The Sausage Dog

For clarity, I am posting a variation of my chicken curry to make a beef or lamb curry. I make my beef and lamb curries slightly differently, in that I use a pressure cooker for the main cooking process, saves you about 7 hours. Also one thing to note with this recipe, I use an old school pressure cooker that makes screaming sounds. I could not advise you how a new-fangled pressure cooker would work, I don’t think those machine things are capable of sounds. When attempting this recipe, keep that in mind, and feel free to tweak it to suit your circumstances.

Note: I use Baba’s meat curry powder in my curries, you can find these packets in any Indian grocery and some Asian grocery stores. Make sure you get the green meat packet for chicken, beef and lamb curries, and the yellow one for fish and prawn curries. Pictured below:

Prep Time: 30 minutes tops (if you are good at time management and multi-tasking)

Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Resting Time: 1.5 hours

Source: Adapted from my mom’s instructions over the phone, and then tweaked for personal preference

Serves: My recipe uses 2 kg of beef/lamb to make 10 lunches.

Ingredients

3 tbsp of vegetable oil or butter

½ stick cinnamon

5 cloves

1 star anise

1 tsp fennel seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 large red onion (fine dice)

5 cloves garlic (crush first to remove skin and get juices running, then fine dice / mince)

2 tomatoes (large dice – 1 half tomato cut into 6 pieces)

2 tbsp Baba’s meat curry powder (heaped)

2 tsp chilli powder

Water

2kg beef (chuck steak cut) or Lamb (buy 2.3-2.5kg of the Lamb Leg Roast, then cut out and discard (or give it to your dog) the bone) – cut into medium sized cubes

Salt and pepper to taste

Jasmine rice to serve (1 cup rice to 1.5 cups water)

Instructions

1. Trim off the fat from the meat if you can. If you leave it on, once you have finished cooking, you will find a really unappealing layer of fatty oil floating on top of your curry, so if you don’t want that, I would suggest a good trim. Then dice your meat.
2. Fry off diced meat in batches, place directly in the pressure cooker.
3. Hot pan, oil/butter in first with all spices. Fry in pan until spices become aromatic.
4. Put onion, garlic and tomatoes in next, fry off until skin is peeling away from tomatoes and flesh of tomatoes becomes soft and gooey. Keep an eye on the pan during this phase, ensure you are scraping the bottom of the pan every so often to ensure it’s not burning. Onions and garlic should become translucent.
5. Put curry powder and chilli powder in with approx. 250 ml water (what am I saying, I never measure out the water. Put enough water in the pan that all powders dissolve and almost covers the onion and tomatoes). Cook down until you see bubbles on the surface of the curry paste. Stir at this point (make sure you scrape the bottom of the pan) and then cook down again. Repeat until you can see the oil separate from the paste in the bubbles.
6. Sometimes, I do blitz up the curry paste with some water in the blender, it just looks more refined, and less rustic than if you had all the bits in their original form. Completely optional for you, if you do decide to do it, blitz away.
7. You can put your rice on in the rice cooker now.
8. Pour your spice and onion mixture into the pressure cooker, add enough water to just cover the meat. Add salt and pepper for taste. Stir before sealing the pressure cooker. Cook on medium high heat for 4-5 sounds.
9. After the counting 4-5 sounds, TURN OFF THE HEAT, and then leave the pressure cooker UNOPENED ON THE STOVE FOR 1.5 HOURS. This is not negotiable.
10. AFTER, open the pressure cooker, skim off and discard the layer of oil from the curry. Pour your curry sauce into a large based saute pan, and cook down the liquid on a high heat. I would recommend cooking down to one third of the original volume.
11. Return the curry sauce to the meat, and mix to incorporate.
12. The curry is now ready to be served.

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