Ceylonese Chicken Curry - Banana Leaf Cuisine

Some curry recipes are long on ingredients and preparation. Not difficult, but you can be overwhelmed just looking at the list. But a great Indian curry is worth the effort.

What makes Ceylonese Chicken Curry special is that it is not only a great example of South Indian Banana Leaf Cuisine, but it also freezes well. You have the option then of making that effort and spreading the dish out over 2 meals or more, by freezing the extra. You have an overall saving in time by doing this.

What is Banana Leaf Cuisine?

Increasingly becoming a relic of days gone by, it is South Indian cuisine served on a banana leaf.

Banana Leaf restaurants were famous for serving a set meal of unlimited rice, 3 types of vegetables, unlimited curry gravy and pappadum. All for a low fixed price. If you wanted chicken, fish or meat or something else, you paid extra.

See my blog post “The Ceylon Restaurant – Banana Leaf Cuisine at its Best” for a more complete description.

Ceylonese Curry Powder

This is a key ingredient in the dish, perhaps the most important in giving the overall flavour.

I have provided a recipe for Ceylonese Curry Powder. If you like the ‘bright’ taste and aroma of coriander seeds in curry powders, by all means add a bit more. Just do not overdo it, lest you lose the balance.

You can either prepare a single-use portion, or bulk. I prefer a bulk portion and the quantities I mention fit nicely in an empty coffee jar that I stick in the freezer. It keeps almost indefinitely, and there is no loss of taste and aroma.

Other Ingredients

Most of the ingredients should be available from Asian food stores. There was a time I could not get mace powder, and happily cooked the dish without it. You could also use whole mace as a substitute.

Indian cuisine supposedly does not use fresh turmeric, only dried or powdered. However, powdered turmeric is often of uneven quality (yes, some producers adulterate it with stuff like rice flour) and I do not see anything wrong with using fresh turmeric root in the dish. It does have a distinct taste and smell, so be careful not to overwhelm the dish with it.

As for the chicken, I have cooked this dish many times using just breast meat. As I noted in my post “Chicken Parts and Spicy Chinese Chicken Stew”, it just does not taste the same as when you include bones in the cooking. Of course you could use a whole chicken cut into pieces, but I prefer to keep it simple and use wing parts and breast meat, mixed in about equal proportions.

Cooking

When you are cooking a dish like Ceylonese Chicken Curry, with a long list of ingredients, get everything ready and lay it out in the order in which you need them. I have organized this recipe to make that simple.

You will note that the cooking itself is not very complicated, as this is basically a simmer, just like cooking a stew.

I start with the bony pieces, and simmer them for 30 minutes before adding the breast meat. This allows the bones to impart flavour to the gravy, and yet it is not so long that the bony pieces get overcooked. By adding the breast meat later and simmering until cooked, I avoid overcooking these lean pieces. Overcooked breast meat can be dry and stringy, not something I like at all.

Serving

Like most curries, Ceylonese Chicken Curry improves in flavour if allowed to sit for several hours, or overnight. Do put it in the fridge if you are leaving it to sit. An hour or two in a covered pot is fine for me, anything more and I put the food in the fridge until needed.

Ceylonese Chicken Curry also freezes very well. I allow the curry to cool in the pot for 30 minutes or so, then dish out portion sizes into air-tight containers and freeze promptly. The containers I use are suitable for Freezer – microwave (see “Inflation Busting – Managing Food Expenses”) so it makes things really convenient.

Put the chicken pieces into the containers and pour enough gravy over them to cover completely if possible. This avoids any drying out that could otherwise occur.

So yes, this is a dish that is quite honestly a bit of work, but you can cook two or more meals in one go, so that gives you a time saving benefit.

 

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