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| cooking experience needed for the recipes |
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I'm a big curry fan but not a very experienced cook. Will I be able to cope with the Book?
I have tried to make the recipes easy to follow and have done my best not to assume that the reader has extensive cooking experience.
The forerunners of the recipes in the Book have been up on The Curry House website since 1996. To this day I get many e-mails from curry fans who have tried the recipes as their first attempt at cooking from the raw ingredients (rather than heating up something from the supermarket!). The messages regularly tell me how easy the recipes are to follow and how the novice cook got good results the very first time of cooking the recipe.
I have tried to follow the same style of writing in the Book.
So does that mean that nothing is left to the individual cook's discretion?
Not at all. An experienced cook will easily be able to amend and adapt the recipes to his or her own taste and style.
If I have one request it is that you give each recipe a try "as is" in the first instance to see what I am trying to get across. After that - improvise away!
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| kitchen equipment needed for the recipes |
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Am I going to have to invest in all sorts of exotic and expensive kitchen equipment in order to make the recipes?
If you wanted to make every recipe in the book then you will need to own some particular pieces of kitchen equipment. But you will not need anything out of the ordinary. For instance, you could invest in an authentic Indian karahi but you can just as easily use a commonly available wok instead.
All the curries require a puréed sauce so you will certainly need an electric blender but you only need a very basic model.
The one piece of equipment I would strongly recommend is an 20cm heavy-bottomed pan. I use an enamelled cast iron "cocotte" made by Le Creuset which, although expensive to buy, will last you a lifetime. But you could use any good 20cm / 8" heavy-bottomed pan instead.
The kebab recipes all require a large baking tray and a wire-mesh rack but they are both very cheap and easily available.
If you want to make any of the bread recipes I strongly suggest you invest in a cast iron griddle. Like the cast iron pan it will last you a lifetime if properly looked after. You could use a lightweight non-stick frying pan but you will not get such good results and you will probably wreck the coating very quickly in the high heat needed to make the breads.
A garlic press, a pestle and mortar and a food grater are all pretty standard pieces of equipment and will make life much easier when you come to make the recipes. If you are going to grind your own spices and make your own garam masala then you will certainly need an electric grinder (I use a cheap coffee grinder).
That's about it! There isn't much that can't be substituted if needs must.
There is a complete section in the Book which runs through everything you could possibly need with illustrations and full details for each piece of equipment.
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