The Shed

It took a couple of hours to prepare and cook the Curry Traders Lamb Madras spice mix because I like to saute the onions until they are translucent and sweet. The recipe says to saute them for 10 minutes, I took about 25mins. I also used Ghee instead of oil. Other than that I stuck exactly to the recipe, to give the Madras Spice mix a fair test.

There were 3 separate spice packs. One was pre-ground and had a strong dark smell of black cardamom; the other contained various seeds, coriander, cumin, mustard, fennel, cloves etc that required grinding. When ground the mix had a fresh, slightly clove smell, that was interesting and not the usual spice mix aroma. The third sachet was 2 cinnamon/cassia sticks and some dried red chillies.

I used 1.25kg of lamb and after 10 minutes of simmering, I put the pot in the oven on low simmer for 90 minutes. Curry Traders call this their ‘Award Winning’ curry, and it all looked and smelt very promising.

I was pleased with the taste test and surprised that it was more chilli hot than I expected. Most spice mixes err on the side of light chilli heat and I add more chilli, in this case it had a pleasant bite, about the same as you’d experience in an Indian Restaurant. I made the pot airtight and put it in the fridge for 3 days, to mature.

I could still smell the interesting aroma for the next 2 days when I opened the cupboard doors above the cook top. It was tantalizing.

After 3 days in the fridge, I re-heated the curry and served a portion. It was a good curry and definitely one I will have again. This spice mix has a different flavor and aroma compared to some other mixes I’ve tried. It has a distinct signature, which I liked and I’d recognize it anywhere because of that signature. I suspect that black cardamoms are part of that.

It wouldn’t take much to raise this curry into restaurant standard. There was plenty of sauce and enough meat to make 5 portions out of the 1.25kgs of meat. The meat was tender and the sauce excellent with just a tad too much cloves for me. Next time I’ll check how many cloves are in the sachet and remove perhaps a third of them before grinding. It’s a personal thing, I’ve had a couple of meals with too many cloves and now I prefer them to be extremely subtle.

I was pleased with the way I cooked this curry, it was aromatic and well matured. Perhaps the addition of some BIR style gravy would lift it to restaurant standard?