The Curious Case of Curry - Recap

Alton has been researching material for a new book on misused culinary terms, or so he tells viewers. He has discovered that the most misused such term is... curry. Several hundred lines in various dictionaries agree that curry comes originally from the Tamil language, where it means a sauce or relish for use over rice. More recent definitions expand on this, stating that curry is “meat, fish, fruit or vegetables cooked with bruised spices and served with dishes made or rice.” To Alton, that's useless to the point of absurdity – nothing that fits that vague description could be... Good Eats.

Compounding this problem is the reality that the word curry is rarely used in India. Alton calls a “connection” to learn more. “Bob” is actually a customer service representative who works for Alton's credit card company, but when Alton asks him about curry, he scornfully replies that a “typical American” assumes that because he's in India, he must be eating curry. Alton presses him for the location of a curry house, and “Bob” replies that no self-respecting Indian would eat anything by that name. He suggests that Alton visit London, instead.

Mention of London brings Alton to a “restaurant” (we know it is a restaurant, and in London, because the sign bears the word “restaurant” within the red circle/blue line sign commonly used for the London Underground, and familiar to many. Here, a waiter serves Alton chicken tikka, the most popular English dish. Perhaps the unofficial national dish of England; curry houses serve nearly twenty million portions per year. Tikka actually means “bits” in the Tamil language. Here, it means bits of chicken served over rice and blanketed with a sauce saturated with a spice blend called curry powder. It's a dish familiar everywhere – except India, where they've never heard of the stuff.

To understand this, Alton travels back in time to the thirteenth century, when Venetians and Arabs controlled the flow of spices overland from Asia to Europe. They also controlled the price, which was good for them, but very bad for Holland, England, Portugal and Spain. So bad, in fact, that these countries decided to do something about it. They set sail to locate an ocean route to India, and most of them failed (and not a few died), before Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama finally succeeded, building relationships for the spice trade with local rulers in India. By 1600, the British East India company had essentially lost the Spice Islands to the Dutch East India Company, so the British elected to take the Indian concession from Portugal. This, they did, succeeding about twelve years later. And by 1618, Sir Thomas Roe was the English ambassador to the Mogul Emperor Jahangir. (The Mogul Empire spanned all of what is modern India and a great deal more.) During his time there, Roe grew very fond of Indian cuisine, and kept meticulous records. When the English annexed all of India in 1857, and many British experienced this cooking, its popularity grew quickly. But the English lacked Indian skills, ingredients and cookware, so they approximated Indian fare with a kind of gravy (or kari) packed with spices. Eventually merchants mixed and sold these spices as curry powder.

The trouble Alton has already encountered is that curry does not exist in India. However, many spices mixes do. Most are specific to a particular dish, generally made of freshly toasted and ground spaces. Such mixtures are called masala, from a Tamil word that means mixture. There are wet and dry forms of masala. The wet form will wait for another episode of Good Eats. And there are many versions. Alton's dish requires one of the most popular, garam masala, which gets its name from the Hindi for “warming.” It is kind of a spice base, in that typically a cook adds other spices “on top” of the masala. Spice merchants have their own versions, but most folks concoct garam masala at home, and that is what Alton intends to do.

From the pantry, Alton retrieves a kit for making masala – several open tins of whole spices stored in an airtight container. This permits him to build a masala easily, since all the ingredients are together, and also permits him to monitor whether he needs more of something readily. Such a kit, properly stored, will keep for several years.

The first step is toasting, which “activates” essential oils (chiefly, making them more volatile). Alton compares this step to having a good preamplifier for a stereo. Even heat is the key here, so Alton fetches a small cast iron skillet and measures his spices into it: cardamom, coriander, black peppercorns, cumin, brown mustard, cloves, cinnamon and arbole chili. The chili is quite hot, so Alton removes the seeds and inner membrane which chiefly add heat without flavor. He stirs and cooks this for a few minutes and lets it cool before decanting it into a blade grinder meant for coffee. A few minutes of processing turns the spices into powder, to which Alton adds some nutmeg, processing again to blend it. The result smells wonderful – but a good smell means a spice is losing flavor, so Alton intends to use his masala quickly (he adds that it will keep for a month or so, properly stored in a dark, dry, cool place).

Now that he has some garam masala, Alton moves on to the actual dish, lamb tikka masala. He puts a gallon zip top bag into a container (which need only be large enough to hold the bag) and adds a quantity of the masala, then some more spices: coriander and cumin, kosher salt and black pepper. Finally he adds lamb (advising viewers to get the sirloin end if possible), and shakes the bad thoroughly. The bag goes back in the container, and Alton adds a dairy component: whole milk yogurt. The recipe needs the fat, so be sure to use the whole milk sort. Refrigerate this for at least thirty minutes and up to several hours. Used this way, yogurt is part of many Indian meals, especially in the southern parts of the country. It serves as a marinade, then a cooking insulator and finally becomes part of the sauce.

The cooking device most associated with tikka dishes is the tandoor, which is a conical oven usually made of ceramic. In India these first appeared in the northern Punjab region, and may have migrated there from Africa via the Middle East. In Africa similar ovens bake bread. Air enters the bottom and passes over coals, then roars up the cone forming a venturi. In essence, the tandoor is like a jet engine for cooking. Breads get slapped onto the slides while meats and others go on skewers that rest on the bottom. High heat combines with yogurt creates a flavor hard to replicate at home. Nevertheless, Alton plans to try.

The grill produces the most heat, so that's where Alton's tandoor begins. For the cone shaped “chimney” he cuts the bottom off of a large, unglazed clay pot (carefully inspected to ensure it is free of cracks or other defects). When the slowness of a hacksaw frustrates Alton, he turns to an angle grinder. Once he has removed the bottom, he dunks the pot in water (completely immersing it) for a day or so to decrease the chance of cracking. When he's ready to cook, he pulls the pot out of the water and allows it to dry. While it does, he uses a charcoal chimney to start a pound of lump charcoal (not briquets). When they are alight, he dumps them onto the charcoal grate of his kettle grill and then sets the pot, wide side down, on top. He leaves that to heat slowly – ten minutes or so – so that the pot does not crack.

Inside, Alton puts a skillet over medium high heat and adds a little vegetable oil, heating it until it nearly smokes. He adds diced onion and kosher salt, cooking until the onion is browned on its edges. That will take around twelve minutes, so Alton goes back outside to add another pound of charcoal to his tandoor.

Back inside, he wraps a ginger grater with plastic wrap and grates some ginger. The plastic wrap means he will not have to wash the grater – yet another of his kitchen innovations to be overlooked (he claims) by the Nobel committee. Next, he prepares a serrano chili by removing the hottest parts and dicing it, then adds this, the ginger and some garlic to the sauce, cooking for roughly another seven minutes. While that cooks, he adds another pound for charcoal to his tandoor.

The sauce is ready for garum masala. Adding some at this low temperature brings out some of the lower temperature properties of the spice blend. Finally, he adds diced tomatoes and cooks this until it thickens. And, back outside for a final time, he adds the fourth and last pound of charcoal to his improvised tandoor.

Retrieving his meat from the chill chest and some rigatoni from the pantry, Alton dumps the meat onto a cookie tray, and then carefully threads it onto a very large nickel-plated steel skewer, using pieces of rigatoni as spaces. Four skewers serve to hold all of the meat; Alton uses metal because anything else would burn in the heat of the tandoor. The tandoor is ready; an IR thermometer measures its temperature at around 800°. Alton rests one end of the skewer on the coals, and the other leans against the top edge. Just a couple of minutes is long enough, and once done (and, yes, a few of the bottom pieces might be a little charred), Alton removes the meat from the skewers and adds it to the sauce (he discards the nearly blacked pasta pieces). The final ingredient is coconut milk. Alton serves his tikka over a bed of any long grain rice – basmati and jasmine rices work well. Alton also notes that chicken, especially boned thighs, works well with this recipe.

With garum masala kit in hand, true Indian flavors are always near. Building a true Indian pantry will take several more episodes, but at least there is one thing you can live without: curry powder.

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