO NOT ALLOW THE OIL TO OVERHEAT. NEVER LEAVE HOT OIL UNATTENDED.

As soon as the oil has reached the right temperature, take a poppadum with metal tongs and lower it slowly into the pan (you dont want the hot oil to splash you). Within about 5 seconds the poppadum will have puffed up and grown about a third larger.

Before the poppadum gets the chance to brown, take it out of the hot oil with your metal tongs and place it in an upright position to drain. We put ours in a wide metal toast rack to drain, which works really well, but you could simply lean your poppadums against a clean saucepan with some kitchen paper underneath them to catch the drips.

Continue frying the poppadums until they are all cooked. Watch the temperature of the oil closely as you dont want it to overheat.

When the poppadums are cooked, serve them warm with assorted dips, chutneys, pickles and relish. Or if you prefer, put them on plates and top with fresh onion and tomato relish (see ) goes well too. Break the poppadums apart with your fingers to eat.

KING PRAWN PAKORAS

Pakoras are a kind of fritter and can be made with lots of different kinds of vegetables as well as fish or meat. The main ingredient is dipped in a spicy batter made from chickpea flour, sometimes called gram or besan flour, and emerges with a wonderful, light-as-air, crispy coating. We love pakoras and this prawn version is one of our favourites