A simple chicken curry...no worries!
This week's recipe is by request. Bernie O'Reilly, a regular reader of the column, sent me an email to say that she's cooked the Chile con Carne recipe I featured some weeks ago several times to great compliments and asked me if I would give a chicken curry recipe.
By a coincidence, the espresso bar on the ground floor of the Harvey Nichols department store in the Dundrum Shopping Centre has just introduced a new tapas-style menu. Among the new dishes devised for it by Harvey Nichols' executive chef Thomas Haughton, is this delicious and very easy Indian-style chicken curry.
Chicken curry
Ingredients
4 chicken breast fillets (cut in large dice -- six to a fillet)
2 large onions, peeled and sliced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed
Pinch of sugar and salt
3 tbsps curry powder
1 tbsp Chinese five-spice mix
1 ltr chicken stock (fresh is best, a stock cube is fine, or just water)
1½ tbsps of cornflour (softened with water)
1 bunch fresh coriander leaves, chopped
2 tbps sunflower oil
Method
- Heat a little sunflower oil in a pan and quickly colour the diced chicken. Remove from the pan and leave to one side. l Add a little more oil to the pan and sweat the sliced onion and garlic until soft, but do not let them colour.
- Add the curry powder and Chinese five-spice mix and cook for a minute or two, then gradually add in stock. Bring to the boil and skim off any excess fat, if you've used a homemade stock. Season to taste with salt, and add a pinch of sugar.
- Thicken slightly with cornflour, adding it bit by bit until you have the consistency you like.
- Now add the chicken to the sauce and simmer for between six and eight minutes. This will ensure the chicken is cooked through but still moist.
- Finish the sauce with a tablespoon or two of the chopped coriander leaves. You could also add some reduced fat coconut milk for added depth of flavour.
If you leave your curry until the next day, it will always taste so much better as all the flavours will fuse together.
Very quick method
Put onions, garlic, oil and chicken in pot. Sweat for a couple of minutes. Add spices, etc then the stock. Cook for 10 minutes, thicken and remove. Finish with coriander and season to taste.
- Myles McWeeney
