This version of the classic rogan josh includes ground almonds to both thicken the sauce and give it texture and substance. The curry is made with lamb or mutton shoulder, cut into one inch chunks and browned in hot oil. Before you start to brown the meat, add ten whole cloves, twelve peppercorns, one or [...]
‘Bhuna‘ is a particular Asian cooking style where a sauce is reduced and reduced until it is so thick that it just clings to the meat, making the meat appear ‘browned’. Dishes cooked in the bhuna style are rich and pungent, the flavour of the spice mix concentrated down by the fierce reduction of the [...]
My curry of choice is always the rogan josh. It’s solid and dependable, the backbone of Indian cookery, unpretentious, hot but not overpowering, deeply flavoured and intense. It’s a proper curry. I’ve made variations on the rogan josh with chicken, lamb, mutton and the decidedly unauthentic and borderline sacrilegious beef. Each produces a different result, [...]
I’m a huge fan of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes, which combine great food with a rich appreciation of its cultural context. An understanding of the way food has developed over time adds an extra layer of authenticity, especially with a cuisine as steeped in tradition as that of India. Jaffrey delivers this context flawlessly, combining observations [...]
My regular Asian supermarket had a huge pile of chopped mutton shoulder, displayed in that haphazard way characteristic of those sort of places, so I took a kilo without really knowing what to do with it. I vaguely remembered Gordon Ramsey banging on about mutton (underrated, hardly used, etc) and doing something North African with [...]